Welfare Reform Snag: Who’ll Watch Kids?

The goal of welfare reform is to push people off the dole and into jobs.

If the new regulations are followed, children of Orange County welfare recipients entering the work force will need nearly $173 million of subsidized day care annually. But state and local officials agree the county will receive only a fraction of that.

The gap is so large that many social welfare experts envision thousands of welfare recipients being unable to take jobs because they can’t afford child care.

“It’s a desperate situation,” said Ellin Chariton, child-care manager for the Orange County Department of Education, which runs the county’s child-care program for low-income families. “But there’s no way people are going to be able to go to work without child care.”

Under the state’s new welfare plan, which will go into effect next year, people will lose their benefits after receiving aid for two consecutive years. During that time, they are expected to find work. A key component of the reforms was to provide adequate child care so recipients could attend job training or go to work.

Angelo Doti, director of welfare reform for the Orange County Social Services Agency, estimated about 30,000 children will need subsidized day care when the new welfare rules kick in next year.

At an annual cost per child of $5,760, the county could have to spend $172.8 million.

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Statewide allocation for child care for welfare recipients entering the job market or job training for fiscal 1998 is $179.3 million, according to the state Department of Social Services.

Chariton’s budget, which pays most of the county’s subsidized child care, is $8 million.

Orange County is not alone in this child care quandary.

“What they’re seeing in Orange County is what we’re seeing around the country,” said Gina Adams, a child-care specialist at the Children’s Defense Fund in Washington. “It’s one of the real hidden problems of the whole welfare legislation. The funding chasm is much greater than many people expected.”

As it is, the county does not have enough money for all the low-income children who need day care.

About 2,645 children are in county-subsidized day care through the departments of education and social services. But more than 9,000 low-income children are on Chariton’s waiting list. About 200 of them have been found to be at risk of abuse at home, she said, but there is no money to place them.

Conservatives and liberals agree there is not enough money to fund quality day care for all the low-income children who will need it. The dilemma is what to do about it.

“One of the concerns for local governments is that they don’t see that money right now--and they’re right about that. It’s not there,” said William C. Jordan, chief of employment and refugee programs for the state Department of Social Services. “But we recognize that families are not going to be able to [move] toward self-sufficiency unless they have adequate child care.”

A major concern under the new welfare rules is whether the working poor, who often are eligible for the same child-care subsidies, will lose out because funding priorities have shifted to welfare recipients.

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The federal government proposes to fine states that do not meet the deadline for moving recipients off the rolls and into jobs--giving states financial incentive to devote their resources to those receiving welfare.

But the working poor are often a missed paycheck away from welfare, and withdrawing child-care money could push them onto public aid, said Maria Balakshin, director of the child development division of the state Department of Education.

She said most of the state government wants “to find an appropriate balance of providing subsidized child care for both the [welfare] recipients and the working poor.”

Others, however, doubt it can be done under the new system.

“The situation is almost so overwhelming that it seems as if we’re being asked to give everybody $5 and tell them to go find some child care,” said Gloria Guzman, director of Child Development at Rancho Santiago College.

But the ability to work and the availability of child care are inextricably linked.

“They’ll call looking for child care, and when we tell them there’s quite an extensive waiting list they say, ‘But I’ve found a job that starts Monday. What do I do?’ ” Chariton said. “They lose their job, they lose their momentum and oftentimes these are the families that with a little help could reach self-sufficiency.”

Kelly Hamilton’s experience is what welfare experts fear.

A welfare recipient and the mother of a 2-year-old girl, Hamilton works part time and attends Rancho Santiago College. Her grandmother, who is partially disabled, cares for Hamilton’s daughter and great-grandmother, who has Alzheimer’s.

“My daughter’s been on the waiting list through the county since she was 3 days old,” Hamilton said. “I really don’t know what else to do right now, but I know I’m going to have to do something fast. My grandmother can’t go on like this.”

Hamilton said if she doesn’t receive subsidized child care soon, she may have to drop out of school and quit her job.

For another Rancho Santiago student, Carolyn Williams of Anaheim, subsidized child care works the way social reformers hope it will for other welfare recipients.

Williams, who is divorced, receives $565 a month of Aid to Families with Dependent Children and an additional $200 from her job at a day-care center.

Her 4-year-old son’s day care at Rancho Santiago is free, but she pays $360 a month for her 2-year-old daughter’s care. She pays her parents $300 rent, leaving her $105 for groceries.

“If I couldn’t get day care for my son, then I could never afford to go to school,” she said. “I’d be sitting at home like all the other welfare recipients.”

Jordan, of the Department of Social Services, suggested that a portion of the gap can be made up by businesses, nonprofit groups, churches and communities. Also, new laws strengthening the collection of child-support payments will offset some costs.

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Many of those groups say they already struggle to help the poor, said Nancy Noble, chairwoman of the Orange County Child Care Planning Council.

But she pointed to a coalition of business leaders and city and school officials who created the Irvine Children’s Fund, which has provided after-school care for thousands of children in the last decade.

“Nonprofits have been doing a lot and it’s really a strain on them, but I think the general public--you and me and our neighbors--are going to have to dig a little deeper in our pocket and help out,” said Noble, who also is the city of Irvine’s child-care coordinator.