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Job Market in W.Va. Defies Efforts to Reform Welfare
Pedestrians and cars filled McDowell Street in downtown Welch, W.Va., in the 1970s, left. Since the coal boom ended, however, cities such as Welch have struggled with poverty and high rates of unemployment.
(West Virginia State Archive Via Associated Press)
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Rector of the Heritage Foundation said that in cases in which people are doing community service for their checks because there is no alternative, he would recommend that the states extend their cash assistance rather than cut them off. West Virginia has granted far fewer than the 20 percent of cases it is allowed to extend under the law.
Diamond says she found out she had reached her welfare limit two weeks before her last check. In and out of the hospital for her leg -- she has had eight surgeries -- she had not been paying attention.
She had taken classes and passed her high school equivalency test. She had earned a certificate in a computer training course taught at her daughter's church. But after the car accident four years ago, she could not pay her bills. "I moved in with my mom. I moved in with my dad. I didn't want to be a burden on just one of them," she said.
Diamond became part of a class-action lawsuit that challenged the state's welfare term limits. The suit helped eliminate term limits for battered women. The West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals also ruled that the state must let welfare recipients know that they could apply for a six-month extension.
The American Friends Service Committee won its fight to make the state stop counting SSI as income. "If one family member received it," Wilson said, "the whole family was disqualified from TANF benefits. Now, if an adult gets SSI, then the kids in the family could qualify for state TANF money until they turn 18. If you qualify for SSI before you reach the 60th month, then your kids can qualify. If you qualify after, then they don't."
More than 40 percent of West Virginia's TANF cases are "child only" cases, in which a child receives welfare benefits in a household where an adult receives SSI.
Diamond, who did not qualify for the extra aid, is not sure things will ever get better.
But she is part of an old Appalachian culture bound to the land. She would not dream of leaving. "It's just home," she said. "I've never been elsewhere. I have been to North Carolina, the beach there, once, and I've been to Florida one time. I really don't know that I could make it anywhere else."
