Special Report

Five, maybe 10, but Tammy Williams certainly didn’t expect to apply for 30 jobs and still be on welfare.

The Oxford mother did what the experts and social workers told her to do. She went back to school, graduated magna cum laude from Ayers State Technical College with an associate’s degree in computer science. She sent out résumés and applications like a tree sheds leaves in autumn.

Now, with the government’s welfare clock ticking, with her last job placement running out in five days, Tammy Williams wonders where her ticket off welfare is going to take her.

“I don’t know what the answer is,” said Ms. Williams, who began her journey to end her stint on public assistance three years ago, when she was 25. “I wish someone could tell me.”

With an 815-page national welfare reform law on the books, Ms. Williams isn’t the only one unsure about the future of the welfare state. Legislators, social workers and taxpayers who’ve complained about the nation’s 60-year-old public-assistance program are scratching their heads, too.

Alabama was one of about 40 states that started welfare reform Oct. 1 by lowering the exemption age for children and their non-working mothers. Before, a woman with a child 3 or younger didn’t have to work or train for a job; now that age is 2, bringing several thousand more women into the state’s job-training program, according to the state Department of Human Resources. If women don’t comply, their benefits will be reduced Nov. 1.

This was an idea the state was already pursuing and one that would have been implemented whether the national legislation passed or not. The state is also planning to step up child support collections from absent parents — mostly fathers — to help the women and children that make up the bulk of welfare recipients.

Although Alabama has filed its plan with the federal government, leaders will likely be slow to implement the most sweeping public policy changes the state has felt in a long time. Some are still trying to figure out what the legislation means.

Advocates for the poor hope a cautious approach will be used in spending the $93 million in block grants that is expected to come from Washington.

“We’re going through a major upheaval in the way we do business,” said Rep. Jim Carns, D-Mountain Brook, who heads the Governor’s Commission on Welfare Reform. “We have entered a new paradigm. I don’t know all the answers — no one does.

“There is no magic bullet.”

‘A community problem’

A few years ago, at least six counties set out on their own quests for welfare reform and jobs. They started developing partnerships that would plug welfare recipients into jobs, classes and a new future. Beating Montgomery’s streets for grants and expertise, officials from Baldwin, Hale, Shelby, Tallapoosa, Lauderdale and Lee counties tried to develop models for the rest of the state to follow.

Some programs faltered because companies providing the jobs picked up and left the county. Others couldn’t get funding for child care and job training, and had to scale back. Other employers were willing to hire only two or three employees.

One program that is still growing was spawned in the catfish capital of Alabama. When people in Washington and Montgomery talk of welfare reform and how it should be done, they point to Hale County and Southern Pride Corp. of Greensboro.

The men running the program there are, in their own words, considered to be the preacher and judge from hell by the legislators and agency heads in Montgomery. They’ve badgered, pestered and solicited every state agency — and some national ones — for money to run their family center.

“It was a community problem, and the community had to solve the problem,” said Hale County District Court Judge William “Sonny” Ryan. To folks who’ve come through the center, he’s known simply as “the judge.”

“The community had to get together and solve this problem. It wasn’t going to fix itself, you know.”

His interest came from two points: seeing welfare children and their parents in his courtroom and hearing grumblings from Southern Pride that it couldn’t keep workers because the county’s labor force could earn more money from welfare benefits. The company was losing 60 percent of its hires in the first 90 days those new employees were on the job and wanted DHR to do something about it. The judge stepped in.

Ryan, a native of northern Hale County, found an unlikely partner in the Rev. Stephen Moore, a self-described Yankee preacher from Cleveland and pastor at Salem Baptist Church in Greensboro. They rallied the community and formed committees and subcommittees to tackle everything from job development to child-care issues. “We’re going way out of our scope to make it happen,” said Moore, who recently was awaiting word on whether the center would get a grant for a child-care operation.

Their organization has paid off. Eighty percent of the people who have found jobs through the center are still in their original placements. Of those who’ve left, some have moved on to higher-paying work, but others have had to quit because of health, transportation problems or family emergencies.

“The government has to realize it’s more than just dealing with people on welfare,” Moore said. “The government and the public must understand what it’s going to take to get people to work and to make reform work.”

He and others in Hale County wonder how the welfare-reform package will affect their clients. Within two years, all eligible adults receiving Aid to Families with Dependent Children must be working or benefits will be reduced. A five-year lifetime limit on welfare will also catch some families unprepared for work, as will the state’s option to make women applying for benefits help the state locate and obtain child support from the fathers of their children. Unwed teen-age mothers who aren’t living at home or aren’t in school could also be denied benefits.

Another problem the state will face is the way the federal government defines work participation, said Joel Sanders, head of DHR’s welfare-reform unit. Alabama is one of the leaders in the JOBS work-training program, but much of its success is owed to a high adult education rate for AFDC mothers. Under the reform, he said, adult education won’t always count as work participation.

“That will be one of the toughest challenges,” said Sanders, who along with other state welfare administrators nationwide is trying to decipher the bill. “Alabama has done well in the past, but activities are narrow under the new law. That will hurt.”

The state faces a $5 million penalty if it doesn’t meet the quota the government has set for work participation, he said. Right now his office is notifying each county of how many residents will have to put in a program immediately. In Calhoun County, which has 1,020 adults getting AFDC, 125 will be affected.

Those, like Ms. Williams, who already have gone through the program wish good luck to those who haven’t started yet. She didn’t have to find a job because her youngest child was a baby when she started taking classes to get her General Equivalency Diploma, the foundation for most AFDC mothers’ climb up the welfare ladder. She had two years to go before she was required to find a job.

“Everyone said, ‘Why don’t you just sit on your butt and wait?’ Well, I didn’t want to, and I feel sorry for women who are waiting,” she said. “It takes a lot longer than they think, and a GED won’t get it done.”

She’s up for a job in Louisville, Ky., even though she doesn’t know how she would get there if she were hired. She was offered an on-the-job-training position in White Plains, but couldn’t get there on time because she doesn’t have a car. Louisville definitely would be a stretch.

Most employers tell her that she doesn’t meet their experience requirements and to come back when she does. She wonders how she’s supposed to get the experience if no one will give her a chance. For the past few weeks, she’s held a job-placement position at Ayers State as an administrative assistant. That job ends Thursday. Then she’s at square one again.

Clara McCain was in those same shoes once, but found help at the Hale County center. That type of approach is the only answer to welfare, she said, and hopes other counties will take note. “They helped me a lot, and I know I couldn’t have gotten a job without it,” said Ms. McCain, who fillets 500 pounds of catfish a day at Southern Pride for $5.25 an hour. “Everybody wants to better themselves, and you shouldn’t get welfare just to get it. But it’s hard. I know it’s hard. I’ve been there.” ‘We must do more’

Ms. McCain said the biggest boost she got was when social workers helped her find affordable child care and plugged her into a job she could do. They also hook inexperienced women up with a program at Stillman College in Tuscaloosa, where they learn life skills people in the working public take for granted.

Stillman has a short-term, $27,000 contract with the Hale County center to train women to get and keep jobs. The women learn how to interview, how important it is to show up on time for work and how to deal with employers and co-workers in what is a new environment for them.

“The change in self-concept and personality is dramatic,” said Eddie B. Thomas, director of the Stillman Management Institute. “Those people who have been on the welfare system, in that vicious cycle, need a support system. When they regress, you need to respond, and I don’t know that many communities are prepared to do that.”

Calhoun County has taken baby steps in setting up a center similar to the one in Hale County. The JOBS program has been trying to locate an employer like Southern Pride that can use limited skill, low-wage workers, but none has come forward, said Gail Kilgore, of the Calhoun County DHR, which had 383 mandatory participants in the JOBS program at the end of August.

Part of the balking from prospective employers is caused by factors in the Southern Pride model itself, she said. That company spent $50,000 on a program to let the women get life-skills training on company time as they learned their jobs. While Southern Pride officials swear that investment has come back to them, other employers are skeptical, Ms. Kilgore said.

DHR has approached Regional Medical Center for a partnership, but that hasn’t worked, either. Ms. Kilgore and others charged with finding employment for welfare workers wonder how the reluctance can be overcome.

“Maybe the timing hasn’t been right,” she said, adding that Head Start has hired a handful of former welfare mothers permanently, but that’s about it. “We’re trying to be real optimistic. Knowing that welfare reform is coming, everybody is going to have to pitch in. We must do more to make this work.” ‘How to judge success’

Once the immediate obstacles are overcome, advocates for the poor wonder how success and the reform’s impact will be judged. Some, such as Carns and Sanders, say the government will look at the bottom line on money saved by getting people off welfare. There are two ways, however, to get people off welfare rolls, said Larry Brown, director of the Center on Hunger, Poverty and Nutrition Policy at Tufts University in Medford, Mass. He wrote the draft of the veto President Clinton was expected to levy on the sweeping reforms.

One way, and one Alabama seems set to follow, is to be punitive and tighten eligibility requirements for public assistance. That saves money and meets the government’s goal of lowering welfare costs, but it also puts 39,500 Alabama families - almost 90,000 people - on thin ice.

The other way is to reduce barriers between welfare recipients and their jobs. That comes through training, child care support and programs that help - not punish - advocates say.

Only about eight states are set with programs that aren’t designed to be punitive, according to the Center on Children in Poverty at Columbia University in New York. They’ve already turned in their plans to the federal government for getting people to work while caring for their children and their health.

Sanders said his department is still teaching legislators how far $93 million will go. It sounds like a lot of money, but it comes to $363 per poor Alabama child annually, according to Mark Greenberg, policy analyst for the Center for Law and Social Policy in Washington, D.C., and an opponent of the welfare bill. The national average is $1,000 per poor child.

“The cheapest thing for a state to do is reduce the availability of assistance,” Greenberg said. “It’s much harder to reduce barriers that keep people from finding jobs. And that doesn’t address what happens if there is a recession and everyone - not just the poor - suffers.”

Sanders and Carns say they are still wading through the law, which gives unprecedented flexibility to states. The folks in Hale County hope it will mean an ease in regulations so they can do more to help their clients without having to get permission from two dozen state or so departments.

Ms. McCain is optimistic the reforms will push some women to do more with their lives. She doesn’t know where they’ll work, but part of the honor is in looking for a job, she said. For Ms. Williams, she’s more than ready for her job drought to end. She’s confident a job will come her way before the two years runs out on her family. What will happen to women less prepared — she doesn’t know.

“I’ve worked hard, and I’ve done everything they told me to do,” said Ms. Williams, who splurged for the first time in years recently to buy a new dress for her graduation and job interviews. She’d like to do the same for her two daughters. “I can’t say what other people are going to have to do. They’d just better get ready for a wait.

“Sometimes you wonder why you do it. I keep going because of my kids. I want to better myself. I’m tired of applying for jobs and having people say ‘She’s on public assistance, she’s never worked.’ I’m all of that, but I don’t want to be. I want so much more.”

A year ago, The Star talked with women on welfare about their lives and their efforts to get off public assistance. Two of the women, Tammy Williams and Yvonne Kemp, have achieved their goals with varying degrees of success: Ms. Williams has completed her schooling at Ayers State Technical College and Ms. Kemp is in her second month of full-time employment at Burger King. Each says she is still looking for the job that will lead to a better life for her family.

In their own words, this is how they’re doing: Yvonne Kemp has three children, ages 6, and 13. When she got her job — and at one time she also worked at a temporary second job at another company — her Aid to Families With Dependent Children was stopped, as was her Medicaid coverage. She works five days a week from 10:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. making hamburgers, cooking french fries and doing a host of other tasks at the Oxford Burger King.

A year ago, she was working on getting her General Equivalency Diploma. She didn’t pass the test, but she decided that the coming welfare changes meant she needed to find work, no matter what. On Aug. 28, she started the first job she’s ever held in her life.

“Everything’s better. I like the job, all the workers treat me really nice. The big thing, though, is my kids are so proud — real proud. I’m out there making my own money. It’s my money — not public assistance. It feels good to have something coming into my hand. It’s mine. I knew all the changes were coming with public assistance. I had to do something. I was afraid because I didn’t know how to go about it — getting a job and all. But I knew that before they started those changes, I needed to be working. And I was. I’m constantly looking for something better. I’m gonna come back and take classes so I can find something better. I’m gonna make it. Wait. I am making it.”

A year ago, Tammy Williams was a few semesters away from an associate’s degree in computer science at Ayers State Technical College. She graduated magna cum laude in May and splurged on a new dress for her first graduation ceremony. She’s applied for 30 jobs, but hasn’t landed a permanent one yet. She took a temporary job for a month, but the employer cut the position. Now she works at the college six hours a day in an unpaid temporary job-placement program that ends Oct. 11.

Her children, ages 7 and 3, are glad she’s looking for a job, but the time it’s taking to find one has been discouraging.

“I wish there were businesses here who would give us a chance. I’d take a probationary job. I’m ready to sweep floors. I’m trying to find something. It’s not like I’m sitting at home doing nothing. All I want is a chance, a plain, out and simple chance. I’m always looking. I check the newspaper every morning. I’ve sent out so many résumés and put in my application at so many places, and they’re always like, ‘You’re applying here?’ I’m gonna keep trying, though. What’s the worst I can do? Wear my fingers out from writing. I wish everyone didn’t have such a bad opinion of people on welfare. We all aren’t lazy. And I don’t really understand how people who’ve got money can pass judgment on those of us who are trying. Who are they? My oldest (child’s) dream is to be a teacher. I’m going to do everything I can to make it happen. I want to be able to walk into a store and buy them clothes when they need it. I want to set the example I should for them.”