Hoping to Graduate Off Welfare : Education: Single parents rejoice at the prospect of getting jobs after completing GAIN program.

Noreen Garcia says she never enjoyed getting welfare and has worked on and off for a decade while she raised her daughter alone, resorting to government help only when she lost a job or a baby-sitter.

“It’s very embarrassing. People stare at you when you cash your check or go in a store with food stamps,” Garcia said.

“They don’t understand not all of us want to be on it.”

But on Thursday the 29-year-old Sylmar woman rejoiced at receiving the equivalent of a high-school diploma at Los Angeles Mission College, holding up her certificate with a prizefighter’s gesture of triumph and speaking of plans to become a nurse.

Garcia was among 140 welfare recipients, mostly single mothers, who graduated Thursday from a government-funded program aimed at moving them from public assistance to private payrolls. Called Greater Avenues for Independence, or GAIN, the statewide program subsidizes books, transportation and child care so welfare mothers--and a few fathers--can return to school, brush up vocational skills and eventually find jobs.

The widely recognized program is part of a national rebellion against long-term public aid and among the models embraced by the Clinton Administration, which this week unveiled a welfare-reform plan that would require recipients to find work within two years.

Critics of the Clinton plan have been quick to question whether welfare recipients can become financially independent with such a deadline, especially when the costs of child and health care plague even middle-class families.

In Los Angeles County, even those GAIN participants who have found work have tended to remain on welfare rolls because they cannot afford medical care for their families on their earnings alone, said Pat Knauss, a county GAIN administrator.

About 97,700 parents receiving Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) have enrolled in GAIN since it began nearly six years ago, and about 25,000 of them have gone to work, Knauss said. Most participants are randomly selected by computer, although some volunteer. Currently, 35,000 of the county’s 315,000 AFDC parents are involved in some phase of the $65-million program, she said.

Of Thursday’s graduates at Mission College, 40 completed training in restaurant management, nursing or clerical work, and have been placed in jobs, said Eloise Cantrell, dean of the Vocational Program. The remaining 100 completed GAIN’s first phase in basic literacy and are expected to continue either college or vocational courses, Cantrell said.

*

Participants in Thursday’s “culmination exercises” donned no caps or gowns but there were plenty of miniskirts and tattoos, and graduates’ children sat on their laps.

The hopeful mood was enhanced by City Councilman Richard Alarcon, who spoke movingly of his own family’s intermittent reliance on welfare and held himself up as an example of success despite humble, even rocky, beginnings.

“If I can be a councilman and overcome the challenges we had as a family, on welfare and as a teen-age father, then you can do the same,” Alarcon said. He went on to recall how his grandfather had been a janitor at San Fernando Junior High School in the 1950s--and then how someone recently sought his recommendation for a principal at the same school.

“I thought, ‘Wow, have we come a long way,’ ” the councilman said.

His sympathetic listeners included Maria Velarde, a 36-year-old mother of four who hopes to become a certified chef and open her own restaurant.

Velarde said she has been on and off welfare since she became pregnant with her oldest child 19 years ago and spoke proudly of a daughter who just graduated from high school at age 16. After Velarde enrolled in GAIN classes, the two sometimes studied side by side.

“She said, ‘Are you doing your homework, Mom?’ and I said, ‘Yes. What about you?”

Velarde recently landed a job in Olive View Medical Center’s kitchen. “Three more weeks and I’m off welfare,” she said, with more than a little satisfaction.

Timothy Logan, 42, of Tujunga, one of a handful of fathers at Thursday’s ceremony, said he hopes to someday own his own business.

Logan said he raised his two children, now 22 and 17, alone after his wife left them many years ago. He applied for welfare only within the last year, after he lost one of a long line of restaurant jobs.

“This was the first time I ever had to use the system and it worked. I was shocked,” said Logan, his teen-age son Shea at his side.

Alma Luna was too shy to attend the ceremony, where she was scheduled to appear as one of nine student speakers, so a friend read her prepared remarks:

“I come to Mission College so I can get a better life for myself and my son. I also work after school so I can give my son the things he wants. Sometimes it’s hard for me because I only see him in the mornings. I come to school from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m., then I go to work from 2 until 9:30 p.m. When I get off work, my son is already asleep. . . .

*

“Yes, I’m on welfare but I barely make ends meet,” Luna wrote. “That’s why I got a job--to be able to give my son the best I can. I hope one day he will be proud of me, not embarrassed or ashamed.”

Garcia, the aspiring nurse, also had her child’s future in mind when she enrolled in GAIN. She said she dropped out of the seventh grade because of family problems that included alcohol, abuse and welfare. She got pregnant at age 19 with Monica, now 10.

“I guess it’s kind of like a cycle,” mused Garcia. “But it’s not going to happen to my daughter.”