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Day Care In New York


On a recent Thursday morning, Ichenaphae Mason signed in at the Bronx office of the Agency for Child Development hoping to enroll her daughter in day care.

This was Mason's second trip to the waiting room, one of only five offices throughout the city where parents can apply for much sought-after spots in city-subsidized day care programs. Mason, who maintains both a full-time job and a full college course load, first applied nine months ago hoping to enroll her daughter into a center in her neighborhood. Now the city wanted the 23-year-old single mother to demonstrate she was still eligible even though her daughter had yet to spend a single day in day care.

"My mom has been taking care of her," said Mason. "But she has multiple sclerosis and she can't do it for much longer."

Mason is one of 47,000 eligible working parents waiting to get into the city's day care system. The number of child care openings has not increased since 1998, and children's advocates estimate that an additional 100,000 New Yorkers are eligible and in need of affordable day care.

The situation will likely get worse.

First, the city has a $6.4 billion deficit. Earlier this month, Mayor Michael Bloomberg's budget proposal called for cutting 2,500 day care slots.

"There is no argument not to do more for children," the mayor said at his budget presentation. "But we just don't have the money."

The City Council fought to restore the cuts this year, but they are likely to be part of the negotiations again next summer.

Second, the number of people in need of subsidized day care is increasing. Unemployment is on the rise at the same time thousands of New Yorkers are trying to move from welfare-to-work. And navigating the system is a complicated process that discourages many parents.

Third, a strike by day care workers - who have been without a contract for two years - also threatens to undo the city's already strained system. A contingency plan is in place in case of a strike, but some worry it won't be adequate.

"Maybe the city thinks it's not as important as police or sanitation workers walking off the job, but I guarantee you that child care is central to the city's economy and the city's economic recovery," said Gail Nayowith of the Citizens' Committee for Children of New York. "These families have to go to work every day."

Is the city doing enough to provide day care for New Yorkers?

CHILDCARE OPTIONS IN NYC

In Home Care
- Care by a relative or nanny

Workplace Child Care
- A few programs, mainly in hospitals or public agencies

Home-Based Child Care
Informal Child Care
- Not registered provider
- Up to 3 children

Family Child Care
- A registered provider in the home
- Up to 6 children

Group Family Child Care
- A licensed provider
- Up to 12 children with 2 adults

Part-Day Centers
Includes Nursery School, Head Start, Universal Pre-K, Early Childhood Centers
- Certified teachers required
- Set in community centers, churches, and housing developments
- Typically ages 2 1/2 to 5 years old

Full-Day Centers
- Certified teachers required
- Set in community centers, churches, housing developments
- Typically ages 2 1/2 to 5 years old

Public Schools
- Certified Teachers
- 4-year-olds in Universal Pre-K
- 5-year-olds in Kindergarten

Religious Institutions
- Parochial schools, churches
- Many programs are based in, but are not operated by, religious institutions

Childcare In NYC

There are approximately 550,000 children under the age of five in New York City.

Some people stay home with their children or turn to relatives or neighbors for child care. A few workplaces provide day care for their employees, but many New Yorkers turn to private centers, which can be a costly option.

The average cost of day care for a four-year-old in New York State is $9,000 a year, which, as the Children's Defense Fund points out, is more than college tuition at a public university.

Most New Yorkers have to find less expensive options.

For those who qualify, the city currently provides some kind of day care funding or program for about 1 in 5 of the city's children. The city contracts with 344 private, non-profit centers around the city. Most centers typically open their doors as early as 7:30 a.m. and can close as late as 7:00 p.m. The city also provides funding to regulated family care providers, licensed individuals who take care of children in their homes.

Families can qualify for city-subsidized child care if they earn less than 225 percent of the federal poverty level, which translates into an annual income of $26,000 for a family of two or $40,000 for a family of four. However, most families receiving child care subsidies from the city earned $18,000 a year or less, according to a report by Child Care, Inc.

Families pay a portion of the fee based on sliding scale. Those that make less than the poverty level (for example $15,967 for a family of four) are exempt from all fees and are given priority on waiting lists. Others still pay between $50 to $215 a week.

Growing Demand

The need for affordable child care in the city is growing, experts say.

Beginning in December, the first wave of families who met the five-year cut-off for public assistance last year will now be ineligible for child care services as well. The 1996 law that transformed the nation's welfare policy came up for renewal in Congress last September. However reauthorization was postponed because lawmakers could not agree on work requirements. Funding was also an issue.

New York City faces its own challenges that are unique from the rest of the nation.

Between the recession and the 9/11 terrorist attack, the city has lost about 128,000 jobs, according to the New York State Department of Labor. Over 100,000 New Yorkers have already run out of their unemployment benefits and applications for public assistance have gone up.

The city had planned on creating new day care slots with federal and state money. In 1998, the Independent Budget Office estimated that increases in aid would help the city create nearly 19,000 new day care openings over five years.

SUBSIDIZED DAY CARE

If a New Yorker is on public assistance, the place to start is the city's Human Resources Administration.

The Human Resources Administration provides care (mostly in the form of vouchers to informal, unregulated care-givers, such as babysitters, friends or family members, who are paid directly by the city) for public assistance recipients and those transitioning off of welfare.

Once a recipient has found a job, he or she is eligible for continued child care services for up to a year. After that year, they are referred to the Administration for Children's Services

The Administration for Children's Services provides care for low-income working families.

Depending on the age of the child, the family's need, and other factors such as abuse or neglect, the family will either be given a voucher to pay for a child care provider of their choice, or be referred to a Head Start, Universal Pre-Kindergarten, or day care program near their work or in their neighborhood.

Head Start, the federally-funded program which began in the 1960's under President Lyndon B. Johnson, blends community outreach with early childhood education. These programs have certified teachers and typically serve children ages 2 1/2 to 5 years old.

Universal Pre-Kindergarten is run by the Department of Education and prepares four-year-olds for elementary school. It is open to all children regardless of family income. Both programs typically run for half a day. Although, some centers have recently begun to combine Head Start with other programs to provide a full day of care.

However, while the state and federal budgets devoted more money, New York City cut back on its share of spending.

Washington's and Albany's contributions increased from $260 million in 2001 to $400 million in 2003, while the city has cut its share from $234 million to $163 million.

Some officials like State Senator Liz Krueger argue that supplanting city funds with federal Child Care and Development Block Grant funds violates state and federal law and the city's share of spending on day care should be restored.

"While I understand that New York City faces a severe financial crisis, the city must still follow state law, which is designed to ensure that child care programs are adequately supported," wrote Krueger in an open letter to Mayor Bloomberg in June.

The net result of all of this, explains Gail Nayowith of the Citizens' Committee for Children of New York, is that overall spending has remained the same and few, if any, new slots have been added.

The Good News About Day Care

There is some good news. New Yorkers who do manage to enroll their children into one of the city's programs tend to be happy with the care their children receive.

"It's good quality care and many people get a subsidy and have access to it," said Candice Anderson of the Citizens' Committee for Children.

Janean Patterson, who recently got her daughter and son into Hudson Guild, a city-funded program in Chelsea, agrees.

"Once it does work out, then you are fine," said Patterson who was on the city's waiting list for two weeks. The center even helped arrange a speech therapist for her son when he began stuttering. "Everybody is really nice," said Patterson. "If you need help, they are there."

Also in recent years, the city has worked to better coordinate services between the Human Resources Administration and the Administration for Children's Services.

The introduction of new programs, such as Universal Pre-Kindergarten through the Department of Education, along with the flexibility to combine funding from different sources, has also helped make it easier to place children between the ages of three and five.

Navigating The System

The bad news is that city's day care system is a complicated.

Families must apply for child care benefits from up to three different city agencies depending on their financial situation, what kind of assistance they need, and the age of their child.

Barbara Brandon-Croft, a cartoonist and freelance researcher and her husband, Monty, a jazz musician, recently experienced a typical day in the child care registration process in New York.

The couple, who makes approximately $30,000 a year, waited in the Agency for Child Development's Queens office from 9 a.m. until 3 p.m., to enroll their son, only to be told they were missing a piece of paperwork and had to come back the next day. The agency also said it would be easier to qualify if Monty filed for unemployment, which the couple did not want to do.

"We fit the criteria," said Barbara Brandon-Croft. "But whatever our situation was, it didn't work for them."

They came back the next day, filed out more paper work, and lost another day of work. In the end, their son was accepted, but to a day care center that did not meet their needs. The couple decided to find other options.

The system is even more complicated for families transitioning from welfare to work.

Under federal requirements, families on public assistance are guaranteed child care for up to a year once they have found a job. But a study by the Community Service Society found that seven out of ten families did not know they were eligible or were denied care. Many of the families who applied for benefits never received a response from the Human Resources Administration. More than half of these families said that they had jeopardized their jobs while seeking services, and some even lost their jobs.

"One wonders sometimes whether the system is intentionally complicated," said Nancy Rankin of the Community Service Society. "The administrative systems can - and do - pose barriers even when [the placements are] guaranteed and the funding is there."

Workers Demands

The city's day care workers - part of a union that also include cooks, custodians, and pre-school teachers - have been without a contract for nearly two years. The average worker makes less than $28,000 a year, according to the Day Care Council of New York.

Child care teachers, who are required to meet New York State Teachers certification standards, make on average $5,000 to $7,000 less than other New York City school teachers. Day care workers also argue that they work longer hours and year around.

And the day care industry often loses its best employees to the school system.

"Our teachers are not babysitters. They are early childhood educators," said Lisa McCreary, a day care book keeper, who says that her center loses five to six teachers to the Department of Education every year. "We should not have to beg to earn a decent salary."

The city has said it cannot afford raises for day care workers.

"While we recognize the services offered by these child care agencies are essential, the city's fiscal situation limits what we can do," said MacLean Guthrie, a spokeswoman for the Administration for Children's Services.

Last week Mayor Bloomberg signed the "living wage" bill, which requires companies contracting with the city to pay their workers a minimum of $ 8.10 per hour with health benefits and $ 9.60 without health benefits. However, because most day care workers earn more than that, union officials say the law's effects won't be felt for several years.

Meanwhile the union is preparing to strike, but say it is still too soon to say if and when workers would walk off the job. If they do, as many as 50,000 children and their families could be affected.

A strike would be just as devastating for workers, argues Ragland George, Executive Director of District Council 1707.

"We don't want to go on strike," said George. "We are dragging our feet and taking our time because we know that the communities and the parents and the children are going to be devastated, but if the city does not come forward and negotiate fairly with us, we will go on strike."

The city says it has already begun to put a contingency plan in place. "We've asked the centers to remain open and provide services to as many children as can be served safely," said Guthrie.

The city has also asked providers to give priority to children-at-risk and families who receive care mandated by the state, such as families transitioning from welfare to work, and many parents have already received notices asking if they can make alternative arrangements.

"Half of the city workers who already received their contracts, we take care of their children." said Jeanette Hudson who teaches at a child care center in Far Rockaway. "If we're not there to care for their children, how are they going to go to work?"

Additional Resources:

 

Making Parents Partners


WANTED: Parents for PS 123 Parent Association -- Flexible schedule needed because time and location for meetings to be announced one hour before meeting time. All meetings held in the middle of the day during working hours. No child care provided and no pay. You must speak English; no translations available. The district provides no funds to support the activities of this group. All major decisions impacting your child will be made by the professionals in the building but we still encourage your participation.

Welcome to parent involvement in the New York City public school system.

If you are a parent of a child in the New York City public school system, you know the drill all too well. And you know that it has gone on for decades, despite two significant governance reforms and countless other meetings and speeches and coalitions that were supposed to bring schools and communities together.

The good news is that Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein appear to understand the importance of parental involvement in education. The mayor, in last week´s education address, identified parent involvement as the third leg of his stool for improving public education in the city. Chancellor Klein gave the responsibility for parent involvement to his deputy chancellor for teaching and learning. This high-level acknowledgment of the role that parents and communities play in student achievement is unprecedented.

The challenge is that bringing about real change will require a significant shift in thinking. Educational professionals have never learned how to consider parents as their full partners in education.

How do you change the expectation of parents and communities that their involvement will continue to be peripheral?

You hold people accountable for it.

* * *

In the late 1960s, low-income and black and brown communities and the school system were at odds. Community activists were not, as revisionist history has sometimes portrayed, fighting for decentralization or a seat on a community school board. Instead, they wanted control of their own schools. They felt that only they, not administrators or teachers, could hold their children to the highest standards. The debate raised the question: What should the relationship be between schools and communities?

The 1969 legislation that created community school boards was the result of a political compromise brokered to appease the community. The Decentralization Law offered them a voice in policy making. But instead of figuring out how parents and communities could and should collaborate, the legislature created a structure.

Unfortunately, this would not be the last time.

Fast forward to 1996. The disconnect that existed in the 1960s between schools and communities had not changed. Community school boards, the vehicle that had been created ostensibly to bring communities and schools together, were viewed as the culprit. So the state created a new round of legislation that stripped community school boards of most of their powers and created School Leadership Teams to give parents a voice at the local school level. The impact on the capacity of our schools to view parents as full partners: none.

No mere change in structure will repair the problem that parents feel that schools are not open to them. Parent believe schools do not consider them legitimate partners in the education of their children or view them as entitled to information about how their schools run and how their children are being educated. A principal who did not have time for parents would not last long at a public school in Scarsdale, guaranteed.

Some editorial pages, and even former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, pointed the finger at parents. This is predictable -- and sometimes correct. But always be wary when people with political power blame those who do not have any. Of course there are parents who have not done their part to support the education of children. But is that as relevant as the fact that schools, inherently public institutions, have isolated themselves from the very people they work for?

* * *

To many, parent involvement conjures up the image of bake sales. That´s fine, but not what we are talking about. The goal is not to engage schools in meaningful relationships with parents because it is the nice thing to do, but because it is absolutely critical to any movement to improve schools.

If you are a principal in a low-performing school and you do not reach out to or welcome parents, can you still be effective? Maybe, but the odds do not favor it. The same goes for teachers. Why? Because if you know anything about education, you recognize that there is a direct relationship between parent involvement and student success. You would know automatically that your classroom or school building cannot be transformed by educators acting alone.

As we have learned, legislation does not automatically improve schools. Leaders, teachers, parents and students improve schools. Just look at the schools that succeed in our city and you will see that it is possible for schools to work, even against the odds. In every one of the successful schools, a strong relationship to parents and community constituents allowed them to change and thrive.

Students with involved parents do better in school. They show up, they do their homework, they have higher expectations for their own achievement. Schools with involved communities have a culture of success that cannot be created by administrative fiat. A strong partnership attracts other partners and soon we have created cycles of success.

How can we replicate this? By growing it, from the roots up. Relationships, among schools and parents and communities, are essential to nurture the process. But such relationships can only happen if the educational professionals in each building understand the importance of opening their doors, receive training in how to do it most effectively, and are held accountable for the results.

It is for that reason that "From Governance to Accountability: Building relationships that make schools work," a paper written by the NYU Institute for Education and Social Policy for the Drum Major Institute, concluded that it is time to hold school staff accountable. We proposed a Compstat-like tracking mechanism and a series of new performance standards to evaluate teachers, principals and even the chancellor himself on efforts to engage their most important partners. The expectation of evaluation becomes the incentive. Each time the system looks at student attendance, test scores, and teacher-student ratios in order to assess its own progress, it must also measure its relationship, responsiveness, and openness to parents and communities.

We shared the results of our report with Deputy Mayor Dennis Walcott and Chancellor Klein in November and were gratified to hear that it made an impact. The mayor, in his address last Wednesday announced, "The entire school system, from principals up to the chancellor, will be held accountable for effectiveness in engaging parents and responding to their concerns. Parent engagement also will be a significant factor in principal performance reviews. This will ensure that it is viewed as a core responsibility, not as an ‘add-on´ or optional activity."

This is the right first step in undoing the distrust between schools and communities. For far too many years, this mutual suspicion was bandaged with legislation, structures and councils -- with everything but the hard work of opening schools up to the people most important to the lives of children: their parents.

Fernando Ferrer, former mayoral candidate and Bronx borough president, is president of the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy, where Andrea Batista Schlesinger, who assisted in this essay, is executive director.

See also:

When Prisoners Come Home


Prisoner rehabilitation is a politically unpopular cause; New York State spent only six percent of its corrections budget on it in 2000. However, the other 94 percent of the corrections budget grows harder to justify as governments run out of areas in which to economize. Releasing prisoners is one way to cut costs; to avoid revolving-door re-arrests, some of this savings must go to what are called "transitional services" or "aftercare."

New York City has a particularly large stake in the success of former inmates returning to the community. Of the 26,000 prisoners released from New York State prisons in 2001, two-thirds were from New York City. The average state parolee is 35 years old, has a substance abuse problem, no high school diploma or GED, was inside for three or four years, and will be back in prison within three years.

In addition to the 350-odd former state prisoners returning to the city in an average week, another 108,000 inmates passed through New York City's own jails in 2002, with the average stay lasting about six weeks. Over two-thirds of these were detainees awaiting trial, meaning that they may have never pled guilty or been convicted of a crime. However, in six weeks, an inmate can be evicted from an apartment; have his or her children placed in foster care; and lose Medicaid, food stamps, and public assistance benefits.

Newly released prisoners rarely have jobs lined up, and many are discharged to homeless shelters. Most have no Medicaid or health insurance, a grave disadvantage for those with serious mental illness or HIV infection. Without help from family members or community organizations, ex-inmates have a strong incentive to commit crimes to survive, and an increased chance of ending up in city hospitals and psychiatric wards.

Factors In Successful Rehabilitation

The harsh sentencing laws of the 1980's were inspired, in part, by a belief that rehabilitation did not work, a conclusion drawn from evaluations of efforts in the 1970's. Since then, as the nation's incarceration rate quadrupled, researchers had ample opportunity to try a variety of rehabilitative strategies, some of which showed promise.

In 1998, the Vera Institute of Justice repeatedly interviewed 49 ex-offenders during their first month of freedom, in New York City. From this small, but in-depth, slice of the life of former inmates, Vera found evidence in favor of several principles on which current transitional programs are based. " Ex-offenders who received support from family members were more likely to be successful " Most ex-offenders who found jobs during the first month after their release were either helped by family or friends, or were re-hired by a former employer. " Ex-offenders who stayed in homeless shelters were seven times as likely as others to abscond from parole. " The main barrier to enrolling in drug treatment programs was not having a Medicaid card.

Rehabilitation has gained respectability among conservatives in light of the welfare-to-work trend. Supporters of welfare reform believe that job training and placement, combined with supportive social services, can move large numbers of welfare recipients into steady employment. Prisoners and long-term welfare recipients have some of the same barriers to employment: inadequate education and little work experience. This suggests that ex-offenders could also change their lives through a combination of job services and social services. And across the political spectrum, it is agreed that fathers, even ex-prisoners, should be encouraged to do more for their children, at least financially.

Counterproductive Budget Cuts

After decades of growth, the population in New York State prisons began to fall in 2000. During the two years ending December 2001, the number of state prisoners fell by over five percent, with an additional four percent drop expected by the end of 2003. Meanwhile, key rehabilitation services once available to prisoners have been reduced. By 1997, fewer than one in five substance abusers about to be released nationwide had received substance abuse treatment while in prison. From 1997 to 2000, the number of New York State inmates enrolled in employment programs fell from 4,952 to 4,616. And in 1995, the state cut off access to higher education for inmates. As of October 2001, 9,300 state inmates were on waiting lists for vocational programs, and 11,300 were on waiting lists for substance abuse treatment.

"There's general acceptance by nearly everyone that treatment does work," says Bob Brennan of Phoenix House. His agency serves both clients who voluntarily enter substance abuse treatment, and "mandated" clients, who must stay in treatment as a condition of parole. "Research shows that if two people enter treatment, and one is voluntary and the other is mandated by the court, the mandated person is likely to be more successful," a fact which Brennan attributes to the incentive provided by the threat of prison.

Ex-offenders need one to three years of transitional services to successfully re-direct their lives away from crime, according to testimony before the state legislature by Rudy Cypser, Chairman of CURE-NY. He recommended a three-stage model of drug treatment, beginning in prison, continuing in community-based residential treatment, and ending with outpatient aftercare. Other required services were life skills and parenting training, anger management, basic education, and job training and placement. According to Ann McLaughlin of the Osborne Association, a major need is "just to have someone they can call if they have a problem, to see how best to deal with it."

Red Tape And Disorder

Bureaucratic rigidity and bungling are a major source of problems for ex-inmates. Somewhere between arrest and release, most prisoners surrender their identification cards and papers, which then disappear. Inmates who had Medicaid or public assistance before their arrest are likely to be disenrolled during incarceration. Without identification documents, they cannot apply for food stamps, Medicaid, public assistance, Social Security payments, and most jobs. Landlords want to see a security deposit and references from an employer and previous landlord before an apartment is rented.

New York State opted out of one of the more damaging provisions of federal welfare reform: a lifetime ban on benefits for most ex-offenders. However, most inmates are on parole after their release, and may be required to find a job, rather than accept public assistance. Finding and keeping a job, or even qualifying for welfare, can conflict with such parole mandates as keeping curfews, avoiding certain neighborhoods or people, meeting with parole officers, and going to substance abuse treatment or 12-step meetings.

Many prisons do not prepare inmates for life after release. The Visiting Committee of the Correctional Association of New York, which inspected 25 state prisons from 1998 through 2001, found some facilities with vacant job slots for transition planners, and others with this role filled by untrained inmates without job-hunting resources. The quality of discharge services varied widely, indicating a lack of systemwide standards and accountability.

Families Fall Apart

Ties with family members are hard to maintain during incarceration. Most state prisoners are held more than 100 miles away from their homes. Visitors must follow confusing and occasionally humiliating rules. Most fathers never see their children during incarceration, and less than half are able to keep in touch on a weekly basis. Prisoners can only make collect phone calls, at exorbitant rates. When they are transferred between facilities, mail is easily lost.

After release, parents must have housing before their children will be returned from foster care. Some children never return: after six months without contact between a parent and child, the state can charge the parent with "abandonment," and begin terminating parental rights. A parent whose rights are terminated cannot legally see his or her child again.

Ex-prisoners from families living in housing run by the city's Housing Authority may not be able to go home at all. A whole family can be evicted from public housing if one household member is accused or convicted of drug use or a violent crime. Other parolees can't return to families in local suburbs because, as condition of their parole, they cannot travel outside the five boroughs.

Studies have found that 15 to 27 percent of prisoners expect to go to homeless shelters upon release, a fact that prompted the Department of Homeless Services to begin working with the state's parole system to identify parolees among the shelter population. According to its Strategic Plan of June 2002, the department is actively seeking ways to place ex-offenders in permanent housing instead.

Programs That Work

With an average caseload of 87, parole officers focus more on keeping track of parolees than on helping them rebuild their lives. Social services are provided by other agencies, such as the state Office of Mental Health, whose LINK team works with up to 100 mentally ill prisoners a year, helping them apply for public benefits, housing, and treatment before release, and providing guidance immediately after their release. The state's Office of Alcohol and Substance Abuse Services operates a referral service for the 500 parolees who need treatment each month. The state's Department of Corrections recently launched Project Greenlight at Queensborough Correctional Facility. Greenlight offers skills training, job readiness, family reintegration, and drug treatment before release, and brings in community organizations to explain their aftercare services.

The New York City Education and Training Coalition lists 47 member agencies on its website that serve ex-offenders. Dozens more offer employment-related services among their other programs. Employers can claim a federal tax credit of up to $2,400 during an ex-offender's first year at work, or hire inmates under a bonding program that insures against theft. Despite these efforts, as of 1998, 60 percent of former New York State prisoners were unemployed. South Forty Employment and Training Services, now part of the Osborne Association, offers "Guidelines for Managing a Successful Vocational and Job Placement Program for Ex-Prisoners" on its website. Based on the program's thirty years of experience working with ex-offenders, they recommend beginning services before prisoners are released, aggressively recruiting employers and building long-term relationships with them, and continually upgrading job developers' skills.

The Queens Plaza Connection

In November 2002, the Fortune Society softened the impact of at least one policy of the criminal justice system. Rikers Island discharges many inmates by dropping them off at Queens Plaza between 2 a.m. and 6 a.m., with a Metrocard and $1.50. Now the Fortune Society has opened a 24-hour drop-in center there. Already, nearly one out of every five ex-offenders dropped off at Queens Plaza is using the drop-in center. Some set up appointments before their release; others accept the invitation from staff members, who meet each arriving bus. A few choose just to have coffee and rest in a place where they are welcome, but most work with the 14-person staff to find health services, housing, shelter, and job services. Like other agencies serving ex-offenders, the Fortune Society is concerned about potential budget cuts at the city, state and federal levels of government.

"More people are being released and there are fewer supports for them," says Jamie Dorton of the Fortune Society. She doesn't foresee making up for lost public funding with private donations, as these have lessened with the economic downturn. "We don't want to think about it, but most people eventually come back from prison." The harder it is for them to find their way back into community life, the easier it will be for them to return to prison.

Linda Ostreicher, a former budget analyst for the New York City Council, is a freelance writer and consultant to nonprofits.

New York City's Elderly


 

Ninety-year-old Connie Cohen walks 11 blocks from her home to the Stanley Issacs Neighborhood Center on East 93rd Street several times a week. She eats lunch, gets a medical check-up, and talks with her fellow senior citizens -- about flu shots, physical ailments, the recently departed ... and political power.

"When older Americans go to the polls on November 5," 85-year-old Helen Farhi reads aloud from an article in the American Association of Retired Persons newsletter, "their votes could decide not only the elections' outcome, but the future of Social Security and Medicare - including prescription drug coverage."

She looks up at the dozen other women in the center's Tuesday Morning Discussion Group. "See, I always say that it is very important for us to vote," Farhi says. "We have to register, we have to know what is going on, and we have to vote."

Older New Yorkers represent the fastest growing age group in the city. The number of city residents over 85 years old increased by 19 percent in the last 10 years. They are also increasingly women who live alone and depend heavily on government and privately funded services.

And the elderly vote -- more than any other age group. In non-presidential election years like this one, younger voters tend not to show up at the polls, making older voters even more powerful.

Is New York City prepared for its aging population? Are elected officials focusing on ways to meet the challenge of providing the basics of housing, food, and medical care?

WHO ARE NYC'S ELDERLY?

There are over 1.3 million people in New York City over the age of 60, the eligibility age for federal programs. Not only is the number of older New Yorkers growing, but who they are is changing as well.

New York City's elderly are increasingly:

  • living longer
  • poor
  • women
  • people of color and immigrants
  • living alone
  • in need of services in their own homes

"The median income for a single senior citizen in the city is $10,450 a year," said Bobbie Sackman of the Council of Senior Centers and Services, an organization that represents 265 senior service organizations. "They do not fit the stereotype of the person who has a vacation house in Florida and plays golf everyday."

The increasing number of older New Yorkers is just the beginning of the coming trend. In the next few years, the first wave of the baby-boom generation, the largest segment of the population born after World War II, will reach 60.

The New York State Office for the Aging has launched an initiative entitled "Project 2015: The Future Aging of New York" to look at how the state must prepare to meet the housing, health care, and transportation needs when a quarter of the state's population reaches retirement age.

THE CITY'S RESPONSIBILITY

When people think of elderly and senior programs they often name national programs like Medicare and Social Security. But New York City actually bears a considerable portion of the responsibility for providing and funding programs that assist older residents.

Unlike most states, New York requires local counties to pay a quarter of Medicaid costs. And over the last two decades, federal funding for the city's Department for the Aging has been reduced from 70 percent to 30 percent of the agency's budget.

The city is responsible for dozens of services, including assistance with housing, meals, health care, and significant funding for the city's 336 contracted senior citizen centers.

"Our biggest concern is how to find funding to provide services [meals, medical care, and social activities], especially during a budget crisis like the city is going through now," said Wanda Wooten, the executive director of the Issacs Center.

Last year during the city's budget process, Mayor Michael Bloomberg proposed closing seven senior citizen centers and eliminating delivery of weekend meals in order to help close the city's deficit. In May, several thousand senior citizens protested in front of City Hall. At the end of the budget process in June, none of the senior citizen centers were closed and no meals were eliminated.

This year, the city faces another $5 billion deficit. Bloomberg is once again looking for places to cut.

Because the federal and state governments mandate that certain funds go to specific programs, the city can only cut from about $15 billion of its $40 billion annual budget. Much of the money in the Department for the Aging budget falls within that category that can be reduced.

"The mayor recognizes that older New Yorkers are a tremendous resource to the city and he's sensitive to aging issues, so we are discussing everything, looking at all alternatives," said Department for the Aging Commissioner Edwin Mendez-Santiago. "The mayor says that by law, we have to balance the budget, but we will try to do it in a way that does not compromise the well-being of our elderly."

THE BASICS: HOUSING, FOOD, MEDICINE

1. HOUSING
Housing is a serious issue for New York as a whole, but with an elderly poverty rate twice the national average, it is especially critical for older residents.

Much of the affordable housing in the city was originally designed with young, working-class couples in mind. But because of the difficulty of finding housing, many seniors still live in the same apartments they moved into decades ago and either live alone - which creates challenges for people in caring for themselves - or with their children and grandchildren - which presents a different set of challenges for family members.

In recent years, the trend is to provide services to the places where people already live.

"[We are] committed to assisting frail seniors in maintaining the highest possible quality of life by remaining in their own homes and resisting institutionalization for as long as possible," said Commissioner Mendez-Santiago. "Nursing home care should be a last resort."

The result is what aging experts call naturally occurring retirement communities, or "NORCS": an apartment building, housing complex, or neighborhood not originally built for seniors, but where many have aged in place.

There are more than 28 such apartment complexes in New York City. Co-op City in the Bronx, which has over 8,000 residents over the age of 65, is considered the largest naturally occurring retirement community in the nation.

In 1994, the State Legislature began funding senior programs and services in these housing complexes. In 1999, the City Council began allocating money for the programs as well. And as New York grows older, the city will have to figure out how to replicate these programs in many more apartment buildings.

"The overwhelming majority of seniors who will require some sort of health and social services over the next 20 to 25 years are already living in precisely the same places they will be when those needs for service develop," said Fredda Vladeck, of the United Hospital Funds Aging In Place Initiative, which helps provide funding and assistance for such programs.

However, providing services to apartment complexes is costly.

Co-op City, which employs 40 staff, including two nurses and four social workers to work with residents, is always on the verge of going broke. But faced with the alternatives of expensive assisted living or going to a nursing home, most people say they prefer to stay in their homes.

2. FOOD
Last year, the Department for the Aging helped provide some 12.5 million meals; 3.6 million were delivered to people in their homes.

These efforts, however, are only reaching a portion of the city's hungry, according to a recent report by Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum. There are currently 505 homebound senior citizens on the waiting list for Citymeals On Wheels, a program that delivers meals to 17,000 homebound elderly every year.

The study also questions why New York City is not making better use of federal money for food stamps. In recent years, San Francisco and Houston have increased their food stamp distribution by ten percent, while New York has decreased its program by two percent.

"The city must work harder to ensure that no New Yorker goes hungry," said Gotbaum, "especially when we have a tool at our disposal that costs the city nothing."

3. PRESCRIPTION DRUGS
Like most low-income medical coverage, most prescription drugs programs come from the federal and state government.

The Elderly Pharmaceutical Insurance Coverage, known as EPIC, is the New York State sponsored prescription plan for senior citizens who are 65 or older and who live on less than $35,000 a year if they are single, or $50,000 a year if married. Over 290,000 seniors are enrolled in the program.

However, many seniors do not qualify for coverage and must spend hundreds of dollars a month on presecription drugs.

Elected officials offer plenty of ideas for how to address this issue.

This year in Congress, there is a push to have a new prescription drug benefit program signed into law. Candidates for office in the State Legislature are talking about the so called, "pharmaceutical justice bill," which would prohibit the sale of drugs in New York at a higher price than in countries like Switzerland and Canada. And in the City Council, there is legislation that would require city hospitals to purchase prescription drugs only from companies that agree to provide at least a 25 percent discount to low-income seniors and Medicare recipients.

However, because of opposition from drug companies, as well as the sheer size and expense of the undertaking, it is unlikely that these proposals will become law anytime soon.

Another local problem is that the cost of prescriptions varies from neighborhood to neighborhood, and even from store to store.

A recent survey of the city's pharmacies found, for example, that four different drug stores on the Upper East Side charged four different prices - ranging from $50 to $98 - for the same osteoporosis medicine.

"It is imperative that senior consumers are educated on their options, that businesses disclose prices clearly and fairly, and that we seek ways to help these seniors," said Department of Consumer Affairs Commissioner Gretchen Dykstra, who commissioned the study.

THE ELDERLY VOTE

Seniors vote in larger numbers than any other group.

"People over 65 is the highest voting group and the only group that has increased its turnout since the 1960s," said Curtis Gans, who studies voting trends at the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate. "They're the last generation imbued with a sense of social civic duty."

The fact that older people vote also means they are targeted with deceptive ads, legislation that has no chance of passing, and empty political promises. The challenge for voters is to figure out which candidates have solid ideas and the power to make them reality.

Even local politics plays a big role in what services the city can provide. Each year during the budget process, the 51 members of the New York City Council fight for small grants to use in their home district.

"We are increasingly dependent on special funds from politicians - what is sometimes called pork," said Wooten. "Those discretionary funds are really our bread and butter."

Like any special interest group, seniors are sometimes criticized for voting only with their issues in mind. And politicians are sometimes accused of pandering to older voters at the expense of other issues.

"You can't fault seniors for voting," said Sackman. "And I find that when many politicians see the poverty rates among the elderly they are shocked. They often don't think of poverty as an elderly issue."

THE FUTURE OF AN AGING CITY

The next wave of older New Yorkers will likely live and age differently than current and past generations.

Experts expect that in the future New Yorkers will work longer, be healthier longer, and have to depend more on personal retirement savings than in the past. They are also more likely to be single, childless, or single parents -- which raises questions of how they will be cared for later in life.

And it is unclear if the next generation will use services at senior citizen centers - that people like Helen Farhi and Connie Cohen say is their "home away from home" - 20 years from now.

"Whether baby-boomers will go to senior centers is one of the big questions that no one knows the answer to yet," said Wooten. "They are independent. They are consumers. They are used to having things a certain way."

To learn more about senior citizen issues in New York City, join Gotham Gazette's live chat, Thursday, Oct 17 at 12:00 p.m. Donna Tessitore, Assistant Commissioner, Bureau of Senior Assistance and Benefits from the city's Department for the Aging, and Gretchen Dykstra, Commissioner of the Department of Consumer Affairs will take your questions.

MORE LINKS

 

Dead Broke Dads


Since the days of the New Deal, the United States has provided financial support to the elderly, people with disabilities, and low-income children and their mothers. This leaves out working-age people without children who are unable to support themselves, a group which has been considered the "undeserving poor" since medieval times. In New York City, the drop in single adults receiving public assistance has been as sharp as that for families. However, adult heads of families are eligible for job training and educational services, and for continued financial assistance when they reach the five-year time limit on federal benefits. Adults without children who left what is now called the "Safety Net" program had no such resources to fall back on.

Recently, politicians and social service providers have begun to rehabilitate the image of a large chunk of the adult population that does not live in a household with children. Many low-income men are "non-custodial fathers," meaning that they have children living apart from them, usually with the children's mothers. These fathers, who might be willing to support their children if they could afford to do so, are sometimes called "dead broke dads" to distinguish them from "deadbeat dads," who earn enough to pay child support, but don't.

By targeting all non-custodial fathers for child support payments, regardless of their financial resources, government agencies have discouraged low-income men from keeping in contact with their children. Fathers have an incentive to live "off the books," where they cannot be traced by welfare officials. This lifestyle may also prevent them from keeping in touch with their children.

Why Aren't Able-Bodied Men Earning A Living?

The labor market is not color-blind. In New York City, the unemployment rate for African-Americans is consistently double the rate for white workers, with Latinos falling somewhere in between. This does not include men who are in prison or jail, who made up 20 percent of jobless African-American men nationwide in 1996; they made up only five percent of jobless white men. Once they leave prison, ex-inmates are hampered in job-hunting by their criminal records.

According to the United States Department of Labor, for every hundred African-American women over the age of 20, there are 63 African-American men who are employed. Among white Americans of the same age group, there are 84 employed men to each hundred women. A 1995 study of employers' attitudes toward African-American male job applicants, sponsored by the Russell Sage Foundation, found that employers believed they were lacking in "soft skills." This set of skills, which includes motivation and the ability to interact well with customers and co-workers, was considered nearly as important as the "hard skills" often learned through higher education, which fewer African-American men are pursuing.

Employers' attitudes may account for the fact that high school dropouts have a better chance of finding work in New York City if they are white. Two out of five young New York City men lacking a high school diploma were either unemployed or underemployed between 1996 and 1999; if they were African-American, the rate was four out of five. Things can only be worse now; since 1995, at least 140,000 new people have been added each year to those already looking for work in New York City. The new job-hunters are a mix of adults leaving public assistance, immigrants, and young people leaving high school. From 1996 to 1999, both unemployment and underemployment were more common in New York City than in the nation as a whole or the state of New York. This was true for all young adults with no education beyond high school.

What Can Be Done To Increase Earnings Of Non-Custodial Fathers?

There are many programs trying to help men be better fathers--the National Fatherhood Initiative has found a tenfold increase since 1994. The first wave of fatherhood programs was disappointing. A 1997 evaluation of one of those programs, Parents Fair Share, showed that efforts to help low-income fathers find better jobs were hampered by the participants' health problems, addictions, shortage of job skills, and hostile reception by their children's mothers.

A study of unmarried couples in New York City suggests that timing might be a factor in the success of such programs. Fathers may be most motivated to participate in income-raising activities at the time their children are born. In couples in which a teenager had recently become a mother, the unmarried father was usually eager to be a part of its life: to live with the child and its mother, and to help financially support the child. However, these fathers were unlikely to succeed as breadwinners. Most earned less than $20,000 a year, and had no education beyond high school. This was true even though two-thirds of them were over the age of 25.

In 2000, the Fathers at Work Initiative was launched in cities across the nation with federal and private foundation support. The Center for Employment Opportunities, a Manhattan-based organization established by the Vera Institute of Justice, is funded under this program to help New York City fathers gain skills that can lead to better jobs, to improve relationships with their children; and to help them navigate the child support system, if necessary. The agency's Responsible Fatherhood program serves nonviolent felony offenders who are on parole or probation; about 80 percent of participating fathers do not live with their children.

The Center for Employment Opportunities entered the fatherhood arena as a result of its experience as an employer of low-income men. The agency received child support enforcement orders from officials who did not realize that many of the employees who owed support had been in prison or jail, unable to earn money.

Fatherhood services offered by the center range from cooking classes provided by God's Love We Deliver, to legal advocacy regarding child support arrears. "If we teach them how to take care of themselves, they can be better fathers," an agency spokesperson explained. A participant works in the agency's transitional jobs program, generally in maintenance and repair work crews, until he finds a non-subsidized job with one of the employers whose trust has been earned by the organization during its 20-year history.

Another veteran at helping the hard-to-employ find and keep jobs is STRIVE, based in East Harlem. Their fatherhood program is independent of their employment program: clients are free to enroll in either program or in both. The majority of men in their fatherhood program are initially drawn to STRIVE by a desire to increase their income. Once they are in the employment program, participants are encouraged to take responsibility for all aspects of their lives. According to agency spokesperson Gregory Amos, the STRIVE employment program "gets them to realize that they have a shared responsibility for the financial and emotional support" of their children.

Men enrolled in STRIVE's fatherhood program are not required to be there to be eligible for employment services. Some are motivated by large back payments owed for child support, which could cause them to be sent back to jail, but most join the fatherhood program simply because they want to play a larger role in their children's lives. Similarly, in the Center for Employment Opportunities' father support groups, staff found that, "When we ask, 'What keeps you straight?' the answer is their kids."

The Shortfall Of The Minimum Wage

Five hundred years ago, the English Parliament passed a law outlawing execution of vagabonds, and the less drastic punishment of burning through their right ears. Instead, they were to be kept in prison. Laws governing the treatment of the poor have progressed a long way since then, but at least one traditional principle is still followed by American policy makers. Public assistance is kept at a level below the minimum wage, and even below the poverty line.

The average monthly cash grant to a New York City adult who lives alone is $331, for an annual income of less than $4,000, when the poverty line for a single adult is $9,039. Working a thirty-five hour week at minimum wage will bring in $9,373 a year, slightly above the poverty line, but not enough to keep a parent paying child support out of poverty. Until all men and women--with and without children--can earn a living wage, stinting on public assistance will continue to hurt children, the one group of low-income people that everyone wants to help.

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 In No-Parent Families


The latest news on American families is that more children are living in no-parent households. These are not the packs of ten-year-olds found on the streets of Rio de Janeiro or Bucharest. Children in no-parent U.S. households are cared for by grandparents, other relatives, unrelated foster parents or in group homes.

According to "Side Effect of Welfare Law: The No-Parent Family?" written by Nina Bernstein for the New York Times of July 29, 2002, researchers are wondering if a recent increase in no-parent families is related to the pressures of welfare reform on low-income parents. The Times article cited a study by the Rand Corporation and the University of California which found that during the 1990s, the share of black urban children living without either parent rose from 7.5 percent to 16.1 percent.

Sending children to live with relatives is not a new phenomenon, and is not confined to any particular social or economic group. Most children raised by their grandparents do not live in central cities, and more of them are white than black. There are many reasons why children live without their parents, including divorce, mental and physical health problems, unemployment, alcoholism, drug use, domestic violence, child abuse, and incarceration.

However, there is some evidence that welfare reform has played a growing role. An evaluation of Iowa's welfare-to-work program found that by 1999, welfare applicants randomly assigned to a new work program two years earlier were more than twice as likely to have a child in foster care as were applicants placed in a program operating under the old rules.

Welfare reform in Wisconsin showed similar results: five percent of parents who no longer received public assistance reported sending their children to live with someone else because they could no longer care for them. Researchers expect that the percentage is actually higher, because the most troubled families were under-represented in the study. Another unexpected outcome was an increase in the number of children on public assistance after Wisconsin finished setting up its new welfare system. Children in no-parent families can receive welfare themselves as child-only cases, regardless of their caregivers' income.

About 30,000 New York City children are in "public foster care," meaning that they have been formally placed in a household of relatives or strangers by child welfare workers. No count is kept of children in "private foster care"-those living with non-parents, usually relatives, without official oversight by the child welfare system-but according to Jerard Wallace of the Grandparent Caregiver Law Center, only one in eleven children living with relatives is in the public foster care system.

For caregivers, which of the two systems they are in can mean the difference between financial ruin and the ability to maintain a household in relative comfort. Public foster care entitles each child in a household to the same basic grant. Children with special needs receive larger grants. Children in private foster care are eligible for "child-only" welfare benefits instead. These are smaller payments that make no allowance for children with special needs, and rise only slightly with each additional child in the household. In either system, most children are eligible for Medicaid, and those in low-income households can receive food stamps.

However children in private foster care are much less likely to know about or receive public benefits. Wallace believes that the child welfare system fails to fully inform relative caregivers about available benefits, in part because of a philosophy he summarizes as, "Family should take care of family without us having to give them money."

As a result, many relatives care for children at great cost to themselves. Wallace has captured the effects of this burden in a videotape of nine grandparents speaking about their lives as relative caregivers.

"You cannot watch this tape and not cry," he says. For private foster care, Wallace notes, public assistance "is the de facto support system, and if we are interested in saving children, we have to make this system work."

The Census Bureau estimates that of the 80,000 New York City grandparents raising their grandchildren in 2000, more than one in four lived in poverty, and the majority had no high school diploma. Nearly two-thirds had been responsible for their grandchildren for at least three years.

These conditions in themselves put children at risk. Children in no-parent households with income lower than the poverty level, and headed by an adult who did not graduate from high school, are three times as likely as children in general to be unemployed high school dropouts by age 17. If they are girls, they are five times as likely as girls in general to be raising a child of their own by age 17.

Private foster care also puts children at a disadvantage because of their caregiver's lack of legal status. Without formal custody or guardianship, schools and hospitals can refuse to allow non-parent relatives to make arrangements for children to receive services. Eligibility workers for government benefits programs may not realize that kinship caregivers are entitled to benefits. However, many caregivers are reluctant to take formal steps to gain custody or become guardians, because it may disrupt their families further and delay the children's reunification with their parents.

There are some bright spots in the growing recognition of the needs of relative caregivers. New York State plans to stop cutting child-only welfare payments in half for households where the caregiver is receiving the Earned Income Tax Credit, a benefit available only to low-income families.

In New York City, relative caregivers can turn to the Department for the Aging's Grandparent Resource Center, which offers support groups, information forums, a hotline for referrals to appropriate services, a resource library, and a directory of resources. Center Director Rolanda Pyle also conducts conferences, collects children's toys for the holidays, and has a small emergency cash fund for grandparents in crisis situations.

Pyle helped draft a state bill-which was not enacted-that would have given relative caregivers legal rights regarding children, such as the authority to enroll a child in school, write notes to excuse absence from school, and consent to medical treatment. Similar laws exist in California, Delaware, Florida, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania.

The New York Times followed up its July 29th article with one on August 14, 2002, entitled "Child-Only Cases Take Up a Bigger Share of Welfare." This time, Bernstein noted that child-only cases now make up over one-third of all family assistance cases, inspiring some critics of welfare policy to accuse caregivers of collecting the $352 monthly payments in order to avoid having to work.

The new focus on child-only welfare cases has the potential to bring the needs of caregivers who are relatives into the debate on reauthorizing the federal public assistance laws, and into the training programs of New York City's front line public assistance and child welfare workers. Children living apart from their parents already face major challenges. It might be a wise investment in our future to identify and support children in no-parent families.

Help and information for grandparents raising grandchildren, and other caregivers

  • The Grandparent Resource Center of the New York City Department for the Aging. Rolanda Pyle, Director. Services include an information hotline, mayoral conferences, technical assistance, and a support group facilitators network. Telephone (212) 442-1094.
  • The Grandparent Caregiver Law Center of the Brookdale Center on Aging, Hunter College. Jerard Wallace, JD, Director. Telephone (646) 366-1015 or (518) 434-4571, or visit the website.

  • AARP Grandparent Information Center, in Washington, DC 20049. Telephone (202) 434-2296 (English) or (202) 434-2281 (Spanish). Visit the website of AARP.
  • Grandparents and Other Relatives Raising Children, a project of Generations United. Ana Beltran, Project Director. Telephone(202) 662-4283 or visit Generations United's website.

  • National Resource Center for Respite and Crisis Care Services.

 

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.

Welfare Reform, Round Two


By the fall of 2002, Congress will decide how hard the lives of the poorest Americans will be for the next few years. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 is about to expire, putting all the questions about welfare reform back on the table in a changed political climate.

In 1996, the nation's economy was booming, unemployment was closing in on a 30-year low, Washington was intent on conquering the federal deficit, and the president was a Democrat who had already vetoed two welfare reform bills. Today the economy is struggling out of a slump, the unemployment rate started to go up in April 2001, and the deficit is about to reappear. This time, no one cares if we run a deficit, as long as we do so in order to fight terrorism.

Five years of experience with welfare reform have generated results ambiguous enough to support arguments on both sides of the issue. Supporters of the reforms point to the decrease in the poverty rate that paralleled the drop in the welfare rolls as proof that welfare benefits discouraged recipients from working their way up financially. Opponents say that poverty was reduced by the overall rise in prosperity, which has now ended.

New York City has also changed since 1996. Our poverty rate has dropped slightly, welfare rolls were reduced by about 60 percent, we lost 139,000 jobs between December 2000 and April 2002, and we now have a mayor who does not call welfare a "sick culture of dependency." The new commissioner of the Human Resources Administration pledges to provide more job training and support services, including child care and transportation, and the Department of Employment is spending the city's allotment for job training, which the previous administration failed to use.

However, the number of people on public assistance in New York City continues to fall by an average of about one percent a month. Mayor Michael Bloomberg's contingency plan for the coming year's budget eliminates money earmarked to expand the supply of subsidized child care slots, which are too few for the low-income mothers already at work. The administration refused to apply for a waiver that would have allowed unemployed adults without children to receive food stamps for longer than three months.

The debate about welfare reform reauthorization is most heated around a small set of questions with large implications for public assistance recipients:

  • What counts as work? Everyone agrees that paid or unpaid employment is work, as are on-the-job training, and community service. The disagreement concerns whether work requirements can also be met by looking for work, going to vocational school, or learning job skills.
  • How much of a work week has to be "primary" work? Now only 20 hours have to be the kind of work universally acknowledged as work, and the rest of the week can be any training or education related to employment. There is pressure to raise the primary requirement to 24 hours.
  • How many hours a week do you have to work to be considered employed? Thirty hours is the number for most welfare recipients now. Conservatives want to raise it to forty, even for parents of children under six, for whom the requirement is twenty hours at present.
  • What kind of learning should you do to prepare for work, and for how long? Now you can go to vocational school for a year and count it as primary work. Proposals about this vary widely, from reducing the year to four months during any two-year period, to increasing the year to two years, to broadening the type of schooling to include basic literacy classes, English as a Second Language, and/or college.
  • How long should it take to recover from substance abuse? Several proposals want to allow three or six months of treatment before clients have to start working.
  • How long should you be excused from work requirements in order to rebuild your life after surviving domestic violence? This is considered a "barrier removal" activity, because it prepares you to hold a job. Other barriers that might need to be removed are mental health problems and substance abuse. Advocates for the poor propose counting "barrier removal" as work for as long as it takes, rather than for a defined period of time.
  • What are you supposed to do with your children when you are at work? This is not explicitly discussed, but it underlies the haggling over whether child care funding should be raised only enough to keep up with inflation, or enough to cover care for all the children already on waiting lists, or enough to prevent new waiting lists from forming if more parents have to work more hours.
  • How many of the people getting welfare benefits should be able to find and keep jobs? Now the minimum is 50 percent; some want to raise it to 70 percent. There is also negotiating room over whether that fraction comes out of the large pool of everyone who gets a welfare check, or the smaller pool of people who are capable of work on any given day. As of March 3, 2002. over a third of the people receiving public assistance in New York City were classified as "unengageable," due to such reasons as being under 16 or over 60 years of age, having AIDS/HIV infection, caring for a newborn baby, or being temporarily incapacitated by a health problem.

 

The first move on welfare reform reauthorization came in February 2002, when President Bush laid out his vision of an improved system. Bush urged Congress to raise the percentage of recipients who must work from 50 percent to 70 percent, and extend their work week from 30 to 40 hours. On May 16, 2002, the House of Representatives passed a bill including those proposals, among other provisions that are more likely to discourage or disqualify people from receiving benefits than to prepare them for successful careers.

Also in mid-May, the Bloomberg administration sent Congress a 30-page wish list of what the city hopes to see in the next phase of welfare reform. In line with his attention to the Board of Education, Bloomberg calls for a new purpose to be added to the four already on record for Temporary Aid to Needy Families: "Prevent future dependence on government benefits and promote self-sufficiency by providing education and training to children, youth, and adults, in order to develop and enhance job skills."

More concrete city proposals include increased funding for child care to meet the full need for it, increased funding for public assistance to keep up with inflation, and restoring eligibility for federal benefits to all legal immigrants. Advocates for welfare recipients will welcome the city's recommendations to keep the percentage of recipients who must work at 50 percentage, and stopping the clock on the five-year lifetime limit for federal benefits during periods when the recipient is working full-time. Many recipients earn so little that they still qualify for cash assistance; others are using their five years while they receive only smaller benefits meant to encourage work, such as subway fare or child care assistance.

There are multiple bills in the Senate already, where the Democratic majority is expected to pass a less stringent measure than the Republican-controlled House. One bill is being called "tripartisan," because its sponsors include Republican, Democratic, and Independent Senators. This version would keep the work week at 30 hours, allow education and training to count as work for two years, and raise the required work participation rate to 70 percent.

Hillary Clinton has co-sponsored a bill considered more conservative, introduced by Senators Evan Bayh and Thomas Carper. It would increase the work week from 30 to 40 hours for most parents (although single parents with children under the age of six would still only have to work 20 hours), and add $8 billion for child care over the next five years. A detailed comparison of the current law, the House bill that passed, three Senate bills, and two other proposals has been prepared by the Center for Law and Social Policy and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

The Washington debate seems far removed from reality in New York City, where the Jobs section of the Sunday New York Times is so thin, you can hardly find it. The number of jobs in the city increased slightly in April, by 7,300, but so many more people were looking for work that the unemployment rate also rose, from 7.6 percent to 7.7 percent. According to Stephen Bell of the Urban Institute, who reviewed nine studies of welfare caseloads, historically, the number of welfare cases has fallen five percent for every one percent drop in the unemployment rate. It seems reasonable to expect a similar rise in caseload when unemployment goes up.

So far, we haven't seen that in New York. However, welfare benefits do not begin until unemployment benefits run out. Those who lost jobs in September 2001 can receive unemployment checks until July 2002. They will face increased competition for the small supply of job openings if the reauthorized version of welfare reform requires more public assistance recipients to work.

Some opponents of welfare reform are starting to talk about unemployment insurance reform. Unfortunately, our unemployment insurance system is geared toward full-time factory workers needing a few months of checks to tide them over during temporary layoffs. It is not geared to part-time workers. But welfare recipients often find themselves in part-time jobs when they first start working, and go for weeks or months between jobs until they find one that lasts. Now that public assistance as we knew it has ended, it may be time to acknowledge that unemployment as we knew it ended years ago.

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.

Child Welfare and Domestic Violence


A federal judge recently delivered what was called a "scathing opinion" of the Administration for Children's Services' treatment of battered mothers and their children. Judge Jack Weinstein has given New York City until June 22 to comply with an injunction designed to prevent the removal of children from the care of a battered mother who does not abuse them. The agency has appealed the judge's decision in the class-action lawsuit, which is known as "Nicholson vs. Scoppetta"

Over the past decade, advocates for both children and battered women have realized there needs to be a working relationship between the systems of child welfare and domestic violence (which almost always means violence against adult women) if they want to protect their clients effectively. However, there long has been a disconnect between services for children and those for adults.

The two systems -- for child welfare, and for domestic violence -- developed separately. Child welfare agencies provide such services as family counseling and foster care placement. They can trace their history back over a century, to the furor that arose around a New York City child beaten by her caretakers. The child welfare system emphasizes investigation, and it values preserving or reuniting families. Children are the clients, and caseworkers are given the authority to make decisions about families against the will of adult members. Parents are in a subordinate role in the child welfare system, and can be forced to undergo therapy or comply with other orders if they want to keep or get back their children.

The domestic violence system, in sharp contrast, grew out of the women's movement in the 1970's and 1980's. One of its fundamental principles is that women surviving partner abuse must be treated with respect and empowered to make their own decisions. Confidentiality is a life-or-death concern, so the need for information is always weighed against the risk of it falling into the wrong hands. Services to survivors must always be voluntary, and any decision to forego services must be respected.

AREAS OF AGREEMENT:

The two systems agree that families in which a child is being abused are often ones in which a woman is also being abused; estimates range from 30 percent to 70 percent. They also agree that both mothers and children should be asked whether they are abused at many points in their passage through the health and social service systems. They both acknowledge that a good safety plan for a non-abusing mother will usually protect her children. Finally, the systems agree that there are not enough services and shelters for the battered women and their children that are known about already, let alone the increasing numbers that will be revealed by expanded screening. The domestic violence policy currently posted on the website of the Administration for Children's Services, includes universal screening of families for domestic violence, safety planning for adult survivors, and acknowledgement that "non-abusive parents must not be held responsible for the violence committed by others." The current consensus is that in theory, an abusing partner should be taken out of the home, and the rest of the family should stay there in safety.

FAILING TO WORK TOGETHER

In practice, this can be difficult to arrange. Unless the abuser is in prison, he will often seek out his partner and continue or escalate his violence; if she stays in their home he can easily find her. While Family Court judges have the authority to bring an accused batterer to trial in three days, the judicial process is more likely to stretch the trial out over weeks or months. Judges are reluctant to prosecute misdemeanor cases, which are more common among domestic violence crimes than felonies. Family Court trials require a level of documentation lower than that needed for a criminal case, but more than many women can present, particularly when they cannot afford a lawyer or wait for free legal services to become available.

According to Carolyn Kubitschek, attorney for the plaintiffs in the Nicholson case, there are many cases in which a batterer is clearly not a threat to the child's safety. "Most batterers are very much in control," she says. "For example, they never hit their bosses." She has clients fighting to get back children who were removed by a city caseworker when there were no visible safety concerns. "One of them removed a kid even though the batterer was arrested, tried, sentenced and in prison for a three-year term. And because he's an immigrant, he'll be deported when he gets out." To Kubitschek, the risk of this batterer escaping from prison falls far short of justifying a child's prolonged separation from a mother.

Advocates for domestic violence survivors have worked hard to make it known that past wife-beating is a major risk factor for future child-beating, and that the sight of a mother being abused can cause emotional harm to her children. Child welfare caseworkers tend to conclude from this that any home where a woman is being abused is dangerous for children, so the survivor must leave her abuser to keep herself and her children safe.

However, removing children from their mother's care is no guarantee of their safety. Foster parents can abuse children or each other, and being parted from their parents is itself traumatic to some children. Kinship care could be a solution, except that it is hard to find appropriate relatives to care for the children of a battered parent. Domestic violence advocates oppose placing them with an abusive father's family, who may reveal the mother's whereabouts to the father, and let him spend time with the children against a decision of Family Court. Yet survivors of abuse often have no relatives to turn to: their abusers tend to isolate them from family, friends, and service providers to increase their control and avoid being criticized or reported.

Women sometimes choose to stay with abusive partners because they have no safe place to go, or they won't be able to support themselves, or they lack a sense of hope and confidence that they can succeed on their own. These fears can be well-founded, as is the most powerful incentive to stay with the abuser, the fear that he will track his partner down and "punish" her or her children for leaving. According to the New York State Office for the Prevention of Domestic Violence, two out of three women killed by their partners have left or are in the process of leaving them.

INCHING TOWARD CHANGE:

In 1998, the Columbia University School of Social Work trained 400 municipal caseworkers and supervisors in how to empathize more with survivors of domestic violence, and how to uncover and deal with their abuse. An evaluation by trainers showed that, as a group, the participants gained empathy with survivors, but became less likely to take any of the possible action covered in the training.

Alisa del Tufo, of the Urban Justice Center , is a fifteen-year veteran of the struggle to integrate child welfare and domestic violence services. She has worked with the Administration for Children's Services on training projects, and now provides training services to a group of 60 private child welfare agencies. "ACS is doing a lot actually," she says. "They're doing things now that have been talked about for a decade." As an example, she cites the agency's plan to place domestic violence specialists in each of the agency's field offices. When this was tried in a single office, caseworkers were grateful to have an experienced advisor on hand; workers from other locations called to consult with the domestic violence specialist.

Del Tufo describes the three-day domestic violence training program inaugurated at the agency in March as being "more sophisticated and detailed" than the one-day program that concluded training for new recruits in recent years. "But the system only changes if training goes on over a long period of time, and is followed up with support and accountability." Instead, caseworkers are afraid to try new tactics with room for large errors. "It's a pretty punitive place to work," says del Tufo of the agency.

Municipal child welfare workers continue to err on the side of what they regard as the child's safety. "At 5:30 on a Friday afternoon they'll say, 'Mrs. Jones, unless you go into a domestic violence shelter immediately we're going to take your kids away.' Meanwhile for every space in a domestic violence shelter, there are fifty women trying to get in." Del Tufo concedes that there are times when children need to be removed temporarily, but notes that children remain in foster care "for months and years" after their mother has arranged for their safety with her.

The Weinstein opinion cites a case beginning in August 2000, three years after the city retrained nearly half of its caseworkers and supervisors, in which an abused mother's children were removed because they were living in "overcrowded" conditions at her grandmother's home. They were returned only when the mother agreed to take them to a homeless shelter. The children spent ten weeks going from foster homes to the city's Emergency Assistance Unit and to a temporary shelter.

In mandated reports submitted by the Administration for Children's Services to counsel in the Nicholson case, the agency declared that it is changing its policy statement. Carolyn Kubitschek says, "We don't know what their new policy is, because they won't tell us." The agency continues to prosecute battered mothers in Family Court rather than arrange for the safety of both mother and child.

According to the national Bureau of Justice Statistics, violent crimes against women by intimate partners decreased by 20 percent between 1993 and 1998. That news is welcome, but it could be even better. The child welfare system has the power to give battered women a valuable defense: the right to seek help without risking the loss of their children.

A federal judge recently delivered what was called a "scathing opinion" of the Administration for Children's Services' treatment of battered mothers and their children. Judge Jack Weinstein has given New York City until June 22 to comply with an injunction designed to prevent the removal of children from the care of a battered mother who does not abuse them. The agency has appealed the judge's decision in the class-action lawsuit, which is known as "Nicholson vs. Scoppetta"

Over the past decade, advocates for both children and battered women have realized there needs to be a working relationship between the systems of child welfare and domestic violence (which almost always means violence against adult women) if they want to protect their clients effectively. However, there long has been a disconnect between services for children and those for adults.

The two systems -- for child welfare, and for domestic violence -- developed separately. Child welfare agencies provide such services as family counseling and foster care placement. They can trace their history back over a century, to the furor that arose around a New York City child beaten by her caretakers. The child welfare system emphasizes investigation, and it values preserving or reuniting families. Children are the clients, and caseworkers are given the authority to make decisions about families against the will of adult members. Parents are in a subordinate role in the child welfare system, and can be forced to undergo therapy or comply with other orders if they want to keep or get back their children.

The domestic violence system, in sharp contrast, grew out of the women's movement in the 1970's and 1980's. One of its fundamental principles is that women surviving partner abuse must be treated with respect and empowered to make their own decisions. Confidentiality is a life-or-death concern, so the need for information is always weighed against the risk of it falling into the wrong hands. Services to survivors must always be voluntary, and any decision to forego services must be respected.

AREAS OF AGREEMENT:

The two systems agree that families in which a child is being abused are often ones in which a woman is also being abused; estimates range from 30 percent to 70 percent. They also agree that both mothers and children should be asked whether they are abused at many points in their passage through the health and social service systems. They both acknowledge that a good safety plan for a non-abusing mother will usually protect her children. Finally, the systems agree that there are not enough services and shelters for the battered women and their children that are known about already, let alone the increasing numbers that will be revealed by expanded screening. The domestic violence policy currently posted on the website of the Administration for Children's Services, includes universal screening of families for domestic violence, safety planning for adult survivors, and acknowledgement that "non-abusive parents must not be held responsible for the violence committed by others." The current consensus is that in theory, an abusing partner should be taken out of the home, and the rest of the family should stay there in safety.

FAILING TO WORK TOGETHER

In practice, this can be difficult to arrange. Unless the abuser is in prison, he will often seek out his partner and continue or escalate his violence; if she stays in their home he can easily find her. While Family Court judges have the authority to bring an accused batterer to trial in three days, the judicial process is more likely to stretch the trial out over weeks or months. Judges are reluctant to prosecute misdemeanor cases, which are more common among domestic violence crimes than felonies. Family Court trials require a level of documentation lower than that needed for a criminal case, but more than many women can present, particularly when they cannot afford a lawyer or wait for free legal services to become available.

According to Carolyn Kubitschek, attorney for the plaintiffs in the Nicholson case, there are many cases in which a batterer is clearly not a threat to the child's safety. "Most batterers are very much in control," she says. "For example, they never hit their bosses." She has clients fighting to get back children who were removed by a city caseworker when there were no visible safety concerns. "One of them removed a kid even though the batterer was arrested, tried, sentenced and in prison for a three-year term. And because he's an immigrant, he'll be deported when he gets out." To Kubitschek, the risk of this batterer escaping from prison falls far short of justifying a child's prolonged separation from a mother.

Advocates for domestic violence survivors have worked hard to make it known that past wife-beating is a major risk factor for future child-beating, and that the sight of a mother being abused can cause emotional harm to her children. Child welfare caseworkers tend to conclude from this that any home where a woman is being abused is dangerous for children, so the survivor must leave her abuser to keep herself and her children safe.

However, removing children from their mother's care is no guarantee of their safety. Foster parents can abuse children or each other, and being parted from their parents is itself traumatic to some children. Kinship care could be a solution, except that it is hard to find appropriate relatives to care for the children of a battered parent. Domestic violence advocates oppose placing them with an abusive father's family, who may reveal the mother's whereabouts to the father, and let him spend time with the children against a decision of Family Court. Yet survivors of abuse often have no relatives to turn to: their abusers tend to isolate them from family, friends, and service providers to increase their control and avoid being criticized or reported.

Women sometimes choose to stay with abusive partners because they have no safe place to go, or they won't be able to support themselves, or they lack a sense of hope and confidence that they can succeed on their own. These fears can be well-founded, as is the most powerful incentive to stay with the abuser, the fear that he will track his partner down and "punish" her or her children for leaving. According to the New York State Office for the Prevention of Domestic Violence, two out of three women killed by their partners have left or are in the process of leaving them.

INCHING TOWARD CHANGE:

In 1998, the Columbia University School of Social Work trained 400 municipal caseworkers and supervisors in how to empathize more with survivors of domestic violence, and how to uncover and deal with their abuse. An evaluation by trainers showed that, as a group, the participants gained empathy with survivors, but became less likely to take any of the possible action covered in the training.

Alisa del Tufo, of the Urban Justice Center , is a fifteen-year veteran of the struggle to integrate child welfare and domestic violence services. She has worked with the Administration for Children's Services on training projects, and now provides training services to a group of 60 private child welfare agencies. "ACS is doing a lot actually," she says. "They're doing things now that have been talked about for a decade." As an example, she cites the agency's plan to place domestic violence specialists in each of the agency's field offices. When this was tried in a single office, caseworkers were grateful to have an experienced advisor on hand; workers from other locations called to consult with the domestic violence specialist.

Del Tufo describes the three-day domestic violence training program inaugurated at the agency in March as being "more sophisticated and detailed" than the one-day program that concluded training for new recruits in recent years. "But the system only changes if training goes on over a long period of time, and is followed up with support and accountability." Instead, caseworkers are afraid to try new tactics with room for large errors. "It's a pretty punitive place to work," says del Tufo of the agency.

Municipal child welfare workers continue to err on the side of what they regard as the child's safety. "At 5:30 on a Friday afternoon they'll say, 'Mrs. Jones, unless you go into a domestic violence shelter immediately we're going to take your kids away.' Meanwhile for every space in a domestic violence shelter, there are fifty women trying to get in." Del Tufo concedes that there are times when children need to be removed temporarily, but notes that children remain in foster care "for months and years" after their mother has arranged for their safety with her.

The Weinstein opinion cites a case beginning in August 2000, three years after the city retrained nearly half of its caseworkers and supervisors, in which an abused mother's children were removed because they were living in "overcrowded" conditions at her grandmother's home. They were returned only when the mother agreed to take them to a homeless shelter. The children spent ten weeks going from foster homes to the city's Emergency Assistance Unit and to a temporary shelter.

In mandated reports submitted by the Administration for Children's Services to counsel in the Nicholson case, the agency declared that it is changing its policy statement. Carolyn Kubitschek says, "We don't know what their new policy is, because they won't tell us." The agency continues to prosecute battered mothers in Family Court rather than arrange for the safety of both mother and child.

According to the national Bureau of Justice Statistics, violent crimes against women by intimate partners decreased by 20 percent between 1993 and 1998. That news is welcome, but it could be even better. The child welfare system has the power to give battered women a valuable defense: the right to seek help without risking the loss of their children.

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.

Job Training


Back in 1998, when Congress passed the Workforce Investment Act, it looked like the one good thing that everybody could agree came out of the much-criticized movement called welfare reform. A large chunk of public money saved by cutting the welfare rolls, the law said, would have to be reinvested into helping welfare recipients get paying jobs.

Each local government had to recruit a Workforce Investment Board, with a majority of its members from the local business community, to provide expert advice on the qualifications that employers currently look for in new hires. The board was supposed to come up with a plan, develop a written agreement with the government welfare agency, and run the program.

New York City's Human Resources Administration apparently had some problems with this scenario, because the city was one of the last places in the nation to form a Workforce Investment Board, and the board has been allowed little input in the city's job training programs.

The city's top welfare official, Jason Turner, did not believe in job training. His statement, "It's work that sets you free," notorious for inadvertently echoing a Nazi slogan, reflected the conviction that a low-paying job today is better for a welfare recipient than a better job postponed for a period of training. Turner used his control of workforce development funds to delay and avoid providing services to people on welfare.

The city is left with $67 million from past years' unspent federal funding that, if not used by June 30, may be diverted to more ambitious employment programs elsewhere in the state. "It's ludicrous, when we have budget deficits and people are out of work, to lose any money because we didn't spend it," said David Fischer of the Center for an Urban Future. (See his article, "The $67 Million Question")

One place where the funds were needed was in setting up "One-Stop Centers," where job hunters--welfare recipients or not--can receive a full range of services under one roof, from government and nonprofit agencies. While Los Angeles has 18 one-stop centers, New York currently has just one. Until the city opens the six additional centers that were announced in November, all job hunters in the city must travel to Jamaica, Queens to get one-stop employment services.

For the Human Resources Administration, employment services under the Workforce Investment Act have been relatively simple to administer. They picked 14 major contractors, agreed to pay them massive amounts of money, and let the contractors deal with the dozens of community-based organizations delivering most of the specialized services.

If you're a welfare recipient, things are more complicated. You're already working three days a week to "earn" your benefits. For several weeks, during the other two days, you must go to a Skills Assessment and Placement program for an evaluation. If you look instantly employable, you will be given the use of newspapers, a computer and a phone, in order to find yourself a job.

If you don't succeed, you will be sent to an Employment Services and Placement program, which will probably have to evaluate you again because they won't get your paperwork from the assessment program. You'll be helped to write a resume, and taught how to dress and behave on a job interview. If this gets you hired for a minimum-wage job, the program will advise you on child care subsidies and providers, and how to keep Medicaid and food stamps for a period after you start to work.

If you have any major barriers to employment--you can't read, or you suffer from clinical depression--you'll be referred to a subcontractor of your Employment Services and Placement provider. This will be a smaller community-based organization, which would probably like to give you real job training, but would go out of business if it did. After another interview, you'll receive "intensive" services: more lessons in how to dress and behave at job interviews, create a resume, and complete a job application. You may get substance abuse treatment, mental health care, or case management services, as well.

The federal Workforce Investment Act provides for a third level of services: the genuine "training" component of the act, which can support education in such forms as literacy classes, English classes, vocational school, apprenticeship, on-the-job training, and community college.

However, the payment structure for welfare-to-work employment service providers, especially subcontractors, is not designed to reward providers who place clients in better jobs. The hardest clients to place are sent to subcontractors who are offered inadequate incentives for keeping clients in jobs.

New York City's employment services contracts are based on results, not on efforts made to achieve results. Such "performance-based" agreements are meant to improve contract management, but fail when they define success using the wrong measurement. In the case of employment services, the goal of self-sufficiency isn't reached the day that a former welfare recipient starts work at a paying job. Jobs must be permanent, pay a living wage, and provide health insurance and other essential benefits, to keep workers from needing to go back on the welfare rolls. Jobs like this usually require some training and academic skills. Indeed, much research that has been done into the most effective welfare-to-work strategies, such as that conducted over the past several decades by the Manpower Research and Demonstration Corporation, found that the best results come from mandatory employment programs that offer education and skills training in their mix of activities and services.

How the city's system performed even in good times was not encouraging. As of March 2001, only one in four clients had found a job. Now the local economy is going downhill, possibly longer and harder than the rest of the country. During 2001, the city lost 132,400 jobs, according to the New York State Department of Labor. The City Comptroller, William Thompson, reported that in the last quarter of 2001, the U.S. economy stopped shrinking and grew slightly, while the city's economy continued to shrink.

The first people to be laid off are usually those last hired, which would include recent placements by the city's employment services system. The number of people on welfare used to rise and fall pretty much in line with the local unemployment rate, until last July. According to the city's monthly bulletin "HRA Facts," between July 2001 and January 2002, the unemployment rate rose from 5.3 percent to 7.1 percent, while over 23,000 people left the welfare rolls.

Luckily, the city is stepping up its rate of spending workforce development funds. According to the executive director of the Workforce Investment Board, Dorothy Lehman, "The new administration is totally committed" to carrying out the mandate of the Workforce Investment Act. This summer the act comes back to Congress for reauthorization; some welfare advocates fear that New York City's past failure to support employment services will give the law's opponents ammunition against its renewal.

The Bloomberg administration is also now revising the city's five-year Workforce Investment Act plan. The public will have a chance to comment.

Read also:

 

Back in 1998, when Congress passed the Workforce Investment Act, it looked like the one good thing that everybody could agree came out of the much-criticized movement called welfare reform. A large chunk of public money saved by cutting the welfare rolls, the law said, would have to be reinvested into helping welfare recipients get paying jobs.

Each local government had to recruit a Workforce Investment Board, with a majority of its members from the local business community, to provide expert advice on the qualifications that employers currently look for in new hires. The board was supposed to come up with a plan, develop a written agreement with the government welfare agency, and run the program.

New York City's Human Resources Administration apparently had some problems with this scenario, because the city was one of the last places in the nation to form a Workforce Investment Board, and the board has been allowed little input in the city's job training programs.

The city's top welfare official, Jason Turner, did not believe in job training. His statement, "It's work that sets you free," notorious for inadvertently echoing a Nazi slogan, reflected the conviction that a low-paying job today is better for a welfare recipient than a better job postponed for a period of training. Turner used his control of workforce development funds to delay and avoid providing services to people on welfare.

The city is left with $67 million from past years' unspent federal funding that, if not used by June 30, may be diverted to more ambitious employment programs elsewhere in the state. "It's ludicrous, when we have budget deficits and people are out of work, to lose any money because we didn't spend it," said David Fischer of the Center for an Urban Future. (See his article, "The $67 Million Question")

One place where the funds were needed was in setting up "One-Stop Centers," where job hunters--welfare recipients or not--can receive a full range of services under one roof, from government and nonprofit agencies. While Los Angeles has 18 one-stop centers, New York currently has just one. Until the city opens the six additional centers that were announced in November, all job hunters in the city must travel to Jamaica, Queens to get one-stop employment services.

For the Human Resources Administration, employment services under the Workforce Investment Act have been relatively simple to administer. They picked 14 major contractors, agreed to pay them massive amounts of money, and let the contractors deal with the dozens of community-based organizations delivering most of the specialized services.

If you're a welfare recipient, things are more complicated. You're already working three days a week to "earn" your benefits. For several weeks, during the other two days, you must go to a Skills Assessment and Placement program for an evaluation. If you look instantly employable, you will be given the use of newspapers, a computer and a phone, in order to find yourself a job.

If you don't succeed, you will be sent to an Employment Services and Placement program, which will probably have to evaluate you again because they won't get your paperwork from the assessment program. You'll be helped to write a resume, and taught how to dress and behave on a job interview. If this gets you hired for a minimum-wage job, the program will advise you on child care subsidies and providers, and how to keep Medicaid and food stamps for a period after you start to work.

If you have any major barriers to employment--you can't read, or you suffer from clinical depression--you'll be referred to a subcontractor of your Employment Services and Placement provider. This will be a smaller community-based organization, which would probably like to give you real job training, but would go out of business if it did. After another interview, you'll receive "intensive" services: more lessons in how to dress and behave at job interviews, create a resume, and complete a job application. You may get substance abuse treatment, mental health care, or case management services, as well.

The federal Workforce Investment Act provides for a third level of services: the genuine "training" component of the act, which can support education in such forms as literacy classes, English classes, vocational school, apprenticeship, on-the-job training, and community college.

However, the payment structure for welfare-to-work employment service providers, especially subcontractors, is not designed to reward providers who place clients in better jobs. The hardest clients to place are sent to subcontractors who are offered inadequate incentives for keeping clients in jobs.

New York City's employment services contracts are based on results, not on efforts made to achieve results. Such "performance-based" agreements are meant to improve contract management, but fail when they define success using the wrong measurement. In the case of employment services, the goal of self-sufficiency isn't reached the day that a former welfare recipient starts work at a paying job. Jobs must be permanent, pay a living wage, and provide health insurance and other essential benefits, to keep workers from needing to go back on the welfare rolls. Jobs like this usually require some training and academic skills. Indeed, much research that has been done into the most effective welfare-to-work strategies, such as that conducted over the past several decades by the Manpower Research and Demonstration Corporation, found that the best results come from mandatory employment programs that offer education and skills training in their mix of activities and services.

How the city's system performed even in good times was not encouraging. As of March 2001, only one in four clients had found a job. Now the local economy is going downhill, possibly longer and harder than the rest of the country. During 2001, the city lost 132,400 jobs, according to the New York State Department of Labor. The City Comptroller, William Thompson, reported that in the last quarter of 2001, the U.S. economy stopped shrinking and grew slightly, while the city's economy continued to shrink.

The first people to be laid off are usually those last hired, which would include recent placements by the city's employment services system. The number of people on welfare used to rise and fall pretty much in line with the local unemployment rate, until last July. According to the city's monthly bulletin "HRA Facts," between July 2001 and January 2002, the unemployment rate rose from 5.3 percent to 7.1 percent, while over 23,000 people left the welfare rolls.

Luckily, the city is stepping up its rate of spending workforce development funds. According to the executive director of the Workforce Investment Board, Dorothy Lehman, "The new administration is totally committed" to carrying out the mandate of the Workforce Investment Act. This summer the act comes back to Congress for reauthorization; some welfare advocates fear that New York City's past failure to support employment services will give the law's opponents ammunition against its renewal.

The Bloomberg administration is also now revising the city's five-year Workforce Investment Act plan. The public will have a chance to comment.

Read also:

 

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.

When The Neighborhood Doesn't Want It


Although there are relatively few backyards in New York City, residents defend their territory as fiercely as any other Americans against unwanted new facilities. This syndrome is frequently called "Not In My Back Yard," and it has helped to shape the face of social service delivery in ways that project opponents could not anticipate.

What might the map of social service facilities in the city look like if neighborhood reactions were not a factor?

MORE SERVICES FOR UNWELCOME CLIENTS

The most obvious change would be a lot more housing and services aimed at clients who are not generally welcomed by their neighbors: the homeless, drug addicts, people with developmental disabilities, people with AIDS/HIV, ex-prisoners, mentally ill people, foster children, people on welfare.the list embodies some of the most pervasive urban fears. Much fear is based on inaccurate assumptions: that developmental disabilities are the same as mental illness, and that the mentally ill are more violent than the rest of us; that foster children are also juvenile delinquents; that all homeless people are visibly different from people with homes; and that drug users and alcoholics are a threat even when they are on the wagon.

An agency trying to open a group home or treatment program for people bearing one of these labels must tactfully court the chosen community and prepare for long delays in obtaining a site. Money for programs can dry up during these delays, and staff time is diverted to meetings, hearings, and the putting-out of public relations fires. According to Brad Lander, Executive Director of the Fifth Avenue Committee in Brooklyn, "Siting is as much a constraint as the cost of land." Despite the organization's long history of creating successful low-income housing in the neighborhood, nearby residents object to its plan for a transitional residence for parolees. Much effort went into "outreach, door-knocking, and community meetings" to win the local Community Board's approval for the project.

Staten Island's homeless population relies heavily on Project Hospitality, which provides food, shelter and supportive services. Its Executive Director, Reverend Terry Troia, concedes that over the years there have been "a lot of opportunities we've had to let go by," because it takes so long to get sites approved. She recalls a day care center for children of homeless and other low-income families as a project that was blocked for lack of a site.

It's hard enough to find a place to locate a new facility even when funds to pay for it are available. However, unwanted clients are often unsympathetic figures for advocates to champion to government decision-makers. No matter how much it would help the rest of us, making life easier for drug addicts and ex-convicts is not a priority for many voters. Local politicians rarely move against the wishes of their most vocal constituents, so unwanted social services have little leverage with elected officials in the competition for member item funds, or even for representation in the overall budget process of their legitimate needs.

MORE FACILITIES WOULD BE THE RIGHT SIZE

Small group homes and other sites would provide as much of the supply as was necessary to have the best possible system. Centralized settings with high capacity would not offer the advantage of decreasing the number of siting battles, but would be chosen only when centralization was needed.

Small group homes, and individual apartments in regular buildings, are among the most promising solutions to a variety of needs. They allow clients to live among diverse neighbors and eliminate the institutional feel of larger homes. For foster children, they more closely resemble a family; for adults with developmental disabilities or mental illness, they allow more independence. Unfortunately, like services for homeless people, the supply of group homes is nowhere near the demand for them.

Service providers might use more of these smaller sites if they did not arouse nearly as much controversy as larger ones. A reporter for the Riverdale Press observed bitter opposition, at a Bronx Community Board 11 meeting, to an apartment proposed to house eight developmentally disabled people under 24-hour supervision. The Fifth Avenue Committee's residence for parolees will house only ten people, but Lander recognizes that, "If we had not been able to get Community Board approval, the project would have been dead in the water because the city wouldn't have given us control of the building lot."

SERVICES WOULD BE WHERE CLIENTS NEED THEM TO BE

Service providers could look for the best building for their programs, in the location that was most convenient for their clients. Now they look for buildings where their clients can blend into the flow of other users, like hospitals, or where the surrounding community would prefer nearly any use to an existing misuse.

Liz Abzug, a spokesperson for Housing and Services, Inc., describes that agency's strategy as one of replacing "drug-infested eyesores" with well-run facilities. When Housing and Services, Inc. began managing the Kenmore Hotel on 23rd Street, it had been taken over by the federal government because of drug activities inside it. According to the agency's website, at the height of its criminal career, the Kenmore generated about a thousand calls a year to 911. Now, Abzug estimates that there is only about one such call a month.

However, the supply of boarded-up and decaying city-owned properties may not be inexhaustible. Limiting new facilities to such sites does not necessarily result in ideal locations for service delivery. Social service agencies need many of the same features that urban small business owners look for in a new location: safe streets, good public transportation, and closeness to clients' homes, jobs, or other essential services.

NEIGHBORS WOULD HAVE LESS INFLUENCE ON PROGRAM DESIGN

Neighborhood opposition can sometimes improve services. Communities do not like to see people loitering on the street, unless they are drinking cappuccino. This puts pressure on agencies to provide comfortable waiting rooms for appointments, and day treatment programs for those who might otherwise have nowhere to go. Good security practices at homeless shelters make the residents feel safer, as well as the neighbors. The old Kenmore Hotel was notorious for heavy objects being dumped out of its windows at odd times, so Housing Services, Inc. agreed to put in air conditioners in response to community demands -- a benefit to both passers-by and tenants.

Parolees living in the Fifth Avenue Committee's planned transitional housing may benefit from activities intended to reassure skeptical neighbors, such as supervision by case managers and random drug testing. However, some applicants for admission to the residence will not benefit from having to pass a panel including three neighborhood residents. The entire project could fail after a year, when a Community Advisory Board will have the power to shut it down with a 75 percent majority vote.

One way to provide services without needing to open a contested facility is by operating a mobile program out of a van. This is not the chief reason why mobile programs exist: vans are the best way to reach clients who resist going to shelters, soup kitchens, clinics, and other services. While the community may complain that clients hang around a van site before it comes and after it goes, the fact that a van finds clients at a site usually means they are already in the surrounding area. This makes mobile programs more popular with providers, funders, and neighbors than they might otherwise be.

Another type of facility that is usually welcomed, at least initially, is the drop-in center for homeless or mentally ill people. Years ago, when Times Square was still seedy, homelessness was conspicuous in midtown Manhattan. Drop-in centers were opened to attract homeless people out of Grand Central, Penn Station, and the Port Authority terminal, into havens that were open during the day, when most shelters are closed. The drop-in centers may have contributed too much to the transformation of midtown into a safe, clean tourist attraction: they are losing their appeal to area businesses, who now look on them as the source rather than the solution of the problem of homelessness.

FAIR SHARE CRITERIA WOULD WORK

New York City is something of a celebrity in the world of city planning for its "Fair Share Criteria" and facility siting process. As a result of the 1989 revision of the City Charter, there are rules requiring that new facilities for programs run or paid for by the city (unless they are very small) must go through an evaluation by the sponsoring city agency and the Department of City Planning. The effect that the program will have on the proposed neighborhood must be weighed against the value of the site to the users of the new facility.

This approach won an American Planning Association award in 1992, even though few New York communities are pleased with their resulting share of city services. In practice, the criteria are still somewhat subjective and imprecise. Facts uncovered in the Fair Share impact evaluation do not dictate the final decision on a controversial site.

The design of our social service delivery system reflects neighborhood fears of undesirable outsiders. A dramatic example is recorded in the minutes of a March 28, 2001 meeting of Community Board Six in Brooklyn. The Board's Human Service Committee proposed a resolution calling for the city to have separate, decentralized intake systems for homeless single men and women, located in buildings already being used as shelters and intake centers. The resolution also called for more supportive housing and rental assistance as long-term solutions to homelessness.

The proposal was in the tradition of rational planning: it considered the needs of New York City as a single entity, acknowledged that existing shelter and intake sites encounter less red tape than new ones, and spread the benefits and burdens of services around the city by decentralizing them. The resolution was voted down, "on the possibility that it would leave the Park Slope Women's Armory vulnerable to future conversion as an intake center."

Additional Resources:

 

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.

 



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