Real Change News | A rare chance to make work pay

June 23, 2010
Vol: 17 No: 26

Community & Editorial

A rare chance to make work pay

New rules could manage child care like kids matter

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The state is changing the rules for the families of 20,000 Washington children who are in day care thanks to government assistance. Embedded in this process is a chance to shift the state’s role from managing the working poor to getting all young kids’ lives off to a good start.

The state and federally funded programs Head Start, Early Head Start and the Early Childhood Education and Assistance Program are at issue. If they can’t afford daycare, workers who enroll their kids in these programs get a child care subsidy called Working Connections.

Each month, parents pay their child’s day care center or preschool a sliding-scale fee, and Working Connections pays the difference. Making child care affordable is a way to keep the working poor on the job. Most of those participating are single mothers.

Gov. Chris Gregoire, who came into office championing education, set up the Department of Early Learning in 2006 with the legislature’s approval. DEL is responsible for administering Working Connections and overseeing the statewide network of licensed child care centers. A serious cut to the subsidy program was in play during this winter’s legislative session; it was avoided, though perhaps only forestalled, as $480 million in federal money the state had banked on is held up in the U.S. Congress.

DEL’s rule change comes about as a result of the state legislature’s House Bill 3141, a bill resulting from a long struggle to see the state act more responsibly toward those moving from welfare to work – or in many cases, swinging erratically between the two. While Gregoire vetoed much of it, the remainder cut poor families some slack by lengthening the timespan between each eligibility review from three months to a year.

But the rules say that any financial change in circumstances – for example, adding hours to part-time work – will trigger another review, which frequently results in a family losing a subsidy. Without it, they can’t pay for child care, which means the parents can’t work.

The program is directed by DEL, but the reviews are the job of the Department of Social and Health Services. DSHS manages caseloads; its mission is to move people toward self-sufficiency, which, put less euphemistically, means to get people who are on public assistance back off again.

Tales of mistreatment by DSHS are legion; as one former client told me recently, a central assumption of the welfare system “is that you have no life.” From hold times of 30-40 minutes on the phone, to the agency dictating the date and time when a recipient next meets with a caseworker: time and again, DSHS’s ways confirm the axiom that poor people’s programs are poor programs.

Joel Ryan, executive director of the Washington State Association of Head Start & ECEAP, says he’s heard innumerable stories of DSHS caseworkers erroneously taking away the child care subsidy. Or of parents who get small pay raises and then see their fees bump up by two or three times the raise. Parents who lose their jobs have just 28 days to find new work before the subsidy expires. And it’s a tacit, and sadly true, assumption embedded in the system that there’s always another family in line for Working Connections.
Sometimes, Ryan says, parents find it’s easier to just go back on welfare.

Working Connections is the daughter of the welfare-to-work shift of the ’90s. It’s a product of a new New Deal: the state took the proceeds from dropping people from welfare and plowed them into a child care subsidy program that makes work pay. When low-skilled workers found jobs, it made some sense. But sending those parents into an overcrowded pool of job seekers doesn’t work in times like these. Recognizing this, Rep. Ruth Kagi (D-Shoreline), House Bill 3141’s prime sponsor, initially aimed to reorient the state’s whole perspective on Temporary Assistance to Needy Families. That effort fell under Gregoire’s veto, with the governor indicating that an executive-level workgroup will keep the bill’s spirit in mind as it re-examines Workfirst. What remained after the veto pen was the lengthened eligibility review period: a small, but positive, start in changing welfare policy. Perhaps if DSHS can accord this portion of the working poor more freedom, it will eventually start treating other sections of its case-load humanely.

And the state may also discover that helping these families helps itself. Caseworkers undertaking eligibility reviews – mostly for families whose finances hadn’t changed since they were first declared eligible – doesn’t make financial sense. Neither does pushing people from the working world back onto welfare with a battery of “soft barriers”: difficult paperwork, erroneous reviews, and unreasonable rate increases.

Ryan’s group has the following recommendations for Working Connections:

• Small changes in household income should not trigger the eligibility review process. DSHS should leave parents to their subsidy if it changes by $250 a month or less.

• If a parent loses a job, give her six months, not 28 days, to find another.

• Federal law gives special protection to the children of homeless families, allowing them to travel each day to the same school regardless of where they’re spending the night. Afford young children in daycare the same stability, with a guaranteed year at the same child care provider, using the same subsidy.

All good ideas; DEL needs to hear them out. The department is taking public comments on its proposed rules Thursday, June 24 at 5:30 p.m. at the Beacon Hill branch of the Seattle Public Library, 2821 Beacon Avenue South. You can also submit comment online at http://www.del.wa.gov.

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