Some Cities Find Success With Welfare Reform : Aid: A number of mid-size communities have tailor-made programs to get residents into the work force. And they are seeing positive results.

For most people seeking public assistance in this industrial city, welfare is a lot like work. Sitting at home and waiting for the mail carrier to deliver the check is not an option.

Within seven days of applying for benefits, most recipients must begin participating in a full-time work program, which includes self-esteem classes, skills training, education and a job search.

As a result, in the space of two years, 75% of those who signed up for welfare have moved to jobs, and the county’s caseload has dropped by more than a third since the program started five years ago.

While most of the rest of the country is still talking about reform, Kenosha’s leaders say they have achieved it.

“We have reformed welfare in Kenosha County,” said Gerald Schroeder, economic support manager at the local Job Center, where welfare recipients and the unemployed apply for benefits and receive training.

It would be an exaggeration to say that Kenosha’s success could be replicated everywhere. Not every community has an economy as vibrant; many have a much larger underclass and more entrenched urban decay.

Nevertheless, this community’s experience and that of some other mid-size cities across the country is quietly demonstrating that a changed approach to public assistance can indeed bring impressive results--sometimes almost as dramatic as the politicians and social theorists have fantasized it would.

These cities are providing a valuable counterpoint to the poverty-saddled Detroits and Newarks--where the welfare problem is of daunting scale and where the obstacles and complications to reform can make the effort seem almost hopeless.

Where there is optimism about welfare reform, it lies partly in the fact that a larger percentage of the welfare recipients in this country live in cities like Kenosha than one might think.

“The public has a stereotypical, automatic vision of what poverty is: They think of the urban model--Brownsville [Texas] or a Chicago housing project, or rural poverty that goes back to Appalachia,” said David Butler, a welfare policy analyst.

However, 55% of public-assistance recipients live in neighborhoods with relatively low poverty rates, according to an analysis of the 1990 census by Paul Jargowsky, a sociologist at the University of Texas at Dallas. Only 16% of public-assistance recipients live in urban neighborhoods where 40% or more of the residents are below the poverty line.

“Rural areas are tough, and the large inner-city areas are particularly tough,” said Butler, whose research group, Manpower Demonstration Resource Corp., has evaluated more than two dozen welfare reform efforts across the country. Work is scare, social problems are extreme and, in the inner cities, the caseload is large.

“Up until now, with some exceptions, we’ve not seen a history of success” in these places, Butler said.

But in this city of 80,000 between Chicago and Milwaukee, as well as in places like Riverside, Calif.; Tulsa, Okla., and Burlington, Vt., welfare reform is a different story.

There, local officials say, they have found they can put their dependent population to work, improve families’ lives and sometimes save tax dollars if certain factors are present and are fully exploited.

They are:

* A local economy that is reasonably good or growing.

* A cost of living that is reasonable.

* A healthy ratio of haves to have-nots.

* A local government and business community that can make a serious, coordinated effort.

In some communities, the drive to overhaul welfare is coming not from politicians but from businesses, concerned that the local economy will not meet its potential without a more productive labor force.

“We cannot afford to have anybody who could potentially be in the work force sit out,” said Wayne Rowley, an official with the Tulsa Chamber of Commerce, which launched an effort, known as Index, that is putting welfare recipients in industrial jobs.

Tulsa’s economy was badly battered by the collapse of the oil industry in the 1980s, but it is now making its way back steadily through expansions and relocations in a number of industries. Welfare recipients are being nudged into the market to fuel the process.

Participants in the Tulsa Chamber of Commerce’s program attend classes for four hours in the morning and spend the afternoon assembling reels for fishing rods, packaging building materials, or performing other work on the program’s manufacturing floor. The production pays for the cost of the job training.

“You’ve got a 50-year psychological barrier to get over; it’s not easy,” Rowley said.

But recipients say the chamber’s willingness to stick with them has made a big difference. So has its willingness to rally local employers to come up with jobs and give them a chance.

“It’s scary to go back out and look for work,” said Dottie Baze, 36, a welfare recipient who had not worked for seven years until she signed up for the program. “Index gives you confidence. It makes you feel good about you.”

She says the re-entry training “helps you get back into the routine of getting up and getting to the bus on time. It also helps you learn how to be organized so you can get things done and how to work with other people.”

Since graduating, Baze has worked for seven months at a paper recycling plant. She has already received a raise, to $6 an hour, and been promoted to crew leader.

Index and several other welfare-to-work programs in Tulsa are voluntary, so they have not met the test of hard-core cases or large numbers. But that may not be a serious caveat. Tulsa’s overall welfare population is not that large to begin with--only 4,000 parents receiving assistance, or 1% of the local population. By comparison, Orleans Parish, where New Orleans is located, has a slightly larger population but has a poverty rate that is double Tulsa’s and 20,000 parents on welfare.

Emboldened by the small-scale success, local officials are optimistic about the next step when Congress passes a comprehensive system that will cover most or all local recipients.

“Most people do not make change until it is more painful for them to stay the way they are than to change,” said Marcia Eastwood, the supervisor for the training programs in Tulsa County. “But if we had enough money, we could develop a program to move everyone toward self-sufficiency.”

About 700 miles to the northeast, Kenosha already has a mandatory program and says it is proof that the concept can work.

“The minute someone walks through the door, the connection is made immediately to help them find employment,” said the Job Center’s Schroeder. “Within two years, 75% are off--and they don’t return. We don’t believe the theory that there are not enough jobs. Once you start making excuses, you lose.”

It helps that jobs are indeed plentiful. The local economy is hot, creating work for almost anyone willing to do it. Also present is poverty at a manageable scale--Kenosha’s 2,400 adult welfare recipients compare to Chicago’s 132,000.

Also, local officials freely admit, there is the matter of money. The county has had an exceptional track record of attracting state and federal grants to pay for its training program, which costs about $1,000 per year per recipient.

“The dirty little secret is that this costs money,” said Seymour Adler, the head of social services for the county. “The public thinks they’re going to save all kinds of money with welfare reform--they’re not.”

Still, having the ingredients for success doesn’t matter if the community does not put them together--and Kenosha has. The result, said Adler, is that the money spent brings real, long-term social benefits for the community, rather than just perpetual dependency.

“We can actually do something to affect people’s lives here,” he said. “Problems are solvable here--if there’s a will to do it.”

The Kenosha program requires all welfare recipients to participate unless they have children younger than 2.

“So many places in the country are not successful because they are running the old welfare program--the entitlement one. That’s the one where welfare recipients are demanding checks and case workers are scrambling around to make sure they get them,” Schroeder said.

When Chris Miller was told she had to attend full-time preparation for work or would lose a third of her monthly check, she initially opted for the latter.

“I went through a lazy period,” said Miller, 27, who dropped out of school in the eighth grade, had her first child at age 15 and has received welfare for eight years. “It’s too easy to sit home and collect it. It’s addictive.”

But like some others in similar circumstances, she later reconsidered. “I went back because I needed the money,” said Miller, who enrolled in trade school and started a working at a fast-food restaurant.

LaDonna Pavetti, a welfare specialist at the Washington-based Urban Institute, said her research of welfare programs has shown that positive results like Kenosha’s are possible in many cities and suburbs around the country--even in some larger locales where the poverty and crime problem is not already far out of hand.

Salt Lake City, for example, is showing great promise with a program that is directing every recipient into work. It is well-designed, intensive and strongly supported by the community, Pavetti said.

“I don’t believe Utah will have any long-term recipients,” she said.

Such results are hard to expect in large cities with dense poverty, eroded job bases and pervasive gangs, crime and drugs. “They have a higher concentration of people with more problems, so to get people into any job strategy is going to be harder to pull off,” Pavetti said.

However, such cities constitute a fraction of the welfare problem.

Butler said that good results are also possible in areas with relatively high unemployment, like Riverside, as long as entry-level jobs are available.

Welfare-to-work programs in some large cities--including San Diego, Oakland and Baltimore--also have seen positive results because they were exceptionally well-designed and implemented, Butler said.

But in the toughest big-city cases, it is apparent that getting results may require higher costs, more time and much more community support.

Gary Stangler, social services director for the state of Missouri, where Kansas City’s initial welfare reform efforts have not gone well, said he is more encouraged than ever that strong commitment by a community to solve its welfare problem will bring success.

“When you’re doing it like we’re doing it--having it designed locally--by definition it’s going to take a lot longer,” he said. “But the theory is that it will have staying power if the community owns it.”