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Child Care For Welfare Recipients


The United States Senate voted last month to increase funding for child care for welfare recipients and other low-income families, over the objection of the White House, which is firmly against any increase (In PDF Format).

Even as advocates support the Senate's proposed increase in child care funding, they worry that it will not be sufficient. First of all, they say, child care is already very underfunded - current funding only pays for one child in seven, nationally.

Worse, the reason behind the increase is mostly to facilitate the reauthorization of the 1996 federal welfare reform law. This law currently requires that 50 percent of a state's welfare recipients work 30 hours a week. The definition of "work" is very narrow and includes almost no education and training programs. The reauthorization will probably include an increase in both the percentage of welfare recipients required to work (to 70 percent) and the number of hours they have to work (40). More people working means their children will need some place to go while their parents are on the job; welfare recipients receive child care assistance as part of their benefits.

"Even a substantial increase in child care funding won't meet the overall need, and barely keep up with the new need that's created by the work requirements," says Don Friedman of the Community Service Society.

One of the most significant changes of the welfare reform act was the creation of a new system entitled Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, which gives "block grants" to the states. Prior to the 1996 legislation, states received federal welfare funds based on the number of individuals or families enrolled. Today, welfare is no longer an entitlement but is only a temporary - five year -- stopgap. But states receive the same amount of money that they received in 1995, even as the number of people on public assistance declines. The legislation gives states greater control over their welfare programs, and also allows a way for them to use surplus funds as caseloads drop. So New York's $2.4 billion grant has stayed the same even as the rolls went from 561,762 cases to 140,758.

Like states across the country, New York has relied on its surplus from the block grants to pay for a wide variety of social services, including child care -- the lack of which is one of the main reasons low-income workers can't keep jobs once they get them. In the last budget the federal block grant funded almost two-thirds of the city's child care budget.

Most of the city's child care funds go to the city Human Resources Administration, which distributes 45,000 child care vouchers for parents on public assistance, and the Administration for Child Services, which oversees the largest municipal child care system in the country. It provides child care and Head Start services to approximately 75,000 children, toddlers to pre-teens, and their families each year, mostly through contracts with private, non-profit organizations. But tentative new research shows that the city only serves 30 percent of pre-schoolers and 13 percent of school-aged children, says Sandy Socolar of the Welfare Reform Network Child Care Committee.

In the 1990s, when the economy was strong, New York was able to put aside a reserve of welfare funds. But with both the economic downturn of the last few years and federal cutbacks, New York, like other states, has been spending down its block grant. Governor George Pataki's current proposed budget predicts a surplus from the grant of $1.48 billion, 40 percent lower than in 2002. The result in New York City could be a shortfall of as much as $80 million in aid next year for child welfare programs overall, according to a prediction (In PDF Format) by the Independent Budget Office.

"Over the next two to three years most states will have exhausted their reserves," says Mark Greenberg of the Center for Law and Social Policy. "That virtually assures cuts in services, just to manage their funding within the next five years. The particular implication for child care is that they will have to cut either welfare-funded child care, or other, larger services, such as child welfare, domestic violence, the earned income tax credit. Communities will be faced with terrible choices. This is inevitable."

When the original welfare reform legislation was passed nearly a decade ago, advocates were concerned about the lack of education provisions, low benefits that do not adequately reflect the high cost of food and housing in New York City; work requirements that do not offer benefits or training; and the lack of affordable child care. But today some are calling for what they call a "clean extension," the simple renewal of the current legislation.

"We're pushing to get it reauthorized because we are so afraid of what will come out of it if we open the whole thing up," says Elizabeth Lubetkin-Lipton of the Women's City Club of New York (In PDF Format). "Better to go with the devil you know than the one you don't."

Sasha Nyary, formerly on the staff of Life Magazine and the mother of a public school student, edits the newsletter of The Fifth Avenue Committee, a community-based organization.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Meals and Wheels Threatened In The Bronx


If a group of old people got together on their own, advised by experts in gerontology, to come up with a way to keep seniors out of hospitals and nursing homes, the result could look a lot like Meals on Wheels. The current New York City program serves clients who are at high risk of having to leave their homes for institutions. Through face-to-face visits five times a week, it can call in extra care just when a client needs it most. It can ease depression with friendly human contact. And it can prevent one of the most common and deadly conditions underlying major illnesses among the elderly, malnutrition.

Unfortunately, the city’s proposed experiment with the lives of Meals on Wheels clients in the Bronx does not appear to be based on recommendations from old people, gerontologists, or anyone familiar with the role of preventive health care. Instead, the local Department for the Aging has become mired in secrecy, rumors, Bronx politics, and financial problems facing nonprofit agencies.

Freezing Out Senior Centers

In the fall of 2003, the Department for the Aging requested bids for a contract that would replace some of the hot lunches delivered by Meals on Wheels in the Bronx with frozen meals. Senior centers, which traditionally have cooked and delivered lunch to New York’s elderly, bitterly opposed the pilot project. For months, they boycotted the contract and refused to bid on it. There have been no announcements from the Department for the Aging, but it is generally believed that multiple proposals were eventually submitted for the newly designed Bronx Meals-on-Wheels program, from both nonprofit and for-profit contractors.

The most controversial change would be reducing the number of deliveries to each client from five days a week to once or twice a week. It is not clear how this would meet the need, stated in the department’s 2004-2005 annual plan, “to ensure greater access to appropriate food and nutrition services for older individuals.” The change would reduce delivery costs, but also reduce the number of visits clients receive with their meals, and require them to be able to safely store and heat up frozen food.

Critics of the proposal point out the need for companionship and safety monitoring as well as food, that frozen meals place new burdens for meal preparation on clients already assessed as being unable to cook for themselves, and that fewer deliveries mean fewer reminders to eat. Many elderly people have shrinking appetites. The loss of as little as 10 pounds in six months can nearly double the chance of being institutionalized. Half of the people admitted to nursing homes are found to be experiencing malnutrition.

But many communities outside New York are substituting frozen for hot meals. They find that some seniors prefer the independence of being able to choose when to eat, and not having to wait hours every weekday for their lunch to be delivered.

What The Research Shows About Frozen Meals On Wheels

A major federally-funded study compared frozen meals to the traditional hot lunch and found no significant advantage to frozen meals in improving nutritional and function status of clients. [“Effects of two models of nutritional intervention on homebound older adults at nutritional risk,” by Alison J. Kretser, Theresa Voss, Wendell W. Kerr, Claude Cavadini, Janet Friedmann, Journal of the American Dietetic Association, March, 2003.

This is not a good sign. The frozen-meal model studied was much richer than that proposed by the Bloomberg administration. It cost more than twice as much, and provided 21 meals a week, plus 14 snacks.

By contrast, New York City’s frozen-meal option would provide five to seven meals per week. There’s a good chance that the city’s less generous frozen-meal program will not be as good for seniors as the hot meals they are getting now.

How Will Clients Be Screened?

The Department for the Aging made several changes to their proposal in response to the criticism by advocates for the elderly. Among them was a decrease in the minimum share of clients that must be shifted from hot meals to frozen ones, from 60 percent to 30 percent. It is not clear what will be done if 30 percent are not found to be eligible for frozen meals, or how screening for eligibility will be done.

To be in the Meals on Wheels program in the first place, applicants must be unable to prepare nutritious meals because they cannot shop, lack cooking equipment, or cannot do the tasks involved in cooking. They must also be without friends, relatives, or paid assistants who could help them to cook. In addition, they must suffer from dementia or be unable to leave their homes.

New York City is not Virginia, where the study about frozen foods took place. Much of our housing is older than its tenants, and furnished with cranky refrigerators whose freezers have been iced up for years. Con Edison’s rates for electricity are among the highest in the nation; elderly customers can easily lose electricity if they forget to pay—or cannot pay--their bills.

Will aged clients be able to safely operate microwave ovens, if they have never used them before? Or will they nod and thank the social worker who suggests one, not having clearly heard what she said, or wanting to be polite about the offer?

Save Money?

According to a report issued by the New York City’s Comptroller’s Office, the first year of a frozen-meals program could cost the city $185,400 more than estimated by the Bloomberg Administration, for equipment and initial screening of clients. In subsequent years, it is likely to continue to cost more than the administration expects.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Deporting the 'Bad' Immigrant


Recently a dear friend of mine observed that immigrants who broke the law deserved to be deported. In her eyes, certain elements in her community - like a cousin of hers who was busted and sent packing back to the Caribbean by American authorities for selling drugs in Washington Heights - were blights on the reputations of upstanding, hardworking folk who had arrived from distant shores seeking a better life.

Ironically, my friend’s mother had lived and worked illegally in New York long enough to arrange for my friend and her sisters to establish residency here. While of course she never followed her cousin into the drug trade, a strict application of my friend’s moral formula to her own immediate family history would probably find her today back in the Caribbean, without the benefit of the Ivy League degrees, corporate resume and Brooklyn brownstone she now enjoys.

Permanent Exile As Punishment

Behold the good immigrant/bad immigrant paradox. Until recently, it was little more than one of the oldest and slipperiest myths to wash up on the shores of the New World; the idea - often supported by xenophobic, racist and class-based notions - that certain newcomers are poster children for the American dream, while all others are shifty predators who need to “go back where they came from.” Ironically, in a city whose identity is proudly synonymous with the Statue of Liberty and taking in the world’s “tired” and “poor”, it’s as if immigrants arrive under moral probation. One false move is proof that they are pathologically unfit for “democracy” and capitalist consumption.

Immigrant groups and sub-groups have been stereotyped and treated with a different set of standards ever since the Mayflower drifted in. But what is relatively new and gaining widespread social acceptance is the legal enshrinement, through mandatory detention and deportation practices, of the view that being an immigrant is itself separately punishable.

According to a small chorus of immigrant activists, New York communities are being destabilized while a second-class status is enforced by the federal government using the fear of permanent exile. In 1996, years before the Patriot Act I and II or the Office of Homeland Security were activated, a set of landmark immigration laws were put in place by the Clinton Administration that essentially stripped immigrants of some of their most basic rights. The Anti-terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act and the Illegal Immigrant Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act vastly expanded the grounds for deportation to include, roughly speaking, past convictions, an accumulation of relatively minor repeat offenses and almost anything that requires a year or more in jail. At the same time these laws created new conditions for mandatory detention and deportation and denied certain criminal aliens and even asylum seekers the right to appeal deportation orders.

Ripped From Their Families

Subhash Kateel and Aarti Shahani, staff organizers for Families for Freedom , an immigrant defense network of New Yorkers facing deportation, maintain that detention and deportation excessively injure thousands of households every year, ripping people from their families. One of these households belong to Carol and Linden McDonald, a Guyanese-born couple who have been married for ten years and have together raised a child in Bushwick. According to Families for Freedom, “Linden, who is a Rastafarian, was arrested with a joint. His lawyer told him to plead guilty without advising him that he could be deported. A day after Linden began his two-week sentence, Immigration came to him in Rikers. They marked him for deportation, and transferred him to a Louisiana jail.” Carol and her daughter have not seen Linden, a green card holder, since September 2003 and don’t know when they will ever see him again.

Reportedly, stories like this are common, in which defendants, unable to afford high-priced lawyers, enter into plea bargains unaware of the consequences of their actions because even judges are not required to disclose this information. Many of these cases cannot be appealed or reviewed by a federal court and detentions can last years. And once deported, there is no such thing as a second chance. Likewise, if you received, for instance, probation for an offense ten years ago, dutifully served your sentence, became a model citizen and then tried to go on a trip outside the country, you too could find yourself detained and deported.

In other words, even as a permanent resident, you face a form of double jeopardy; if you commit a crime not only do you pay your debt to society as determined by the criminal code, but then, strictly on the basis of being a immigrant, you are forever purged from society.

Carol McDonald, along with another woman facing a similar predicament with her husband, wrote an open letter to New York elected officials complaining that “Immigration agents are stationed at Rikers to screen non-citizens…and hand them off for deportation…Detention and deportation have ruined our lives…(Our husbands) used to help with everything – pick up the kids from school, take them to the library, the park, McDonalds….We’re both terrified of people saying we are bad parents and taking our babies away.”

Deportation is, in effect, a life sentence. As Carol explains, “All our personal ambitions -- to get better jobs, make real careers -- are out the window…In detention you make $1 a day for full time work. Back home in the Caribbean, no one will hire a US deportee.”

A Chilling Effect

The implications for New York are far-reaching. According to Families for Freedom, 15 percent of American families are “mixed status”, meaning that at least one parent is a non-citizen and one child a citizen. In New York City, according to the New York Immigration Coalition, two thirds of all families have an immigrant parent and an American-born child. Deportees lose their social security benefits and their family members are not allowed to collect them.

Families for Freedom goes on to argue that immigrants increasingly risk deportation “when they turn to public servants for help... They are afraid to turn to hospitals, schools, fire departments and police officers. For example US born domestic violence victims report their abusers in one out of two situations; immigrant victims report one out of four instances and undocumented immigrant victims in just one of seven instances.”

Commensurate with the Crime?

The website for the federal agency, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (chillingly referred to as “ICE”), proudly extols the virtues of deportation and the kinds of actions that have led to over a million people from 120 countries being deported between 1996 and 2002, with billions of dollars being spent to do so. These kinds of results are seemingly designed to help Americans feel they are safer, that the “war on terror” is being won at home. In the now famous memo to FBI Director Robert Mueller, Coleen Rowley, an FBI Special Agent and Minneapolis Chief Division Counsel, wrote “After 9/11, FBI Headquarters encouraged more and more detentions for what seem to be essentially PR purposes.”

There are other cynical observations to be made. For example, the Bush administration’s newly proposed Temporary Worker Program, which sets up a legalized employment system for newcomers and immigrants currently living in the U.S. without authorization, is an explicit acknowledgement that there exists, in Bush’s own words, a “massive” underground economy thriving on undocumented immigrant labor, an economy in which all Americans enjoy the benefits of illegal immigration. The Temporary Worker Program, while offering no paths to citizenship, reinforces the concept of immigration as an indentured servitude mill. If you were prone to conspiracy theories, you could reasonably conclude that the specter of deportation functions to keep America’s imported servant class in line and scared straight.

Despite these views, politically speaking, deportation abolitionism or advocating for the rights of immigrants with criminal convictions remains about as unpopular and quixotic as it gets. Even many of the individuals fighting deportation are quick to point out that “yes, many immigrants do need to be kicked out – just not me.”

Criminal activity should be punished and the punishment should be commensurate with the crime. It’s also important to remember that behind the proud legacy of virtually every group of people that has arrived in this country over the last several hundred years, there has been a not so pretty tale of survival by any means necessary. Dust it off a bit and call it “entrepreneurial spirit”. Some refer to it as “pursuing the American dream”. The bottom line is immigrants are no more, no less, “bad” than those born on this soil. It’s time we had a social policy that can admit that.

Mark Winston Griffith, executive director of Talking Democracy Media, normally writes the community development topic page for Gotham Gazette.



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