Welfare Program ‘Hidden’ in Public Maze : Assistance: A transitional child-care program for working mothers is not well known, despite the benefits it can provide.

Darcell Woods and Karolin Jappe Stanger are typical welfare mothers. That is as opposed to stereotypical welfare mothers.

Woods, in California, and Stanger, in Montana, both went on welfare as single mothers. They stayed in the system less than two years. They were not raised on welfare and did not want their children to be. So they found jobs.

And that is when they encountered something else typical of welfare: They almost could not afford to work. They could not earn enough to support themselves and pay baby-sitters.

A new federal welfare act was supposed to solve their problem by paying part of their child-care costs for a while. Ultimately, it did. But Woods and Stanger both complain that they had to fight for the benefit, a time-consuming struggle that would have sent many workers--with less understanding bosses--back on the welfare rolls.

“It was such a hassle, I wanted to say, ‘Forget it, I’ll just go back on aid,’ ” Stanger said. “But I wasn’t brought up that way, and I didn’t want my daughter to be.”

The benefit, called transitional child care, is part of the 1988 Family Support Act meant to get welfare clients back to work. The act requires welfare recipients to be in training or searching for a job to receive aid, and it gives states $4.4 billion over five years to phase in the act by this fall.

The child-care portion subsidizes child care for a year as families leave the welfare program, known as Aid to Families with Dependent Children, for jobs. The families pay part of their child-care costs, in amount that vary by state, sometimes as low as $1 a month, sometimes half.

“If I wanted to point to one aspect of the act that’s unquestionably failing, transitional child care would be it,” said Mark Greenberg, a lawyer with the Center for Law and Social Policy, a nonprofit advocacy group in Washington.

Greenberg said congressional research indicates that only 46,000 children nationwide--instead of the projected 280,000--were receiving the transitional support as of last August.

“The whole idea of the act is to end welfare dependency,” said Barbara Reisman, executive director of the Child Care Action Campaign in New York. “And short of saying to women, ‘Abandon your children,’ we’ve got to figure out a way to make that happen.”

Transitional care is part of growing concern over America’s working poor. Preliminary 1990 Census data show that 12% of Americans working full time, year-round, still live in poverty. A job at the minimum wage of $4.25 an hour pays only $8,840 a year, well below the federal poverty line of $10,419 for a family of three. The typical welfare recipient is a single mother with two children.

Transitional care also is surfacing amid election-year welfare bashing, according to advocates for low-income families. President Bush referred to welfare as a “narcotic,” a “habit” and a “lifestyle” in his State of the Union address. Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton has campaigned on his intent to put welfare recipients to work.

On the state level, the most popular welfare initiatives this year would mimic the New Jersey law that denies additional benefits to a child born in a family already on welfare, according to Julie Strawn, policy analyst at the nonprofit Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington.

Transitional child care has even captured the attention of business groups, including the National Alliance of Business, which worked for passage of the Family Support Act.

“We know that a major reason for recidivism on the welfare rolls is the lack of medical and child care,” said Steven Golightly, vice president for human service programs at the alliance. In fact, national figures show that seven of 10 welfare recipients go off aid within two years but that 40% return.

Woods, Stanger and their employers talk plenty about the connection between child care and work.

Woods said she had been on welfare for just over a year when, last August, she got a job in the accounting department of the Watergate Community Assn., a condominium development in Emeryville, Calif. Woods said that she brought home about $1,200 a month and that child care for her daughter, Takiyah, 3, took nearly a third of that.

It was the director at Takiyah’s child-care center, not the family’s caseworker, who told Woods about transitional child care. When Woods tried to apply for the subsidy, the local office lost her paperwork three times, she said. She finally got her first check in February.

In the process, Woods’ boss, Renee Wallace, tolerated her long telephone calls to caseworkers, mostly on company time. “Once it got straightened out, there was a big change in Darcell,” Wallace said. “A lot of pressure was taken off her, and it showed.”

Karolin Jappe Stanger, who went to work in July, 1990, as an administrative assistant at the Montana Advocacy Program for the handicapped, also had to approach her caseworker about the subsidy.

Stanger found out about transitional child care only because she happened to work at a federal agency in Helena and saw a lot of paperwork out of Washington.

These cases illustrate two central concerns of the Child Care Action Campaign: that welfare caseworkers are not telling clients about the transitional care and that bureaucratic problems compromise women just as they are trying to establish themselves in new jobs.

Welfare administrators counter that word is getting out well, considering that it is a new program for caseworkers already burdened with burgeoning caseloads. Aid to Families with Dependent Children has grown 25% over the past two years, to 4.7 million families.

And state figures indicate that use of transitional child care is up. In New York, for example, the program cost $3.5 million last year, up from $1 million the year before, according to Jo Ann Friedell, director of the Bureau of Early Childhood Services in the state’s Department of Social Services. That total includes federal, state and local allocations to the program.

But Child Care Action Campaign project director Ann Collins said a nationwide sampling of states shows that for every family receiving transitional child care, 20 families receive transitional Medicaid, another element of the Family Support Act. She said the disparity results because families automatically receive transitional Medicaid but must apply for transitional child cere.

Many states, including New York and California, depend mostly on letters and pamphlets to tell families leaving welfare about the child care. But a survey by the Kentucky Department of Social Services showed a problem with notification by mail: 30% of the recipients said they either forgot the letters or did not understand them.

Kentucky followed up the mailings with telephone calls. As a result, the child care-Medicaid ratio in that state is 1-to-7.

U.S. Rep. Thomas Downey (D-N.Y.), who sponsored the Family Support Act in the House, said he would propose legislation to make transitional child care automatic.

And Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.), who also sponsored the act, has proposed that the federal government pay the entire cost of job training and job searches under the act. Advocates say that in this bad economy, a requirement that states pay a share has led them to apply for only 50% to 60% of the authorized federal matching funds.