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The Limits of Time Limits On Welfare


About 30,000 New York City families reached their lifetime limit--five years--for receiving Federal welfare benefits in December. The purpose of such time limits, according to their proponents, is to motivate welfare recipients to find other sources of income before they reach their limit. In New York State, however, this theory does not apply.

The state Constitution requires the government to provide for the "aid, care and support of the needy." This means that when federal welfare benefits run out, the state Safety Net Assistance program kicks in with benefits equal to those under the federal program. Theoretically, the change should be minimal for welfare recipients: they will get the same amount of assistance, in a slightly different form.

So who should care about Federal welfare time limits in New York? In fact, it is the government--both at the state and city levels--which should feel motivated by time limits to reduce the need for public assistance. During the years that people are eligible for Federal welfare benefits, the U.S. government foots half the bill, so the state and city each pay only 25 percent of the cost. Once that eligibility ends, the cost to the state and city doubles as they take on the whole responsibility for Safety Net Assistance benefits.

Officials of both the city and state governments of New York have known for over five years that time limits would cut off federal funds for long-term welfare recipients. If this had motivated them to reduce this population's need for support, they would have made major efforts to reach this "hard-to-help" group with services aimed at their particular needs.

Studies of families receiving long-term public assistance show that they differ from the general population of families on public assistance. According to the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation, heads of these households have more children and less education and work experience than heads of households receiving only short-term benefits. Many long-term recipients have multiple barriers to work, rather than a single clear-cut problem that would qualify them for Social Security disability assistance. They are the people least likely to be helped by welfare reform as New Yorkers have known it since Rudy Giuliani launched his version of it in 1995.

New York City's welfare reform program has focused on two goals. 1. It has prevented people from getting or staying on the welfare rolls by ingenious, often illegitimate, means. 2. It has helped the most skilled, educated, and experienced beneficiaries to get employment of any kind, no matter how dead-end, low-paid and temporary those jobs may be.

In the short term, these tactics have succeeded in cutting the welfare caseload in half over the five year-period starting in October 1996. Their long-term effects may end up costing the city and state more than they have saved.

A number of states had earlier time limits on federal welfare than New York. When we look at families that reached those limits already, we get some idea of what to expect in New York City. The evidence does not suggest that families can pull themselves together and out of poverty just because their welfare checks stop arriving. As of April 2001, nearly one in three adults heading New York City households on welfare was already employed, but earned wages so low that the household still qualified for public assistance.

Six months after time limits ended cash assistance for recipients in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, only 32 percent of them had worked continuously for at least 20 hours a week since their assistance ended. The Center on Urban Poverty and Social Change reports that three out of four of these families had incomes below the poverty line, even when food stamps are included. When the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation followed up on a series of welfare-to-work projects, they found that only eight percent of subjects were continuously employed in the four years after they left welfare.

Federal welfare reform legislation has built-in incentives for states to invest in helping public assistance recipients to become qualified and able to work. Each year since 1996, each state has received the same amount of money that the U.S. government gave it for welfare benefits in 1995, even though the number of people receiving cash benefits is now much lower. The extra money was meant to be used to pay for child care, transportation, Medicaid coverage, education, job training, and other items needed by welfare recipients to find and keep jobs.

New York spent a lot of that money on good programs. However, some funding went through a budget gimmick called "supplantation," in which federal dollars paid for services that the state would have paid for otherwise, freeing up state dollars for general purposes, including a massive round of tax cuts.

The United States General Accounting Office examined spending under welfare reform by ten states, and concluded that eight of them invested more state funds into services for low-income families in the year 2000 than they did in 1995. New York was one of the two exceptions in which state spending declined.

Five years into welfare reform, New York State has accumulated over a billion dollars in unspent federal welfare funds. This surplus would be helpful when welfare rolls begin to increase again in response to economic changes, if it were not likely that Congress will treat the unspent dollars as an excuse to reduce future federal funding for public assistance.

Immediate use could be made of the unspent federal funds to improve and expand services that invest in beneficiaries' future ability to support themselves. These include high-quality child care, and education, job training, and vocational counseling for teenagers and adults. Job creation would also be useful during this time of economic contraction, through wage subsidies or community service programs. Even if the new jobs were not permanent, employees could develop a work history and gain experience, better positioning themselves for jobs that may emerge when the economy recovers.

There is no shortage of successful welfare-to-work strategies for New York to adopt. On paper, many of them already are in place. However, the size and quality of these programs depends on state and city commitment to do more than push people off the welfare rolls without regard to their future well-being.

New York City has a history of illegally discouraging applicants for public assistance. In the months preceding December 2001, recipients about to reach their five-year federal benefit limit were invited by the city to report to welfare offices to discuss "how you plan to manage your household expenses once your limits for Cash Assistance expire." According to a report by the Social Welfare Committee of the Association for the Bar of the City of New York, the notices bearing this invitation did not say that state benefits were available for those whose federal benefits ran out.

Although child care is essential to low-income mothers seeking work, there are still 30,000 children on the waiting list for subsidized child care slots in New York City. Just before leaving office, the city's first term-limited Mayor and City Council eliminated $71 million from the municipal budget, preventing the creation of 10,000 new day care slots.

It is no wonder that advocates for the poor are leery of how smoothly New York will make the transition to Safety Net Assistance. It will be much more difficult for families to navigate their way back into eligibility once the welfare machinery accidentally drops them into hunger and homelessness.

Linda Ostreicher, a former budget analyst for the New York City Council, is a freelance writer and consultant to nonprofits. She is currently on the staff of Bronx Independent Living Services.

THE NEEDIEST. Also: City-Wide Task Force On Housing Court Still Alive


The United States has had a social welfare system for over 70 years, but each Christmas the New York Times continues to print heartbreaking stories intended to inspire contributions to its Neediest Cases Fund.

In 1912, when Times publisher Arthur Ochs established this tradition, there were no food stamps, no social security for the elderly and people with disabilities, no school breakfast or lunch programs, no Medicaid or Medicare, and no Section 8 housing. Federal income taxes would not begin until the next year. New York City had a public-private system of poorhouses, outdoor relief, settlement houses, tuberculosis sanatoria, insane asylums, and orphanages, yet many of the poor lived in conditions so pitiable, Ochs thought they would no longer be tolerated if the Times made them known.

The first Hundred Neediest Cases were peopled by widows, orphans, and sick or disabled fathers. Mothers were often invalids, too delicate or devitalized to hold jobs or do housework. Hunger, cold, and the death of family members were dreaded not only for their direct effects, but because they could bring on tuberculosis.

More than a third of the cases arose from a father's death; today widows and children can receive Social Security survivors' benefits. Another quarter of the cases, in which the father was sick or disabled, might now be prevented by disability payments and better medical care. Public assistance or child support payments could now support the 13 cases where the father was in jail, had deserted, or was not mentioned. The few cases of impoverished old people would be resolved by Social Security. The remaining 17 cases involved children, mostly orphans, who had no adult to care for them. These would now be steered toward the still-controversial child welfare system.

By 1921, the annual collection for the Hundred Neediest Cases had become an institution. The Times pledged to make the nature of poverty "clearly known and to drive it home," because New Yorkers were "cut off by the conditions of life from channels of information as to the conditions of neighbors, channels of information which bring help and sympathy immediately." The Neediest cases were still dominated by sick, absent, and dead fathers. Mothers might work, but they earned too little to live on, or collapsed from overwork. A system had evolved to deal with such families by taking children away from their mothers. The Hundred Neediest Cases Fund provided an alternative: enough money to keep the family together.

The New York Times was careful to distinguish its 1931 collection for the Neediest Cases Fund from the "Emergency Unemployment Relief Fund," explaining that the donations for the Neediest helped "those who cannot be helped by employment because they are too old, too young, or too sick to work." Another difference was that the Emergency Unemployment Relief Fund had collected $18 million, while the Neediest Cases Fund was unsure it would reach its 1930 total of less than $348,000.

Pearl Harbor was bombed on the opening day of the 1941appeal. During the next week, enough money was donated to take care of the Hundred Neediest Cases, so on December 14, a collection was launched for a second 100 cases. The nation had been in the Depression for over a decade; no explanations were needed for fathers being out of work. The Times promised its readers their donations would "mean the turning of the tide toward health and self-reliance."

Some cases were receiving "public aid," but had additional needs, while others were not eligible because a family member worked part-time or at a low salary. There was cash assistance for dependent children, the elderly, the blind, and those needing "home relief." There were WPA jobs that could be held for up to 18 months, after which workers had to go back on public assistance, in a cycle some tried to break through training for higher-paid, permanent jobs.

Medical care now offered answers to many physical and mental problems, if the Neediest Cases Fund could pay for it. Donations began to buy "guidance" and "counseling," as well as rent and food. When a mother was dead, absent, or too weak to take care of her children, a housekeeper might be provided to avoid separating children from their families and homes.

The Hundred Neediest Cases of 1951 and 1961 show the success of the social safety net then in place. Hunger and absence of income were no longer prominent. Stories gave detailed explanations of why their subjects were in need. The new cases required counseling to lead them to solutions that they would otherwise not know about or accept, such as living with a disability, or moving to a nursing home. Parents and children who were "nervous" or "near breakdown" needed care to return to mental health. Delinquency had become an issue, as was living in crime-ridden slums.

By 1971, the "Hundred" part of the fund's name was dropped, and cases no longer were given numbers. Counseling was still the prescription for many, and drug use emerged as a problem.

The landscape of need looked much like today's by 1991, with homelessness, AIDS, and substance abuse becoming familiar elements in cases. The 2001 campaign for the Neediest features lengthy stories about outstanding cases. Aaron Donovan has written these stories for three years, but is "still surprised at the wide range of things that cause people to be needy."

Some cases fall through the cracks between social service programs: he recalls a child living in a homeless shelter who needed cabfare to and from chemotherapy treatments. Other people need emergency support while applications for public benefits are being processed. "Charities have an advantage over government," Donovan says. "They can get money to people right away."

According to David Jones, President and CEO of the Community Service Society, "government has abdicated substantially from case management." Instead of doing social work, employees at the city's public assistance agency are now charged with weeding out clients who fail to comply with convoluted application and recertification procedures.

The Community Service Society still gives cash grants to needy families, as it has done since 1912. However, Jones finds the agency has shifted its focus to a blend of the welfare poor and the working poor, as well as immigrants no longer eligible for Medicaid and public assistance. More time is spent, for example, on helping welfare recipients to regain benefits after inappropriate sanctions.

Aaron Donovan's story of Jasmine Tolentino, published on November 25, 2001, illustrates both the value of existing social programs and their limits. One of her sons has lupus, a chronic illness for which he was recently hospitalized. Tolentino lives with five children and a grandchild in a two-room apartment. Thanks to the social safety net, her son received the medical care he needed, and the family survives on public assistance, food from a local church, and food stamps. Because of the limits of public assistance, they cannot afford to move to a larger apartment, and were sleeping without sheets, blankets or pillows until the Children's Aid Society bought them with money from the Neediest Cases fund.

In "Behind the Hundred Neediest Cases," published in the City Journal in 1997, Heather MacDonald argued that their history illustrates a change in the "elite" view of charity. It was once reserved for the deserving poor; now the recipient's moral character is "all but irrelevant."

However, the same history can be interpreted as the opening chapters of a still-unfinished success story. In this reading, the early years of the Neediest Case Fund showed government the necessity of meeting basic material needs. Then the charity tackled those needs that remained unfilled. As our collective knowledge evolves, private donations support the application of new solutions to both old and new problems. And where bureaucracy fails, there is no substitute for direct compassion.

CITY-WIDE TASK FORCE ON HOUSING COURT SURVIVES BUDGET CUTS

Last month I incorrectly reported (See "A Rocky Season,") that the City-Wide Task Force on Housing Court was planning to lay off its entire staff and close down in December, due to state and city budget reductions. According to Larry Wood, President of the Board of Directors, the 21-year-old coalition is still very much alive. "We are determined to stay together even if we were to lose all our government contracts," he says. State cuts of close to 45 percent of their income forced the task force to lay off eight of 18 staff members, with the remaining employees agreeing to take a pay cut. The agency's information tables at housing courts are open fewer days each week, with only one paid employee instead of two. Volunteers and employees of other housing-related organizations will still help to staff the tables.

The task force's cash flow is threatened by city cutbacks stemming from the World Trade Center disaster. Fortunately, late in November, it received approval for a grant of $100,000 from the Nonprofit Finance Fund, through its Nonprofit Recovery Fund. While this amount does not return the coalition to the level of funding originally expected for the current year, it ensures their ability to provide uninterrupted services at a time when they are seeing escalating demand for housing court assistance.

Linda Ostreicher, a former budget analyst for the New York City Council, is a freelance writer and consultant to nonprofits. She is currently on the staff of Bronx Independent Living Services.

 

Children's Services


The agency whose job it is to keep the city's children safe, the Administration for Children's Services, is now a permanent agency, thanks to a charter proposal that the voters passed in November, after a six-year separation from the Human Resources Administration. But Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta, widely hailed as the mastermind behind the agency's reinvention, is stepping down and his replacement has yet to be announced. At the same time, as if to mock all their best intentions, tragically, at least six children under the age of seven have died recently, allegedly at the hands of their abusive parents.

The list is a heartbreaking reminder of the agency's grave responsibility: Inez Bennett, 7, found dead in her family's Bronx apartment with a smashed jaw and hot water burns, cuts and bruises covering her body; Signifagance Oliver, 4, drowned in the bathtub by her mother in an exorcism ritual; Sylena Herrnkind, 3, beaten to death by her mother in the Staten Island home she shared with four siblings; Sidney Achan, 2, who died from multiple skull fractures and brain injuries; and Kyron Hamilton, 15 months, beaten to death by his mother who said the baby was bothering her while she watched television. A Brooklyn man was charged with second-degree murder in the death of De Andrew Monroe, the 15-month-old son of his girlfriend. According to police, the baby was shaken to death because he would not stop crying.

If the Administration for Children's Services is now officially permanent, that might not mean too much. "I don't see anything magical or dramatic happening," said Gail Nayowith, executive director of the Citizen's Committee for Children, New York's oldest child advocacy organization. "The real struggle will be to hold on to the reforms."

These reforms were born out of the case of six-year-old Elisa Izquierdo, who died in November 1995 after she was held prisoner, beaten, sexually abused and starved by her crack-addicted mother, a woman allegedly so vicious that she used her child as a mop, cleaning the floor with her dark curly hair. The public outcry was so immense that Mayor Rudolph Giuliani immediately dismantled the old Child Welfare Agency, a branch of the Human Resources Administration, and replaced it with the Administration for Children's Services. Former prosecutor Nicholas Scoppetta, who grew up in foster care, was installed as director.

Commissioner Scoppetta, who took office in January 1996, has been the agency's architect and Teflon-coated commander-in-chief. During the mayoral campaign, Michael Bloomberg said he wanted to keep Scoppetta, but the commissioner was firm that he would reject any offers to stay.

"There are two Nick Scoppettas," said Richard Wexler, executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform in Alexandria, Va. "There is the 1996 to 1998 model, who came in, made all the wrong assumptions, and sent child welfare careening backwards for two years. He drove the numbers of kids taken away from home way up." During the commissioner's first years, that number jumped from 8,000 in 1995 to 12,000 in 1998.

At the same time Scoppetta stepped in, Marcia Robinson Lowry, a leading litigator for children, was preparing a broad class action lawsuit against the city intended to reform the child welfare system, Marisol v. Giuliani. The lawsuit was eventually settled with a special advisory panel who would oversee an overhaul of ACS, with an emphasis on keeping families together. A final report was issued last December where the panel praised the agency for making "remarkable progress."

"Scoppetta's changed to some extent," continued Wexler. "He looked at things a different way from 1999 to date. He was absolutely convinced that we have too many people in foster care. He changed the orientation of the agency to family preservation. The new-model Scoppetta would be a very good commissioner."

Scoppetta has been responsible for cutting the foster-care population to 29,800 from 43,000 in 1997. For the first time ever, the city is now providing more families with preventive services -- more than 30,000 -- than there are children placed in foster care. Other successes include raised caseworker training and salaries, and a record 21,000 adoptions in six years, a six percent increase over the previous six-year period.

The difficulty is in picking the right person to follow Scoppetta. Although no names have been released, child advocates believe that the nomination will come from inside the agency. Nevertheless, many believe important lessons can be learned from outside the five boroughs. The Alabama system of care is considered to be the single most successful child welfare reform in the country. The reforms are also the result of a lawsuit where the state was required to rebuild its entire system from the bottom up. Their foster care population is now down by 33 percent.

Then there is the turnaround in Pennsylvania. In the mid-1990s, foster care placements were soaring in Pittsburgh and surrounding Allegheny County. Leadership changed and by more than doubling the budget for preventive services and embracing innovations like adding housing counselors to child welfare offices, the foster care population has been cut by 20 percent. And since January, 1997, there has been only one child abuse fatality in any family previously known to the agency.

Even with the shocking November deaths of Sylena Herrnkind and Signifagance Oliver, the number of child abuse fatalities in New York City remains fairly stable at 23 to 30 per year. Last year there were 22 deaths of children whose parents had been investigated by ACS, in 1999 it was 23, and in 1998 it was 36. These numbers coincide with national figures, where there are about 2 deaths per 100,000 children. David Tobis, executive director of the Child Welfare Fund, a watchdog and advocacy organization, doesn't see the spate of recent deaths in the news as unusual. "I don't see these deaths as reflecting the system as deteriorating. These deaths are a constant," he said.

"While we can learn from child deaths, they're essentially a weak indicator of how well the system is functioning," said John Mattingly of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the private foundation that lead the Marisol v. Giuliani panel. "Deaths are public failures, but there are silent failures as well. A child who comes into the system who could have been kept at home with the right preventive services is a failure. There are thousands of those situations that are far better indicators of failure."

The Casey panel, along with a host of child advocates, say much more remains to be done before the Administration for Children Service's reforms are more broadly felt by the children and families who deal with the system every day. The panel has particularly noted that more needs to be done for the contract agencies, who handle 85 percent of the system's children. There has been speculation that Sylena Herrnkind's death may have been averted had the workers for the agency who placed the 3-year-old in a foster home, the Seaman's Society for Children and Families in Staten Island, had better training and closer contact with the ACS.

"The agency's success was that it improved the bureaucracy," said Tobis. "They improved training to staff, reduced staff turnover and, to their credit, there is now an accountability system. They have not done comparable work within the private agencies. The salaries, prestige and training is still too low." The Coalition for Child Protection Reform's Wexler also noted that the financial incentives for foster care providers needs review. "What they need to do is get away from the per-diem reimbursement. You're going to get what you pay for. If you change the financial incentive, the reward would be for returning children to birth parents or adoption."

Andrew White, director of the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School, has penned an advisory paper addressed to the new mayor and city council . "Everyone in the child welfare field knows that some parents abandon or severely maltreat their children," said White. "Most parents...do not fit this description, however, and are struggling with issues related to poverty, substance abuse, spousal abuse or illness." He advocated a broad expansion of neighborhood-based preventive services that would "help families steer clear of the kind of severe crises that can endanger their children." Unfortunately, he continued, "the nature of ACS policies are such that in most cases, families must be in the thick of a crisis before they obtain any assistance."

 



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