Welfare's New World: Impact Will Be Felt Quickly by Some . . . as the Nation and States Undertake an Ambitious Experiment

For a 36-year-old single mother of four in the District, the world of welfare she has known for nearly two decades is about to end. With the stroke of a pen yesterday, President Clinton assured that she and millions of other welfare recipients across the country must eventually find another way to survive.

For a social worker in Maryland, the welfare law means a new mandate and an enormous challenge -- moving a huge caseload of needy, often unskilled adults off public assistance and closer to self-sufficiency. And for a 73-year-old Polish immigrant in Chicago, the legislation brings a frightening prospect -- an end to the public assistance check that is her sole support.

The one thing the new law's supporters and opponents can agree on is that the nation is embarking on a stunningly ambitious social experiment. It is, without question, a journey into the uncharted, one that carries with it great hope and equal risk.

"We're entering a period with a lot of unknowns," said Gordon Berlin, senior vice president of the Manpower Research Demonstration Corp., which evaluates welfare-reform experiments across the country. "Historically, when we've taken leaps of faith," such as the creation of Social Security and Medicare, "it has done a lot of good, but it also entails lots of risks and unintended consequences."

Over the next months, the seven men and women whose stories appear below will experience firsthand those risks and consequences.

ON THE ROLLS

Alberta Hamilton, Northeast Washington

'You Just Have To Make a Way'

After spending most of the past 19 years on public assistance, Alberta Hamilton is determined to get off the welfare rolls before the new law pushes her off. Her plan is to start training to be a nurse's aide in October after her youngest child enters Head Start and she is free to leave her home in Northeast D.C.

"It is going to be a big mess," Hamilton said. "But if you are able to work, you just have to make a way."

For more than a year, she said, she has intended to get a job but has put it off because she has no child care for her 3-year-old daughter, Ashley. Now, Hamilton realizes, she will soon be on her own.

Her enterprise could be held up as a model by supporters of the legislation, who have argued that their measure will spur long-term welfare recipients to find and keep a job.

She sees it differently.

"I don't think it's going to work," she said. "It's going to create a big panic" in the District when welfare recipients lose their benefits and are forced to try to find jobs.

Many of Washington's 70,000 welfare recipients are "girls who are not mature, not ready to get out there and just make their own way. Even with training," she said, "I think you are going to see a lot of people not getting jobs, a lot of people depressed, a lot of suicides."

Hamilton said she has been "mostly on" welfare since 1977 when, as a senior in high school, she gave birth to her first child, Reginald. A daughter, Anita, was born three years later, followed by Keisha, now 12, and Ashley. She said she kicked out the father of her three oldest children when he started using drugs. Then she went on a "wild goose chase" after a man nine years her junior who is now in prison.

Older and wiser, she says she has not turned "totally against men" but has learned to be "more selective."

Hamilton has cycled in and out of jobs in the past, like many welfare recipients who leave work when they run into problems with child care, transportation or health. But the new legislation will change her life mightily, forcing her to keep a job longer than she ever has.

The law is designed to help ease the transition to work. It makes more money available for child care, although the District may not be able to put up enough of its own money to qualify for the additional federal funds, and provides Medicaid health coverage for a year after a parent leaves the rolls.

Hamilton hopes to find work eventually in a nursing home and earn far more than she receives now, $492 a month from welfare, $290 in food stamps and housing assistance. Still, she said, "with just one parent working, it is not enough."

Last year her toilet leaked and her water bill climbed to $500 before it was fixed. While she was paying off the water bill, her gas was turned off for nonpayment, and she ran up an $800 electric bill trying to keep her house warm.

She received emergency help from St. Martin's Catholic Church, and now her son is helping out while trying to put himself through college. Her oldest daughter has a part-time job and Hamilton's mother said she would help buy Ashley a new outfit to begin Head Start.

"Well, I don't know what we're going to do," Hamilton said of the new world of welfare. "We'll just have to make the best of it."

CASEWORKERS

Andrea Morris and Jo Ann Fairfax,

Montgomery County

'Self-Sufficiency Is Always Better'

Andrea Morris and Jo Ann Fairfax are accustomed to doing business a certain way. As welfare caseworkers for Montgomery County, they spend every morning interviewing applicants in a tiny, unadorned room, asking them a long list of questions about their financial circumstances, their lives and their families.

"It's like an assembly line," Morris said. "You fill out forms A, B, C and D."

But beginning Oct. 1, Morris and Fairfax expect to step into a very different role, something they envision as a "job coach."

What is now a mechanical interview, Morris said, will become more of a counseling session.

"We will be talking to them one on one, asking, 'What is keeping you from working? What are the obstacles?' " she said.

Fairfax, who spent much of the past two decades in Montgomery County's social services department, welcomes the change. For the first time, she hopes, she will be able to really help her "customers" become self-sufficient.

"I don't see the negatives yet," she said. "But I know there will be a lot of changes and challenges."

They can't imagine, for example, how the county is going to solve a serious problem of understaffing. At the Germantown office where they work, their co-workers carry caseloads of between 600 and 800 families. Under the new law, these families will require much more tracking, counseling and oversight, raising the question of how social workers could possibly manage so many cases.

Even Morris and Fairfax, who interview new applicants, don't know how they can spend the two hours with each applicant that their supervisors think they will need -- more than twice the 45 minutes they now spend -- unless new caseworkers are hired. They don't expect that to happen.

But they are optimistic that the law will solve some of the problems that now keep welfare recipients from working, such as lack of money for child care, transportation and other expenses.

"It will be good," Fairfax said. "Self-sufficiency is always better."

ELDERLY IMMIGRANT

Janina Sanbak, Chicago

'At My Age I Cannot Work'

On paper, Janina Sanbak appears to fit a pattern that the authors of the welfare bill wanted to prevent: She moved to the United States and ended up on public assistance.

And so in the coming weeks or months, the 73-year-old Polish immigrant will lose her benefits, $471 in disability payments and $10 in food stamps each month.

But interwoven through the bare facts of Sanbak's life is a more complex story of European political change, illness and age. She speaks almost no English and doesn't know how she could become a citizen.

"I have lost memory," she says in Polish. "Sometime I cannot even remember my address. I must find an envelope to look it up."

After she was widowed in Poland and tried to support herself as a hatmaker, she came to Chicago in 1980 to visit a childhood friend. Soon after, martial law was declared in Warsaw, and the country began years of turmoil that ended with the collapse of the Communist regime. Gradually, her four children back in Poland became poorer and poorer.

"I stayed in America for a better life and to help my children," she said. "I was healthy. I was strong. I thought I would work and help them."

She worked as a cleaning lady, getting steady jobs that paid a fortune by Polish standards. She was given amnesty under an immigration reform law in the 1980s that was designed to legalize the status of thousands of immigrants who had been living here illegally and working underground.

Suddenly -- she can't remember exactly what happened -- she became ill.

"I couldn't bend over," she said. "I had terrible headaches. The doctor said, 'You must stop working.' "

Today, she rents a room for $150 a month in northwest Chicago, caring for an elderly man as part of her rent. But he wants her to move out, she said, so his sister can take care of him.

She says she has few friends, goes to church but is not active, and fears the future.

"It is hopeless. At my age I cannot work." When she loses her assistance, she said, "I don't know if I'll make it. I don't have anyone here. I'm all alone."

Illinois has nearly 40,000 noncitizens like Sanbak who will lose disability payments or food stamps or both under the welfare law. Many of them will be eligible for the state version of general assistance payments, but that provides just $100 a month.

Who then will eventually support Sanbak and others like her?

"Ultimately, I have to believe that states and local governments will not be able to turn their backs on the elderly and disabled," said Edwin Silverman, manager of refugee and immigration services for the Illinois Department of Public Aid. "What will result will be a cost shift from federal to state and local government."

SINGLE MOM

Penny Jo Silva, Port Neches, Texas

'It's Been A Nightmare'

For the past three years, Penny Jo Silva has been caught in a bureaucratic morass. She lives in Texas and has been trying to collect child support from her son's father, who lives in Massachusetts.

"It's been a nightmare . . . the most frustrating thing I've ever had to deal with," she said.

Silva's problem is common. Of the 11.5 million single parents with custody of their children, just 35 percent receive any child support payments. About one-third of the total cases involve a mother in one state and a father in another. And many of the parents who are not receiving child support have turned to public assistance, as Silva did until recently, when she decided that it was humiliating and that she would rather live on her meager income.

The new welfare law includes several provisions designed to make it easier to collect child support, including language to remove some of the barriers in interstate cases such as Silva's.

The law creates state registries of child support orders, which can be matched against information from other states to help locate delinquent parents; it requires employers to report new hires to the state to help find parents who have "job-hopped" to avoid paying support; it requires states to have procedures to deny driver's or professional licenses to delinquent parents; and it makes it easier for states to establish paternity.

The problems of getting two states to cooperate in collecting child support have been all too clear to Silva, who returned to her home town of Port Neches, Texas, after giving birth to her son, Joseph Evan.

Just last week, her son's father agreed to pay $30 a week in child support under a temporary agreement that his lawyer said would be reassessed in the future.

Silva said she barely has been able to make ends meet on her part-time earnings selling insurance from home. And $30 a week "isn't going to help a whole lot."

"I constantly worry about how I'm going to pay my light bill. My truck is falling to pieces," she said. Because of her son's serious allergies, she said, she could not put him in day care. So for the time being, she is scraping by, living free in her grandmother's house and earning what she can.

"I always made a good living until I had my son," she said. "I need for him to pay for his son."

ON FOOD STAMPS

Cory J. York, Washington County, Maine

'Applied . . . All Over'

Cory J. York is not discouraged yet, but he is having trouble getting a toehold in the job market in Washington County, Maine. Despite earning his high school diploma, going to truck-driving school and getting trained in operating heavy machinery, he has been unemployed since February, living with his girlfriend's parents and drawing food stamps.

At Christmastime, York's food stamps will end, the result of provisions in the new welfare law. The measure limits to three months the time able-bodied adults without children can receive food stamps, unless they are working at least 20 hours a week.

York, 21, has been on food stamps since he left his job as a tree trimmer. He quit, he said, after a co-worker called him a dummy and an idiot.

"I went through it all my school life, the kids calling me names," he said. "I just got tired of it."

Despite his successful struggle through high school as a special education student and the courses he has taken, he has had to settle for jobs trimming trees, flagging cars at construction sites and cleaning toilets in a department store.

York said he was turned down when he applied for jobs operating heavy equipment because he lacked experience. But he said he was also turned away from a job pumping gas when the owner said he was overqualified.

The economy of Washington County -- the majestic easternmost tip of the United States, but the poorest county in Maine -- is based on seasonal fishing, blueberry-picking, logging and Christmas wreath-making. And when there is no work in the off-season, families rely on food stamps.

It is an annual ritual that, under the new welfare law, can continue for the disabled, the elderly and adults with dependent children. But for middle-class workers without children who lose their jobs, it could mean they lose their food stamps too.

State welfare directors will have the ability to exempt some high-unemployment areas from the food stamp work requirements, and workers can collect an extra three months of stamps in a three-year period if they are laid off. But barring that, single adults such as York will have to find work or go without food stamps.

"I don't know how many times I've been into the unemployment office," York said. "I've applied for everything, all over the country. I need a steady job. I need something to feed myself. I can't rely on other people."

THE COMMISSIONER

William Waldman, New Jersey

'Formidable Task'

When Congress passed its welfare legislation Aug. 1, it took away part of Donna E. Shalala's job and handed it to William Waldman.

While Shalala, as secretary of health and human services, still retains some of her role as federal overseer of the nation's social safety net, the nuts and bolts of the welfare system will now be run out of 50 state offices, including that of Waldman, New Jersey's commissioner of human services.

Like his counterparts across the country, Waldman has to design a comprehensive new welfare system for his state almost overnight. He must move 25 percent of his welfare recipients into jobs within a year, or face a hefty penalty; decide how to provide assistance to thousands of immigrants whose federal aid will end; and make at least 30 statutory changes in an already overburdened child-support collection system.

Those and dozens of other changes must be passed by the state legislature and put into place no later than next July. That means Waldman must complete in a matter of weeks or months what Congress debated for nearly two years.

"This is the most formidable task we've ever faced," said Waldman, who oversees a $7 billion budget and one-third of state employees. "The consequences are very great and there is a lot of pressure to get it right. But the challenges are also matched by the opportunities to make it better."

New Jersey has a leg up on welfare reform because Republican Gov. Christine Todd Whitman has already proposed a comprehensive plan with time limits and many other features of the federal legislation.

Nevertheless, Waldman's days are a whirlwind of meetings with interest groups -- trying to build support for Whitman's proposal -- and staff, figuring out the implications of the new federal mandates. The regulations touch virtually every program under his purview, from child protection to disabled children.

Waldman is not at all convinced that welfare reform will be a windfall for New Jersey, even though the state will get between $30 million and $40 million more this year than last in federal funds.

His governor has already announced plans to help immigrants who lose their federal benefits under the legislation, shifting those costs to the state government.

Whitman has yet to decide whether to recommend that the legislature should opt out of a federal requirement prohibiting aid to adults convicted of drug felonies.

"This is a very, very tough thing," Waldman said. "Drug use in the projects is a problem of some significance. Should we redirect some of our programs toward drug treatment?"

Waldman, who began his career as a social worker in Newark, is wary of moving as fast as some states are moving to claim the maximum federal funds.

"This is such a big issue," he said. "I'm very reluctant to rush it through."