The Numbers Game

Miami, Fla. — Kathy Murray didn’t much like working alone at a gas station late at night. The job was in a dangerous part of town, but she and her three children needed the money to supplement their monthly assistance check from Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). So she continued to ring up gas sales on the cash register. After work, the hum of the TV would help her unwind.

Then, one night in February 1988, Governor Bob Martinez looked into her living room from the TV screen. What he said made her hopeful for the first time in years.

“He was talking about this new program for AFDC recipients,” recalls Murray. “New life, new change, new future — all you do is call up your local Health and Rehabilitative Services office. I thought I would find out what this is all about.”

The program Murray saw advertised is Project Independence, one of the state workfare programs mandated by Congress in 1988 to provide education and job training to parents on welfare. “Since its inception,” boasts a recent state report, “the program has been recognized as a national model of welfare reform.” Last year, Florida spent almost $26 million to administer the program for nearly 80,000 welfare recipients.

But a closer look reveals that Project Independence has done little to help poor Floridians become independent. The state’s own records show that most participants receive no education or training — they are simply shuttled into dead-end jobs that pay too little to support a family. What’s more, the state routinely denies participants the child care and transportation benefits they are entitled to by law, making it impossible for many to juggle their responsibilities at home and at work.

As a result, many mothers have been ordered to join the program, only to have their monthly assistance checks slashed when they are unable to attend mandatory meetings.

To Kathy Murray, Project Independence offered the promise of self-sufficiency. She dreamed of taking paralegal classes at a community college so she could support herself and her children. But when the 26-year-old mother went to Project Independence, she was told to take her dreams elsewhere. If she wanted to go to school, a caseworker told her, she would have to foot the bill herself.

“They said that since I have a high school diploma, since I don’t speak with grammatical errors, since I know how to spell and put two sentences together, that I don’t deserve to go to school,” Murray recalls. “I said, ‘You mean to say that because I’m intelligent, it weighs against me, that I have to take a $4 an hour job?’”

Unable to persuade the program to provide the education she needed to help her get a decent paying job, Murray appealed the decision to the Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services (HRS). The agency rejected her appeal, saying that her skills in “cashier/sales” work qualified her to enter the labor force. Murray finally won her right to attend school after she testified before state lawmakers at a public hearing last fall — but she had to go all the way to the state Supreme Court to force Project Independence to pay her tuition.

 

Rush Job

A recent report by the state auditor general indicates that Murray is not alone: 80 percent of all Project Independence participants receive no education or job training — even though many lack the skills to qualify for jobs that pay enough to support their families.

Many women, once eager to participate in the program, have become disillusioned — but they have no choice. According to state figures, more than 80 percent must take part or risk losing their welfare benefits.

So why does the program do so little to help participants improve their chances of finding a good job? According to the auditor general’s report, some caseworkers said they felt pressured by their supervisors to increase job placements, which “led them to steer clients into employment who would otherwise be better served with education or training prior to employment.”

Jim Clark, program director of Project Independence, admits that staff often overlook the education needs of participants. “When they’re rushed to get the job done, they don’t refer recipients to education and training programs,” he says. “I’ve seen areas where a social worker will circumvent the federal law, because in the social worker’s mind, this person will never make it.”

Such prejudices have a way of becoming self-fulfilling. According to an HRS report, the average wage of those shuttled into jobs is $4.49 an hour — wages that even Clark concedes are too low to allow people to become self-sufficient.

One mother from Ft. Lauderdale recalls her disappointment at her Project Independence orientation when a social worker announced cheerfully that the program would enable participants to get a job as a bank teller. “I just thought, you’ve got to be kidding. No one can support their family on those wages.”

Even when a participant does find a job, it usually doesn’t last long. Project Independence claims that 62 percent of participants have found jobs through the program — but some employment experts say the numbers are misleading.

“Project Independence is playing a numbers game,” charges Jude Burke, director of the Florida Employment and Training Association. “If a participant gets a job at Burger King and leaves it the next day, they count that as a job placement.”

Burke’s claim is backed up by the auditor general, who found that 59 percent of Project Independence participants are back on welfare two months after they leave the program.

Clark does not dispute that many Project Independence participants who get a job return to the welfare rolls, but he blames the sagging economy and high unemployment. Even a low-paying job, he insists, “diminishes spells of dependency.” The more a recipient gets out of the house to work, he says, the more she “develops interpersonal skills and engages with people.” This, says Clark, is what the program’s for. We shouldn’t have expectations that everyone involved in education and training is going to go out and become a brain surgeon.”

But many participants in the program resent such low expectations. “We’re looking for some financial help, not an evaluation of our IQ,” says one mother who asked not to be identified. “We’re not talking about personality development here — we’re talking about survival.

 

No Wheels, No Way

Six-lane boulevards crisscross Broward County for miles, linking metropolitan Ft. Lauderdale with suburbs like Plantation to the west and Pompano to the north. Here, the message is clear: If you want to get anywhere, you’d better have wheels.

Federal law requires states to give workfare participants a bus pass or gas money to take their children to day care and get to work or school. In Florida, however, Project Independence has failed to tell many participants about transportation benefits. According to the state auditor general, the program can document that it provided transportation to only half the parents who need it.

That stinginess almost cost Maureen Anderson her son. When welfare officials ordered her to join Project Independence last year or lose her benefits, Anderson decided to study alternative medicine in Ft. Lauderdale. Her four-year-old, Sean, suffers from epilepsy and asthma.

“I’m in school because of the medical problems that my child has had,” she says. “I want to learn how to work with him. I want to make a decent living where I can have benefits, where I can help others with problems.”

When the state refused to cover her tuition costs, Anderson took out loans and began attending classes day and night so she could finish before the money ran out. Then Project Independence refused to give her gas money, making it impossible for her to pick Sean up at his day care center in the middle of the day and drop him off again in the evening. Unable to afford the 30-mile round trip, Anderson had no other choice but to keep Sean at the center until she finished her classes two nights a week.

“I hated leaving him there all day,” declares Anderson, “but I just couldn’t afford the gas for that extra trip.”

What happened next is every parent’s nightmare. A social worker at HRS, aware of Anderson’s predicament, filed a neglect charge against her for leaving her child in day care 12 hours a day.

Anderson’s voice quivers slightly as she recalls the day that she learned of the charges. “The first thought that went through my mind was intense fear. I’ve invested a lot of time and a lot of love into my little boy. The fear of losing him was so great that I literally collapsed on the floor.”

Sharon Bourassa-Diaz, director of litigation for Legal Services of Broward County, calls the HRS accusation outrageous. “They put her in this position by not providing transportation, and then they try to punish her for something they caused,” she says. Since Anderson was fortunate enough to have an attorney, the department eventually admitted its error and agreed to reimburse her for child care, books, and transportation costs.

 

Alone After School

Federal law also requires states to provide child care to poor parents struggling to find work and get off welfare — but once again, Florida has failed to live up to the mandate. Many parents taking part in Project Independence say their children have been placed in facilities that fail to provide proper care.

Often, parents have no real say in choosing a day care center. As one mother describes it, the selection process resembles a bureaucratic version of pin the tail on the donkey. “You have a form, each one has a code number, and you have to pick at least two schools that you prefer,” she says. “You don’t know what you’re picking.”

When Mary Harris entered Project Independence, she felt robbed of the right to choose a day care center for her three-year-old son Kenny. Even though the center selected by the program admitted that it was licensed only for younger children, Project Independence refused to give her another option. Harris, who works on-call as a substitute teacher in Pompano Beach to supplement her welfare check, had to get an attorney to have Kenny placed in a center qualified to care for him.

Kathy Murray, who was denied her right to attend community college, has also been forced to keep her children in a facility that she feels is neglectful. Her four-year-old daughter has severe asthma — a condition the day care center selected by Project Independence is unprepared to handle.

“There have been two incidents where I’ve gotten to the school and she’s been in total arrest, wheezing her brains out because she hasn’t had her medicine. One night I had to rush her to the hospital in the middle of the night because no one gave her medicine at the day care.”

Christi Chatlos also suffered when Project Independence assigned her children to day care without giving her a say in the decision. At first glance, Chatlos would seem to be an ideal participant for workfare: She dislikes being dependent on welfare, and she enjoys working. She used to work with developmentally disabled adults and children, but she lost her job during her pregnancy and had to seek assistance from AFDC.

Even with the monthly welfare check, Chatlos had to work to make ends meet. When she was offered a job as a teacher’s aide at Earlington Heights Elementary in Miami — the same school her six-year-old son Jerome attends — she qualified for day care through Project Independence. That’s when the trouble began.

Even though Earlington Heights had its own after-school program that could care for Jerome until Chatlos got off work each day, Project Independence assigned him to another day care center — and refused to give Chatlos gas money to take him there.

“They said that they don’t have a contract with the school, and he had to go to a program one mile away,” Chatlos says. “I don’t have the money to pay for gas to get him there.”

As a result, Jerome must stand outside the doors of the day care center of his own school each afternoon, waiting for his mother to finish work. When the clock in her classroom hits two o’clock, Chatlos feels her muscles tense up. For the next hour, she knows that her son will be on his own. “It’s a rough neighborhood. I see so many packets where drugs came from right on school property.”

One day, while Chatlos was helping her third-graders with their reading assignments, Jerome ran into her classroom crying uncontrollably. He had a large, red bump on his head. “He was standing near a door outside when someone opened it and it hit him in the head. I was worried he had a concussion, so I made him sit down and rest. It seems like he gets hurt a lot when he’s unsupervised,” Chatlos says, her voice trailing off.

Chatlos also worries that someone might kidnap Jerome while she’s finishing her work day. She has tried to ease her fears by teaching him what to say if a stranger approaches. “We role-play. I pretend I’m a stranger and say, ‘Come with me, your mommy is sick.’ And he says ‘no.’ But he’s only six years old. He shouldn’t be anywhere unattended or unsupervised.”

With help from a lawyer, Chatlos finally forced Project Independence to place Jerome in a day care center that would pick him up after school. Even though she fought for her son’s safety, she somehow feels that she’s to blame for what happened to her children. She looks down, lowering her voice and shifting uneasily in her chair. “I feel like it’s my fault for trying to work, pay the bills, and take care of them.”

 

A VICIOUS CYCLE

Project Independence now plans to eliminate almost all day care. An internal document advises HRS caseworkers that because of state budget cuts, the only children eligible for day care are “AFDC employed, transitional, or children at-risk for neglect or abuse.” The memo further stresses that “Project Independence clients who are in pre-employment activities such as job search and AFDC applicants who participate in Project Independence are not entitled” to day care.

Program Director Jim Clark maintains that nobody who is currently working or enrolled in school or training will be denied day care. But Clark apparently hasn’t talked to Barbara Smith, who was turned down for child care even though she is studying to be a medical assistant. “I feel ticked off,” says Smith, who has no one to watch her children at home in Plantation while she attends classes during the day. “It means I’m really stuck.”

Smith is not the only one concerned. Jude Burke of the Florida Employment and Training Association says she has been getting calls from service providers complaining that Project Independence participants are being forced to drop out of school because their child care funding has been cut.

Jim Clark dismisses such reports as untrue. He says that new participants will simply have to get relatives to watch their children — “like the rest of us.” He insists that people are on welfare not because they can’t find child care, but because of “a lack of belief in themselves.”

But without the child care they are entitled to by law, many parents on welfare may never be able to build their self-confidence. “It’s a vicious cycle,” says Barbara Smith. “If you have a minimum-wage job, you may be getting your self-esteem back, but you can’t afford child care. The cheapest I’ve found is $65 a week.”

 

Punishing the Innocent

To make matters worse, women in the program who miss a class or training session run the risk of losing their welfare benefits. By its own calculation, HRS “sanctions” 800 women each year, slashing the monthly checks they rely on to feed and shelter their children. An HRS report cautions, however, that “exhaustive efforts to contact the participant and determine whether ‘good cause’ exists must be completed prior to initiating sanctions.”

In the case of Kathleen Gordon, the agency’s efforts proved somewhat less than exhaustive. Gordon was forced to quit her job as a maid and go on welfare when she was blinded by glass from a shattered window. Three weeks after her eye surgery, she was ordered to attend a Project Independence orientation. “I couldn’t even read the note,” says Gordon. “When I read, my words look like they’re running together.” Dizzy and nauseous with pain, Gordon showed up at the session with a bandaged eye — and a note from her doctor explaining her medical problems.

Since then, Gordon has continued to visit her doctor every week and nurse her injured eye back to health. She heard nothing from Project Independence for seven months — until she received a sanction notice in December informing her that the state was cutting her welfare for failing to conduct a job search.

“I got $167,” says Gordon, whose Ft. Lauderdale living room sports more than a dozen basketball trophies won by her two teenage sons. “I should have gotten $225.”

An HRS report released in March also indicates that black women like Gordon have been punished far more often than white women in the program. Although blacks comprise half of all participants in Project Independence, they represent 80 percent of all those “sanctioned” by the program.

Such figures underscore the punitive attitude that seems to pervade Project Independence. In stressing “self esteem” and punishing those who cannot participate, the program fails to grasp the reasons many families end up on welfare in the first place: disabling injuries, high unemployment, and a shortage of child care. Instead of enabling women on welfare to get back on their feet, Project Independence has denied them training, endangered their children, and wrongly punished many doing their best to follow the rules.

“It’s hurting me more than it’s helping,” says Kathy Murray, who fought Project Independence all the way to the state Supreme Court. “You struggle so hard to do the best that you can do, and then you see it fall apart because of things beyond your control. My children deserve more than what they’ve been exposed to.”