DATE: Sunday, July 6, 1997                  TAG: 9707040836

SECTION: FRONT                   PAGE: A1   EDITION: FINAL 

SERIES: FOLLOWING WELFARE REFORM

        In July of 1995, a group in Culpeper and a few neighboring counties

        became the first in the state to enter the welfare-to-work program.

        The Virginian-Pilot has followed three women through the two-year

        period before welfare ends. Their fate is a clue to the future of

        hundreds of local people.

SOURCE: BY MARGARET EDDS, STAFF WRITER DATELINE: CULPEPER LENGTH: 388 lines

WELFARE REFORMS FACE A CHALLENGE:

REAL LIFE

On a day in May when Michelle Wallner collected her biweekly paycheck of $343, she went straight to her prospective landlord, and handed over the money.

She was $7 shy of the rent on a one-bedroom apartment in a row house just off the town's courthouse square. But it was all she had.

Wallner held her breath. He took the money. And Wallner and her 6-year-old daughter were on their way out of the cluttered one-bedroom trailer they were sharing with four other people.

At the apartment, there might be no chairs for the kitchen table and a quirky bathroom and a few cracks in the walls. But there also would be no roommates, no fights over money, no dealing with someone else's mess.

For the first time ever, Michelle and Devon would be, blissfully, home alone.

Curled up on a donated sofa, brown eyes sparkling, the 25-year-old single mom had no trouble a few weeks later naming the highlight of her two-year sojourn with welfare reform.

``Getting my own place,'' she said, eying the high ceilings, painted wood floor and assortment of hand-me-down furnishings as lovingly as a mansion.

As for the low point, she paused, sifting through the possibilities. There was the birth of a son 16 months ago, and her decision to give him up for adoption. Or her ouster by her longtime roommate last summer, and the appearance for a time that she and Devon would wind up in a homeless shelter. Or the months living in the basement of the friend who took her in. Or their move to the trailer with him and his three children after he was evicted. Or the accumulation of traffic fines and jail threats that came from driving on a suspended license.

``I guess,'' Wallner said slowly, ``from the time I had Zachary until I got here, it was like a whole low point.''

As the first women to enter Virginia's revolutionary welfare-to-work reform reach the two-year anniversary of its launching, it is a time for looking backward and forward, and for summing up.

The reform demands that most welfare recipients work for their benefits, provides incentives such as child care and transportation money, and ends the practice of increasing welfare payments when new babies are born. It also limits most collections to 24 months out of a five-year period.

Recipients can still qualify for food stamps, health care, child care, and transportation money for a time. But the check from Aid to Families With Dependent Children (renamed Temporary Assistance for Needy Families), commonly referred to as ``welfare,'' ends.

Michelle Wallner, Denise Fletcher and Deborah Taliaferro are among a few hundred women in the Culpeper region who have spent the last two years anticipating that deadline.

Their thoughts and situations are a guide for hundreds of others in Hampton Roads who will soon embark on the same journey. The reform plan will be launched here on October 1.

As it turns out, the results for the three are as different as their histories and personalities.

Wallner is working. Fletcher, a mother-of-five, has been relying on her boyfriend, food stamps and child support payments since she was fired from Burger King last January. Taliaferro, who has a 9-year-old son at home and a 17-year-old daughter living elsewhere, is not working and has no visible means of support.

Taliaferro has a history of alcohol and drug abuse and related felony convictions. She declined to be interviewed or photographed for the final installment in this series.

Sandy-haired and spirited, Wallner is the youngest and least saddled with longterm problems. Even prior to welfare reform, she had a modest work history. It may be no accident that she is doing best.

For her, the road to Culpeper began in Frankfurt, Germany, where her father was stationed in the Army and she was born. Her mother, she thinks, was German. When she was 6 and the family was living in Newport News, she was sexually abused by a family friend and placed in foster care. Later, she was adopted.

As soon as Wallner turned 18, she was out the door. With her boyfriend, she abused drugs, moved to New Jersey and conceived a child. When Devon was 3 months old, she opted for a more clear-eyed future and headed home.

In Virginia, a string of part-time jobs and hodgepodge living arrangements landed her in Culpeper's Social Services office.

Wallner spent the first year of welfare reform skirting reality. She was sanctioned for noncompliance for several months, and at one point her case was closed. Her driving record was a mess, and kept getting worse. So were her living arrangements.

The tide turned last September when she began working as an aide in a nursing home outside Culpeper at $5.25 per hour. Through good and bad in her personal life, she stuck with it. Two weeks ago, she got her second 25-cent raise.

Wallner's assessment of welfare reform is cautiously optimistic. Left alone, she would have eventually achieved independence, she believes. ``But they pushed it along. It happened quicker than I would have done it on my own.''

In retrospect, the critical moment may have been one that at the time seemed particularly harsh. Last summer, she lost housing with a girlfriend, in part because she could not provide the babysitting that her friend expected while meeting the job-search requirements of welfare reform.

Had she not been so desperate for stability, she might also have been less persistent about getting and keeping her job. ``I would probably have stayed at the farm a while longer if they hadn't pushed me to do job searches,'' she said.

Wallner passed the income cutoff level for TANF and her case was closed in March. She has eight months of TANF eligibility left for the next three years.

Benefits have yet to be calculated based on her raise, but as July 1 approached, she was taking home the $343 biweekly check, $61 monthly in food stamps and $10 a week in gas vouchers. Welfare reform allows women to collect child care and transportation money for an additional year after they stop receiving TANF. Medicaid health benefits also continue for at least a year.

As she looks to the future, Wallner is considering taking a second, parttime job or training classes to upgrade her job category. She has also become a poster mom for child support enforcement.

Last month, a dressed-up and slightly nervous Wallner was escorted to Richmond for a press conference in which Gov. George F. Allen unveiled a crackdown on wayward dads. Angel Rosa, Devon's father, has been in sporadic contact as he moved between New Jersey and Florida over the last few years. But he has never contributed more than a few Christmas gifts and $50 here and there to her support.

``I promise you we're going to find him,'' Nathaniel ``Nick'' Young, assistant commissioner for child support enforcement, told Wallner as they left the governor's conference room.

``That's 732 Doughtery Lane, Lakeland, Fla.,'' she shot back.

Even with an address, however, collecting child support payments out-of-state can be tricky, said Sarah Berry, the support enforcement specialist assigned to Wallner's case. Paternity must be formally established. There is back-and-forth paperwork. Fathers bent on evasion can move or quit work.

Berry, who had a 2,000-person caseload before being assigned to a special project in Culpeper, expects that it will be several months at best before any payment is received. Even then, she acknowledged, success may depend largely on Rosa's willingness to comply.

Whether or not support comes, Wallner says she will make do somehow. ``I have no choice,'' she said, breaking into a giggle. ``I'm just going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm not moving again.''

Denise Fletcher also is doing well in a sense, though not necessarily the sense envisioned by welfare reformers.

A petite, soft-spoken woman who alternately seems fragile and iron-willed, Fletcher has resigned herself to being at home at least until her youngest, 4-year-old Daisy, is in preschool. Her oldest child is 13.

So long as she continues to collect $354 a month in child support from the father of her four oldest daughters, plus $504 monthly in food stamps, she can manage with the help of her boyfriend and possible future husband, Wilson ``Butch'' Wince, Fletcher believes.

In fact, their developing routine is closer to Fletcher's vision of the ideal life than was her brief stint as a semi-independent working woman.

``It's the way it should be,'' she said, settling onto a velour sofa recently purchased by Butch for the small house she rents. A matching love seat and recliner, along with a glass-and-brass coffee table complete the ensemble.

``I get to maintain and raise the girls the way a parent should,'' she said. ``One parent's working and the other's home maintaining the house.''

The good part of the last two years, she said, was ``independence, getting established in my own house, maintaining the bills on my own. It was something I hadn't proved to myself I could do.''

The bad part was exhaustion, missed events at her daughters' schools, and what she saw as unrelenting pressure to perform. Since stopping work, ``I feel a lot more relaxed, less stressed. I'm happier all the way around.''

Fletcher, 32, voluntarily closed her TANF case in May. She has three months of eligibility left for the next three years. Her Medicaid coverage will continue for at least one year. Food stamps will go on indefinitely, depending on her income.

While she sees benefits to welfare reform, Fletcher's chief complaint is that the cutoffs do not distinguish between those who try-and-fail at marriage or work and those who don't try.

Fletcher was born in Fauquier County to an alcoholic father and mentally unstable mother. She grew up in foster care and dropped out of school in the 11th grade when she got pregnant. She and her boyfriend produced four children and eventually married.

But there was ``a lot of abuse, a lot of depravedness'' in the relationship, she said.

When Fletcher finally got up the nerve to leave, she found protection with another man, who fathered Daisy. At first, he seemed like a savior. Later, he too turned on her.

That time, Fletcher wound up at Social Services' in Culpeper. When she landed a job at Burger King the month after entering welfare reform, she began the first sustained period of work in her life.

Over the 18 months until she was fired, Fletcher vacillated between pride in her achievement and anxiety about balancing her complicated life. The move to her own house in April 1996 was the highlight of the two years, fulfilling an elusive dream.

The extra income that she was allowed to keep under welfare reform as an incentive for working financed the move.

Fletcher toyed with, but was never able to pull off another achievement, however. She talked briefly with a local technical school about enrolling in a cosmetology course, but never completed the paperwork.

A year ago, the social services' department tried to prod Fletcher by making work on her high school equivalency exam a condition of receiving TANF. But the work-school-home combination was exhausting, and Fletcher dropped out of that program also when her job ended.

Someday, when the children are older, she may yet find a way to earn money fixing hair, Fletcher said. As for now, with Butch at her side, a paycheck does not seem essential.

And if he should disappear?

``I'd take any man at that point,'' she said, laughing at what she hoped is a joke. Then Fletcher sobered. ``That's what makes a woman lose her respect, right there,'' she said.

Across town, at the small bungalow where Taliaferro lives, Linda Roy greeted a visitor on a warm June afternoon. Introducing herself as Taliaferro's ``best friend,'' she described the despair into which the 41-year-old woman is falling.

After being fired from a job at Little Caesars last October, Taliaferro's benefits were sanctioned. Failure to respond to questions about income resulted in the withdrawal of food stamps as well.

On the recommendation of Social Services, Taliaferro voluntarily closed her case in March. She has five months of eligibility left for the next three years.

Her only visible form of public or private support is Medicaid health coverage for herself and her son, Mario. That is due to end next March.

``Her electricity is turned off. She's got no food, no nothing,'' Roy said. ``They say if you're on welfare, you be getting this, that. She's not getting nothing.''

A group of neighbors - Carol, Robert, and Otis - who sat passing time outside Taliaferro's door nodded their agreement. They brightened at the appearance of Mario, whose final report card - brought home that day - clearly was Topic A for the afternoon.

He displayed the marks: four As for the quarter, two As and two Bs for the year.

Taliaferro, the group said, had gone to check out a report that a nursery down the road might be hiring. It was her most promising job lead since a friend said a few weeks earlier that she could work as a flag-holder on a construction crew. The job never materialized.

``I'm scared for her,'' said Roy, who visits regularly and kept Mario during the three months in 1995 that Taliaferro was in a court-ordered drug rehabilitation program.

It is not the life Taliferro envisioned when she graduated from Culpeper High School two decades ago. Then she thought about going on to college or about some professional job.

Wild times, alcohol and, eventually, heroin intervened. The father of her children was part of that scene. He is serving time in the Bland Correctional Center.

For Taliaferro, the last two years have been a period of fits and starts. She cleaned county offices for a few months as a public service requirement. And she has held two paid jobs briefly. Work in telephone solicitation ended both because of her performance and transportation woes. Her employer at Little Caesars cited performance and concern about alcohol use in that firing.

Last week, Taliaferro reiterated her refusal to be interviewed.

Rising from the sofa where she sat watching television with a male friend, Taliaferro was typically warm but firm in her refusal. The nursery job had not worked out. Life was too discouraging, she said.

Asked if she had any parting wisdom about welfare reform, Taliferro pondered the question briefly.

``Pray,'' she said finally. ``Just pray.'' ILLUSTRATION: BILL TIERNAN color photos/The Virginian-Pilot

Michelle Wallner and her daughter, Devon, 6, moved into their own

apartment in May. She says welfare reform pushed her to make the

transition faster than she would have on her own.

Deborah Taliaferro, left, closed her case in March. Denise Fletcher,

right, closed hers in May. She's raising her five daughters -

including Amanda, 9 - with help from her boyfriend.

BILL TIERNAN photos/The Virginian-Pilot

For Denise Fletcher. ..

Deborah Taliaferro, above, shown in May...

Michelle Warner, below, appeared in a June news conference...

Graphics

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Margaret Edds, based in The Virginian-Pilot's Richmond office,

has written about Virginia politics and social change for 23 years,

most recently as a member of the editorial department.

She started reporting on welfare reform as gubernatorial

candidate George Allen expressed his ideas in the 1993 election, and

she followed the initiative through the Virginia General Assembly in

1995.

Later that year, she began reporting this continuing series about

three Culpeper women on the frontline of change. That work won First

Place in Virginia Press Association contest.

Now, Edds steps back and Hampton Roads reporters follow welfare

reform as it unfolds at home.

Elizabeth Simpson covers children and family issues for The

Virginian-Pilot, where she has worked for nine years. Previously she

worked for newspapers in Texas and Louisiana.

THREE LIVES ON WELFARE

MICHELLE WALLNER:

1995

September: Signs Personal Responsibility Agreement.

October: Two-year clock on AFDC (renamed TANF) benefits starts

running. Escapes jail for driving on suspended license when

boyfriend shows up at last minute with $600 to pay fine.

November: Begins working part time at grocery. AFDC benefits

sanctioned for failure to file sufficient job applications and fill

out paperwork.

December: Stops work just before Christmas. Sanction continues

for failure to contact Social Services.

1996

March: Son, Zachary Daniel, born. Places him in private adoption.

Sanction continues.

April: Case closed for one month for failure to contact Social

Services.

May: Case reopened. Again, ticketed for driving on suspended

license.

July: Attends job readiness class. Job expected at daughter's

pre-school falls through.

August: Loses housing with girlfriend, partly because job

searches limit ability to baby-sit for friend's son. Moves into

basement of another friend.

September: Sanctioned for failure to meet job application

requirements. Begins work at nursing home at $5.25 an hour on Sept.

26.

October: Uses first paycheck to pay off driving fines. License

reinstated. Pay raised to $5.50 an hour.

November: Sanction lifted.

1997

February: Friend with whom living evicted from his house. The

pair and their four children move to a one-bedroom trailer.

March: Wallner's AFDC (TANF) case closed because take-home pay of

$710 a month exceeds cutoff.

May: Wallner and daughter move to their own apartment. Job

continues.

June: Receives 25-cent pay raise to $5.75 an hour.

July: Eight months of TANF eligibility left for next three years.

DENISE FLETCHER

1995

July: Signs Personal Responsibility Agreement. Begins working at

Burger King at $4.65 an hour. Stops working on high school

equivalency degree.

1996

April: After living with her uncle, Fletcher fulfills dream by

moving with daughters into their own rented home. She contacts a

local technical school about cosmetology training, another dream.

July: Gets first, one-week paid vacation. Still has not followed

up on her call to the technical center.

September: Gets first raise of 15 cents an hour. Over next

several months, gets more small raises until earning $5.05 an hour.

October: Under orders from the Social Services Department, begins

working again on her high school equivalency degree. If she

completes degree, the department can help finance her cosmetology

training.

1997

January: Fired from Burger King because of shortage of about $8

in her cash drawer.

March: Sanctioned because of firing. Gradually stops attending

high school classes.

May: Sanction continues. AFDC (renamed TANF) case closed

voluntarily to bank time for the future. Fletcher living primarily

on child support and help from her boyfriend. Marriage plans

indefinite.

July: Three months of TANF eligibility left for next three years.

DEBORAH TALIAFERRO

1995

August: Signs Personal Responsibility Agreement.

September: Two-year clock on AFDC (renamed TANF) benefits starts

running. Begins filing job applications to meet five-a-week

requirement.

November: Finishes court-ordered drug rehabilitation program.

Behind in job searches.

December: Sanctioned for failure to file sufficient job

applications.

1996

February: Begins $5-an-hour phone solicitation job in Northern

Virginia. Falls through two weeks later.

March: Sanction continues. Begins public service work cleaning

Social Services Department offices.

April: Sanction lifted.

May: Gets part-time job at Little Caesars Pizza.

July: Not getting enough hours at Little Caesars, so required to

go back to filing job applications.

October: Fired from job at Little Caesars. Taliaferro attributes

to child-care difficulties. Boss attributes to failure to perform

work and concern about alcohol.

1997

January: Sanctioned because of firing. Her 17-year-old daughter

gives birth.

March: Sanction continues. Case closed voluntarily on

recommendation of Social Services.

May: Offered highway construction job as a flag holder through a

friend. Job fails to materialize.

July: Five months of TANF eligibility left for next three years. KEYWORDS: WELFARE REFORM MOTHERS CULPEPER

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