Special Report

Policy-makers talked about putting mothers to work and getting them off welfare, but it wasn’t until the final moments of the state reform commission’s birth that leaders decided child care should be included.

“The feeling was those particulars could be worked out later. I don’t know when, but later,” said Mary Davis, director of the Child Care Resource Network. “I don’t know that children are particulars.”

She isn’t alone in her feeling that children, and what happens to them while their mothers are working, have been the fluctuating variable in the welfare reform equation. With more than 20,000 poor Alabama children already on a waiting list for subsidized child care, it will take more than 11th-hour planning to develop a system that will work for the thousands more that will be added. Congress tossed in some $13.8 billion in block grants to pay for child care from fiscal 1997 to 2002. The reform legislation passed last month calls for an additional $6.6 billion in child care funding nationally over the next six years, including an extra $11 million that will come Alabama’s way in the first year.

Unfortunately, Ms. Davis and state welfare reform officials say, that money won’t touch the amount needed to care for the almost 8 million children nationwide on welfare who will need full-time or part-time child care over the next few years as reforms kick in.

A study by Columbia University’s National Center on Children in Poverty says that’s about 66 percent of the money that will be needed.

“And we don’t know how long that will last,” said Joel Sanders, director of the state welfare reform unit at the Department of Human Resources. His department is checking to see how far the money will stretch, figuring that $10 million will take care of 4,000 children. “We are sure it will go fast.”

That means the state will have to find other ways to pay for child care, because it is one of the top two reasons welfare mothers list when asked why they don’t have a job. The state already spends $43 million a year on care for about 20,000 children. Once the additional money is found, then comes the problem of how to hook up parents with child-care providers whose work schedules match theirs. Finding child-care providers for parents who work second and third shifts is already a problem, and it’s going to be difficult to recruit more.

The state must also work on better ways to ease welfare mothers into paying for their own child care, the women on public assistance say. It isn’t reasonable to expect a woman making minimum wage to pay at least $50 a week per child for day care.

With costs like that, the paycheck the state demanded her to get will soon evaporate, especially since most women on welfare average two children.

And, the women say, reform doesn’t mention people already struggling to pay for day care. Before the reform, women participating in DHR’s JOBS program were guaranteed a spot in a licensed, subsidized day care. They also received a transitional fee scale to reduce the shock of the child-care expense.

That guarantee is gone in the reform.

Plus, thousands of children from working-poor families didn’t get that guarantee and were in danger of slipping onto the welfare roles, Ms. Davis said. One quandary reformers faced was ignoring those who were already working to try to help women who had never held a job.

“In some circles, that’s really a dilemma,” Ms. Davis said. “They say we should help the ones doing what they are supposed to do.”

The federal regulations stipulate that states must use at least 70 percent of their mandatory child-care allocation to help AFDC recipients or people at immediate risk of going on welfare. Four percent is set aside to improve the quality of care, and a 5 percent cap is placed on administrative costs.

If states don’t meet their quota of the number of people they move off welfare, their allocations will be cut. “Child care hasn’t really been addressed,” said Julian Palmer, spokesman for the Columbia center. But, he said, the bottom line is states can’t move people off welfare without it, and if they don’t move people off welfare, the federal government won’t be there to help pay for it.