Welfare-to-Work Plan Encounters Some Bumps

Here’s a program with something to please everyone: recruiting welfare recipients as volunteers to teach reading while working toward degrees.

Such a program tackles a number of policy goals at once: Schools get free tutors. Children learn to read. Welfare recipients are trained for jobs. Volunteerism gets a boost. All the pieces fit.

But from the office of AmeriCorps Director Kate Gale on the campus of West Los Angeles College, it doesn’t always look that way.

Sure, there are days when it all falls together, when it is clear that people’s lives could be changed for the better: people such as Sonya Hatter, who thought she would never get off welfare.

“I was home so long, just sitting at home watching soap operas, watching the neighbors’ kids,” said Hatter, 41. “I couldn’t do it anymore. I’m a good person. I’m a good mother. This gave me a chance to prove myself.”

But Gale’s welfare recruits also have disconcerted some people on campus. They are loud and boisterous, and peeved even Gale by calling her “our Great White Hope.”

More than half have not been paid promised work-study funds, and Gale is nervous. She would like to avoid a repeat of an incident last fall when 30 unpaid recruits marched into the president’s office to cries of “We aren’t going to the back of the bus!”

The 90 recruits Gale directs are among the vanguard of welfare recipients expected to hit community colleges because of welfare reform.

They are part of a program at 25 community colleges in which welfare recipients are recruited for AmeriCorps, the national service program. The recruits volunteer 20 hours per week teaching reading in schools while taking 12 college units of child development as job preparation. They get a small stipend of work-study funds while in the program.

Welfare reform is national policy. But in programs like this one, the trenches of welfare-to-work training, it is like directing a play with no script or sets.

Gale has found that getting welfare recipients through college and tutoring stints requires “duplicating what a middle-class family would do for their kid in college,” she said.

That means coping with their illnesses and car problems, helping them buy books and bus vouchers, supplying computer disks--”all the little problems you run into,” Gale said.

This week, for example, the recruits were in an uproar when Gale announced at the weekly meeting that from now on they would have to type their papers. There were protests from all sides--they did not have typewriters or did not have access to the computer lab.

“People!” an exasperated Gale yelled over the din. “You are never going to get through college if you can’t type a paper!”

Organizers are anxious to iron out such problems.

Already, some of the child development faculty members have voiced concern that the recruits are not prepared for college, said Maria Luisa Mateo, the college’s dean of academic affairs.

The college will soon offer them an extra seminar teaching, in part, how to talk and act like college students. “They need to be smoothed out,” she said.

But she said the recruits are being transformed on their own as they gain skills.

Gwen Duncan, a 41-year-old woman who was one of the first to be recruited, concurred. “Coming back to college was the best thing that happened to me,” she said.

Duncan, who has hazel eyes and a head of tiny braids, is one of the few women in the program with no children. She has been living off a county general relief check of $212 per month and plans to finish an associate degree in childhood development in June.

“I’ve lived in cars. I’ve lived in abandoned buildings,” she said. “I am so appreciative,” she said, gesturing toward the rain outside. “People are like, oh, look at the weather. I say, I’m just happy to be breathing.”

About 100 of 700 recruits statewide have so far earned the early childhood education certificate the program offers after one year, qualifying them as preschool teachers, said statewide AmeriCorps/America Reads coordinator Ed Connolly.

But it is still unclear how many who earn the certificate will find jobs. It is also unclear how many will use the $2,363 tuition grant they get at the end of the program for more schooling.

For all Gale’s efforts, the program’s dropout rate has been about 50% so far, she said. One reason is that many recruits failed to get their work-study money. Others had family or housing problems.

Recruits describe struggles with money, language difficulties, 90-minute bus rides, evictions and the overwhelming sense that everyone else on campus is younger and smarter than they are.

“Sometimes I have doubts about myself--whether I can actually accomplish it,” said Lisa Hubert, 33, a mother of four. “I kind of got comfortable, you know. Now, stepping out, going to school--it’s hard.”

Inspiration, though, comes from her 12-year-old daughter: “She tells all her friends, ‘My mommy’s in college,’ ” Hubert said.

Some of the most favorable responses to the program so far have come from schools, Connolly said. Hillcrest Drive Elementary School teacher Celeste McClure said she is “thrilled” to have a recruit tutoring in her first-grade class.

Although some of her colleagues in the Crenshaw-area school have said they do not know how to use the tutors and question their skills, McClure said her tutor has the natural ease with children that comes from motherhood.

Gale said this is one of the program’s strengths--it utilizes welfare recipients’ interest in children.

Some policymakers worry that jobs as preschool teachers or aides do not pay enough to replace welfare. But Gale said such careers present a practical goal for the women. “It’s a leap, but not that great of a leap,” she said.

For Hatter, who plans to get an associate degree in child development, working in a preschool, day-care or classroom is a treasured dream, even if the pay is low.

She is no longer worried about being pushed off the welfare rolls, she said. “Now I’m capable,” she said. “I’m going to get my own job. Welfare is something I’ll be proud to get off of.”