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Cuts threaten welfare goals
Tuesday, April 10, 2007 By Sharon Emery Lansing Bureau
LANSING -- Charged with getting the last of mid-Michigan's welfare clients working and off cash assistance, Doug Stites posits a sticky dilemma:
"If a mother is worried about where she's going to sleep that night, she's not listening to us when we're telling her how to write a resume," Stites recently told the House Families and Children's Services Committee.
Homelessness is just one of the problems facing Michigan's remaining welfare cases -- some 88,000, down from 225,000 a decade ago, said Stites, president and CEO of Capital Area Michigan Works!, a public-private partnership that provides work-force training. The state contracts with the agency to get welfare clients in Ingham, Clinton and Eaton counties on the job and off the dole.
While welfare reform succeeded in moving most recipients off cash assistance, those who remain usually need more than a training program and some direction. Once they find a job, 60 percent of long-term recipients return to welfare, most within six months. The so-called "hard-core unemployed" are straining county agencies statewide.
"We've had great success in getting people into the work force," the Michigan Department of Human Services' Donald Mussen told committee members. "We have not had great success in keeping people in the work force."
About 13,400 families have been on welfare more than four years. Of those, 97 percent are single parents with children receiving a monthly cash grant of $489 for a family of three. Starting Oct. 1, the clock starts ticking on a 48-month state time limit on benefits for individual recipients of cash assistance.
With states facing federal financial sanctions if they don't get more of their welfare clients working, Michigan is battling to increase its work-participation rate of about 24 percent. The state's current federal target is 27.7 percent, although ultimately the feds want 50 percent of recipients working.
To that end, a three-tier set of sanctions kicks in this month for Family Independence Program (FIP) recipients who do not meet work requirements. Republican lawmakers pushed the plan for several years before it was signed into law by Gov. Jennifer Granholm late last year.
Benefits are cut for 90 days the first time recipients fail to meet work requirements; they're cut another 90 days the second time; and the third time it's a 12-month cutoff.
Single parents with one or more children under age 6 must spend 20 hours per week in work-related activities; single parents with no children under 6 have to put in 30 hours.
Two-parent families not using federally funded day care have to work 35 hours a week; two-parent families using federally funded day care must work 55 hours.
Education programs count as work. But reduced funding of adult education programs makes it all the trickier to meet the federal work rules, since Michigan also has one of the highest jobless rates in the country.
"It's especially a problem in rural counties because there just aren't jobs, but also in urban areas, where there's a high concentration of poverty," said Sharon Parks, of the Michigan League for Human Services, a research and advocacy group. "The economy just makes it incredibly difficult."
Also hobbling would-be workers are mental health and substance abuse problems, domestic violence issues, lack of basic social skills and transportation, and illiteracy.
It's that last factor, the lack of the most basic reading, writing and math skills, that makes the challenges crystal clear for Stites.
The crux of the problem isn't skill training, it's a step before that -- getting clients' basic academic skills up to speed so they can simply qualify for skill training, Stites told lawmakers. He estimates that more than 65 percent of the people sent to his agency are illiterate.
Ken Walsh, executive director of the Michigan Association of Community and Adult Education, said the impact is statewide.
"This is very much a problem in terms of providing opportunities (for welfare clients) to complete their education," Walsh said. As a result, those people are essentially locked out of job training.
And while state budget cuts in almost any social services program hurt his clients, Stites zeroed in on the 70 percent cut over the past decade in state funding for adult education as being especially onerous. In 2001 state funding was $80 million; today it's $24 million. The hope for next year is just to maintain that level of funding.
The chances of someone getting the help they need are "devastatingly smaller" as a result of the cuts, Stites said.
Asked by Rep. Fulton Sheen, R-Plainwell, if his agency couldn't use literacy programs offered by churches and other volunteer groups, Stites said the need vastly outstrips the supply.
"I can fill up any vessel you can find," Stites replied.
Granholm is counting on her Jobs Education and Training (JET) program to provide individualized training plans for welfare clients, including better screening programs to address specific barriers to employment, such as illiteracy. Currently operating in all major urban areas, the program will be statewide by October.
JET will cost about $40 million this fiscal year, but is expected to save $56 million in welfare payments, according to the Department of Human Services.
Preliminary DHS statistics show that in the four 2006 JET pilot sites (Kent, Sanilac, Oakland and Wayne counties), welfare caseloads are static or slightly declining. In areas without JET, caseloads are up 5 percent.
More information about JET is at www.michigan.gov/jet
Contact Sharon Emery at (517) 487-8888 x236 or e-mail her at semery at boothnewspapers.com.
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