Welfare Reform in California Schools

Analysis of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996
(P.S. 104 - 193)

A Background Paper of the Association of California School Administrators
Introduction

The welfare reform package passed by Congress and signed by President Clinton in August of 1996 represents the largest single change in federal welfare provisions since the "Great Society" years of the Lyndon Johnson administration. Taking direct aim at assumptions of entitlement in assistance programs, these reforms disqualify populations from eligibility, set time limits on participation, require states to transition recipients into employment, and change the rules for a host of special programs.

The provisions of this bill are many and complex; their impact can be expected to reverberate in state, county, and city governments - and in California's public schools as well.

The Association of California School Administrators has developed this analysis of the welfare reforms to provide school leaders with a "heads-up" to assist in planning for possible impacts on school services, programs, and populations. The information in this paper has been developed from studies by:

• the California Legislative Analyst's Office,
• the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, U. S. Department of Health and Human Services,
• California Food Policy Advocates,
• National Association of Secondary School Principals,
• State Senator Leroy Greene,
• Testimony from a hearing of the California Senate Committee on Health and Human Services, and
• Analysis from the Child, Youth and Family Services Branch of the California Department of Education

The paper will begin with a summary of the provisions of the Act. Following this will be a discussion of the implications of the new laws in terms of the conditions affecting children and families, and the impact of the new program on public education.

Provisions of Public Law 104-193

The State of California must implement the new welfare laws by July 1, 1997. States with welfare waivers under the old system may elect to wait until their waivers expire; however, the Governor has notified Federal officials of his intent to implement the new law on schedule. Targets for work participation are phased in over several years as described below. This new law consists of nine "chapters" or Titles. The provisions of each are summarized below.

Title I: Block Grants for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families

The AFDC program is eliminated, along with the Job Opportunities and Basic Skills Program and the Emergency Assistance Program. They will be superceded by the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Block Grant (TANF). States determine eligibility criteria, but must adhere to the following Federal requirements:

No TANF benefits to any family including an adult who has received 5 years' worth of benefits during his/her lifetime. States may (but are not required to) exempt up to 20% of families for hardship.

Someone in each family must begin working a specified number of hours per week after two years of receiving assistance. States must demonstrate that work participation rate targets are being met; the targets begin at 25% in Fiscal Year 1996 and increase to 50% by FY 2002. Targets are higher for two-parent families. Work can be subsidized or not, and can (if a state wishes) include on-the-job training, community service, up to a year of vocational training or high school, if the recipients are teenagers. The state may not count adult school, vocational school, or high school attendance for more than 20% of its target of "working" recipients. English language acquisition, citizenship preparation, and GED preparation do not count towards work requirements.

Unmarried minor parents must live with an adult or in an adult-supervised setting, and participate in school or training to receive assistance.

Individuals convicted of drug-related felonies are barred from receiving assistance for life.

States are permitted to deny additional cash benefits for additional children born into families already receiving TANF benefits.

Title II: Supplemental Security Income (SSI)

This section redefines disability for children, removing maladaptive behavior as a medical criterion in its listing of impairments. Existing cases must be reexamined to determine eligibility under the new criteria.

Title III: Child Support

States must operate a child support enforcement program, including establishment of a central registry of child support orders and expedited enforcement procedures. States are required to use wage garnishment, revocation of drivers' or professional licenses, and asset seizure to enforce payment of child support orders.

Title IV: Restricting Welfare and Public Benefits for Aliens

States are required to ban legal aliens from eligibility for food stamps and SSI until citizenship. Exceptions are refugees and asylees (for the first five years), veterans, and people with 40 quarters of Social Security eligibility. States have the option to also withhold Medicaid, TANF, Title XX social services, and other forms of state funded assistance, with the same exceptions as above. The Act explicitly recognizes the right of all immigrants to a "basic public education" as determined by the U.S. Supreme Court in Plyler v. Doe.

Services which MAY NOT be provided to legal immigrants (with certain exceptions) or "unqualified aliens":

• Welfare
• Food Stamps
• Public Health
• Housing
• Supplemental Security Income, including in-home supportive services

Services which MUST be provided to immigrants:

• Basic public education
• Emergency medical care
• Short-term non-cash disaster aid
• Immunization and communicable disease testing

Services which MAY be provided to legal immigrants (but not "unqualified aliens"):

• School lunches and breakfasts
• Means-tested elementary and secondary education programs, including Head Start
• Student assistance under Higher Education Act and Public Health Service Act
• JTPA
• Foster care
• Women, Infants, and Children program nutrition and child care

Immigrants entering the country after enactment, in addition to the prohibitions mentioned above, must be barred from receiving Medicaid and other Federal means-tested programs for their first five years in the country.

Title V: Child Protection

States are authorized to make foster care maintenance payments using IV-E funds on behalf of children in for-profit child care institutions. Federal matching funds will be provided for statewide automated child welfare information systems, and a national study of child abuse and neglect. States are required to consider giving preference to kinship placements, provided the relative meets state standards.

Title VI: Child Care

This section retains current Federal requirements relating to health, safety, and immunization standards for Federally funded child care programs. Single parents with children under six years of age will not be penalized for failure to engage in work activities if they cannot find child care.

Title VII: Child Nutrition Programs

All individuals, including immigrants, who are eligible for free public education are also not ineligible for free and reduced school meals. Reimbursement rates for summer school programs, family and group day care homes are restructured; higher rates will be paid in high-poverty areas. Startup and expansion grants for school breakfast programs are eliminated, and the Nutrition Education and Training Program (NET) will be discretionary.

Title VIII: Food Stamps and Commodity Distribution

Most legal immigrants are banned as discussed above. Maximum benefit levels have been reduced, and redefines income calculations to reduce eligibility. A new work requirement is established for individuals between 18 and 50 years of age without dependent children.

Penalties for fraud violations are increased. States are permitted greater flexibility in setting customer service requirements, operating offices, and other administrative regulations pertaining to food stamp implementation.

Title IX: Miscellaneous

Title XX Social Services Block Grant funding will be reduced in each year until 2002.

Starting in 1998, funds will be provided for abstinence education, which is explicitly defined in the Act. States are also authorized to perform drug tests on welfare recipients and to sanction recipients who test positive for controlled substances.

What Will These Changes Mean?

Perhaps the most profound alteration to these programs is in the area of the relationship between the Federal Government and State governments. Previously, Federal regulations served to mandate that states serve individuals based on Federal entitlement criteria, whether or not the state agreed that the persons so identified should be served. Under the new system, states will be penalized if they do not limit eligibility and remove recipients from the rolls at prescribed rates.

This shift from mandated inclusion to mandated exclusion may have the long term effect predicted by its proponents - that is, to push more welfare recipients into self-sufficiency. During or after the transition period, it is difficult to predict whether employment opportunities and the supports to enable work (i.e., child care, employment training, enforcement of child support orders) will keep pace with the eviction of recipients from the welfare rolls.

According to Anne C. Lewis of Phi Delta Kappan magazine, there is one prediction on which most analysts agree: that the new rules will, at least initially, push more than a million children below the poverty line. This number will be added to a national incidence of at least 20% of all children in poverty - one of the highest rates in the industrialized world.

Other strands emerge from the myriad of revisions to welfare-related programs. These include work requirements with mandatory participation targets for states; cumulative lifetime limits on the length of time any able-bodied individual can receive welfare payments; tightened eligibility for Supplemental Security Income to disabled children; and elimination of legal resident aliens from eligibility for welfare, food stamps, or SSI funds.

The act affirms the Plyler v. Doe decision that both legal and undocumented alien children must be afforded public education services. The CDE analysis indicates that no data may be collected by schools regarding "alienage" with the intent to deny benefits.

Work requirements. Regarding the work requirements, the CDE analysis suggests that funds available to meet the work requirements will fall $12 billion short of nationwide needs over a six-year period.

Short-term employment preparation for targeted welfare recipients is available, according to the CDE report, through JTPA/GAIN programs. Funded by JTPA moneys, GAIN served approximately 41,000 recipients last year; AFDC participation was an eligibility criterion.

ROP programs , which served 390,000 students last year, are enrolled at their state-imposed caps. Therefore ROC/ROP programs cannot be seen as a source of increased job training resources, unless additional funding is provided and caps are lifted. The CDE reports that nearly all ROC/P programs indicate that they have the capacity to expand on short notice, if funds should become available, by using double shifts, work-based learning experiences, on-the-job training, and apprenticeships or internships.

The CDE report expresses concern that individuals seeking basic education services may be discouraged by the specific provisions of the work requirements. Up to one year's worth of vocational training or adult education can be counted towards the work requirements; however, basic education, English language acquisition, GED preparation, and citizenship preparation do not qualify as vocational training. Individuals participating in these programs do not receive extended deadlines for beginning work activities. The two-year time limit prior to enrollment into an approved work activity may preclude further education participation for some individuals.

Adult education programs, which are mostly operating at capacity with waiting lists, are not seen as a viable means of meeting any substantially increased demand for jobs training.

If the work requirements result in welfare recipients completing their educations and gaining vocational experience which allows them to become self supporting, the results over time could be powerful for both families and schools. Parents who take care of their families and model increasing self sufficiency are more likely to produce children who expect the same of themselves. Such children may be more committed to academic achievement than they would have been otherwise. However, it is not possible to predict the degree to which, or even the certainty that, this will be the case.

Child Care. The work requirements of the act are expected to create a significant increase in the need for child care, especially in non-traditional hours and part-time care. The CDE's concerns center around access to care and quality of care. They suggest that there will be pressure to create child care placements at the lowest possible cost, regardless of the quality of service.

The Legislative Analyst's August policy brief on the effects of the legislation estimates a total increase in Federal funds for child care of approximately $525 million over a six year period. No estimate of the volume of increased need or costs associated with the need is provided.

The CDE will be required to report extensive information regarding family profiles and income, type of child care, and method of payment for child care. No funds have been provided to set up or operate such a data collection system. It can be anticipated that the actual data collection could fall to local schools or city and county child care providers.

Statewide data will also be required to calculate the state's compliance with the work requirement. Adult Education, JTPA, and ROC/ROP may be affected by these expectations.

Limits on lifetime eligibility. The prospect of families "falling off" welfare because the adults have failed to become self-supporting promotes the fear that children will arrive at the schoolroom door without any kind of an economic safety net. Most analysts suggest that at least one million American children will be pushed into poverty by these provisions. The precise effect of such a deepening of childhood poverty rates is hard to predict. The correlations among poverty, crime, and low achievement are well established but difficult to quantify.

Many schools and districts use AFDC eligibility for state and federally funded education programs such as Title I and Healthy Start. Districts have also used AFDC eligibility as a proxy for need-based programs such as free and reduced price meals or transportation. TANF eligibility will not accurately substitute for AFDC due to its time limits for all recipients and elimination of legal immigrants from its rolls. Therefore schools will need to devise and implement new ways of determining need for categoricals as well as local programs.

Supplemental Security, reduced funds. An additional concern articulated by the CDE is the possibility that with reductions in the block grant and other funding, the budgets of health and social service agencies in the State could be cut. If this occurs, services being provided to Special Education students by those agencies may be reduced or curtailed, leaving school districts with the responsibility for fulfilling the mandates of students' IEPs. Additionally, students who are newly disqualified for SSI funds may turn to schools to replace the services they have lost. California may have as many as 16,000 children who fall into this category.

The Office of the Legislative Analyst estimates a loss to California of $3 million for 1996-97 and $542 million over the first six years of the act due to the redefinition of disability in this section.

Immigrant Issues. The language of the act affirms that all students, regardless of citizenship status, are entitled to schooling. In addition, eligibility for school-based child nutrition programs is not altered. However, states are given the option to deny non-school nutrition benefits to undocumented immigrants. A reduction of approximately $340 million is anticipated through 2002 due to changes in the rate structure for the Child and Adult Care Food Program.

Eliminating the economic safety net strengthens the imperative for schools to ensure that immigrant children leave school able to support themselves. English acquisition programs may take on a new urgency in the eyes of parents as well as educators, and access to effective school to career programs may be the only real "safety net" our society has to offer to children who have been brought here, legally or otherwise, by parents seeking a better life.

Increased demand for citizenship classes is anticipated due to the denial of benefits to non-citizens. The CDE reports that there is some legislative interest in developing a collaborative proposal with the Community Colleges, the CDE, and the Department of Social Services to finance a greater number of citizenship classes.

In summary, we see that the provisions of the new Federal welfare law will change the economic landscape for may of the clients of public schools. What those changes will require of educators is still unclear in many ways; we can predict the need to develop information resources, improve school to career transitions, and participate in creating solutions to child care, adult education, and citizenship status issues when they affect our students' ability to come to school and learn.

Time will tell whether the new rules result in a wave of self-reliance or a greater separation between the haves and the have-nots. But one thing is clear: for students, education is the key to not needing the welfare safety net. Though the problems of poverty are complex and far-reaching, the only long term solution that is just as far-reaching is effective schooling. That part of the package belongs to educators.