DATE: Sunday, July 6, 1997                  TAG: 9707060092

SECTION: FRONT                   PAGE: A11  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: 143 lines

3 WOMEN'S CASES SHOW THE PITFALLS, THE PROMISE

When I approached the Culpeper Social Services Department two years ago, my only request was to follow three women who had different stories to tell.

``Welfare recipients'' might get lumped together in the public mind, but demographic data said caseloads were made up of a range of individuals with vastly different backgrounds and prospects.

I hoped to speak to a mother with several children and another with only one or two, an individual who had finished high school and another who had not, a person who had at least some work experience and another who had very little, someone who was young and someone older, someone black and someone white.

The three women who agreed to be interviewed fit the diversity bill. Among them, they reflected almost every subset of the welfare population:

Denise Fletcher was, when the project began, a 30-year-old mother of five with almost no work experience and no high school diploma. The father of her four oldest daughters, from whom she had long been separated, paid child support.

Deborah Taliaferro was a 39-year-old mother of two who had a high school diploma but had not worked in years. She was saddled with drug and alcohol addictions and related felony convictions. The father of her two children was in prison.

Michelle Wallner, 24, had a high school diploma and a 4-year-old daughter. She had worked intermittently since splitting from her boyfriend soon after Devon was born. Devon's father rarely contributed to the child's support. Wallner's suspended driver's license was a major barrier to work.

The one missing ingredient was geographic diversity. Culpeper and neighboring counties were chosen to launch the Virginia welfare reform effort precisely because caseloads were low and job opportunities good.

Independence, presumably, would be harder to achieve in an urban setting where the poor are congregated in larger numbers and jobs are either more scarce or located in hard-to-reach suburbs.

Still, with that caveat, many of the issues confronted by those trying to leave welfare in Culpeper transcend geographic boundaries. Among the lessons I found there are these:

Welfare reform will have different outcomes for different people.

Though the newspaper's Culpeper study is too small to be scientific, the results may prove to be typical. After two years, one woman is working. One is relying on a boyfriend for support. And one is existing on the fringes of society. For her, any income is either from friends, charity, or less savory sources.

Some social scientists estimate that one-fourth to one-third of the welfare population is unemployable in the private sector. That is consistent with data showing that, before reform, only one-third or so of welfare recipients stayed on the dole for three years or more.

Work is good. Independence is good.

Each of the Culpeper women, regardless of what complaints they may have had about the overall process, seemed elevated by the experience of drawing a paycheck and being part of the working world.

Life goes on, but not necessarily in ways you'd want if it was your life.

I rarely left Culpeper without fearing that one or another of the three women was on the brink of some disaster. Yet six weeks or so later, when I'd return, the crisis usually had passed. A boyfriend had shown up with money just as someone was about to be hauled off to jail for not paying a fine. The generosity of a neighbor had forestalled a move to a homeless shelter.

The fact that tragedy had been averted did not mean that day-to-day life had gotten better, however. Sometimes it had. Just as often, life remained in disarray.

The middle class may decry a lack of connectedness in our society, but among the poor, community remains an essential part of survival.

None of the three women would have navigated the past two years without the willingness of friends and relatives and, sometimes, bare acquaintances to help out.

The politics of winning or losing in the welfare reform debate intrudes too much on the flow of information and the analysis of results.

For instance, a chart recently distributed by the state Social Services Department shows that, of the 38 individuals in the Culpeper region whose benefits will expire between now and October, all but two are working. The impression is that almost everyone who has entered the work program has found a job.

That is not the case. In the city of Culpeper, 179 women have been enrolled in the work plan since it began. Forty of those - or about 22 percent - left welfare without having a job, either because they were fed up with the system or wanted to bank their remaining benefits, or for some other reason.

Both Fletcher and Taliaferro are among those who are no longer receiving Aid To Families with Dependent Children (renamed TANF), but are unemployed.

Data needs to be broadly available in unedited form.

Flexibility is important. One size does not fit all.

The advocates of welfare reform are right: Some recipients milk the system and do little to help themselves. The critics are also right: Some people are weighted down by personal or economic circumstances that are too great to overcome alone.

Uniformity has benefits. But, to my mind, it is more important - within bounds - to let local officials tailor work and education policies to fit the individual.

Tax and benefit policies should be as generous as possible toward the working poor.

Put yourself in Michelle Wallner's shoes for a day and you'll see why. Superimpose your family budget - rent, utilities, food, clothing, car maintenance - on weekly take-home pay of $343, plus $61 a month in food stamps. Can you fit in a new muffler? A busted transmission? School trips for your child? Child care?

The Virginia reform helps with child care and transportation for up to three years. That's good. But the benefits may need to last longer if wages don't rise as hoped.

Child support enforcement is critical.

For all three of the Culpeper women, access to a second income is the primary - and perhaps only - hope for sustained independence. Yet state workers assigned to help with collections are sorely overtaxed. In the Charlottesville region, which covers Culpeper, a single worker monitors about 2,000 cases.

One critical unanswered question about welfare reform is this: What happens to individuals who have drug addictions, low mental capacity, or life skills so impaired that incentives such as income and independence don't propel them forward? More important, what happens to their children?

Taliaferro and her son are a troubling case in point.

And finally, welfare reform is a work in progress.

The movement cannot be deemed a success until it has survived recessions and the cutoff of benefits in both urban and rural areas. Nor can it be deemed a failure until the impact on a future generation of poor children is known. If, over time, fewer lives revolve around a government check and poverty does not escalate, then the policy will have worked despite short-term hardships.

Advocates of welfare reform, I fear, minimize the extent to which economic success requires more than personal initiative. Critics, I suspect, underestimate the extent to which helping hands can become crutches.

It may speed the process if both can acknowledge that, in a sense, the political battle is over. While the nation's support system for the poor will almost certainly look different in 10 years than it looks now, it seems just as definite that the government will play a smaller role in whatever system exists.

As the welfare experiment goes forward, both sides should applaud if a policy seems to work. Neither should try to hide the fact nor block reform if it does not. The contribution of the Denise Fletchers and Deborah Taliaferros and Michelle Wallners is the sober reminder that this is far more than an exercise in political theory.

Real women, real children, are behind the debate, and the mountains they must climb are almost always higher and more treacherous than those that face you and me. KEYWORDS: WELFARE REFORM CULPEPER MOTHERS

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