'CHILD-ONLY' CASES RISE ON WELFARE ROLLS

In a growing number of states, nearly half of those who remain on the
welfare rolls are children whose parents do not qualify for public
assistance and in many cases do not even live in the same home.

Known as "child-only" cases, they represent a variety of families, but the
largest group is children being raised by grandparents or other relatives
because their parents are in jail, are on drugs or have lost custody as a
result of abuse or neglect. In California, New York and other states, they
include children of illegal immigrants, because the children are eligible
for welfare by virtue of being born in the United States.

Unlike the millions of other families on assistance, these children have
been largely untouched by welfare reforms that have swept the country in
recent years. While work mandates, time limits on benefits and other
requirements were designed to push adults into jobs, the adults in these

households technically aren't on the rolls – only the children are – and so
they are exempt from the requirements. In each case, monthly welfare checks
are sent to adults in the household as compensation to help them care for
the children, but the benefits are lower than traditional welfare benefits.
In most cases, there is no job-training or other help to enable the
caretakers to become self-sufficient.

As millions of other Americans are catapulted off public assistance by the
twin engines of welfare reform and a booming economy, these children –
roughly 1.8 million of them – are left behind. They now seem likely to
become a permanent welfare stratum, destined to remain in place even as a
tide of new reforms washes many others off the rolls.

At the same time, they are becoming more conspicuous: Just 10 percent of the
national welfare caseload a decade ago, they now constitute more than double
that. And a Washington Post survey of states found much higher proportions
in pockets around the country: In Alabama, they make up 51 percent of the
remaining welfare cases; in South Carolina, the figure is 49 percent; in
Mississippi, 47 percent; and in Florida, 38 percent.

Locally, child-only cases constitute 31 percent of the caseload in Virginia,
25 percent in Maryland and 19 percent in the District.

At a time when welfare is fashioned as a program to move adults into jobs,
the child-only cases are prompting a renewed wave of emotional debate in
state capitals: What are these children doing on welfare if their parents
don't qualify, destined to live below the poverty line for their entire
childhoods, with no hope of rising toward the middle class? Should they be
moved instead into some version of foster care, since many are in the

custody of relatives because of parental neglect? If grandparents get
welfare for taking in children, but aren't required to work, does that
create perverse incentives for mothers to abandon all responsibility to
avoid the welfare rules?

Also, because some are the children of undocumented immigrants, should
public money be going indirectly to the adults, or should counties be forced
to follow the letter of the law and report the parents to immigration
authorities for possible deportation?

"This is the next-generation welfare issue," said Sheri Steisel, human
services director for the National Conference of State Legislatures. "It's
the next set of issues to think through."

In rural Craven County, N.C., one of a few communities around the country
that have studied this group, officials were determined to learn

more about their 327 child-only cases, a substantial portion of their total
caseload of 800 families. One goal of the study was to answer a fear – that
mothers may be turning over their children to relatives to avoid the new
work requirements mandated by welfare.

"I started out thinking we might find fraud, but when I saw what was coming
back, I said whew!" said Nancy Coston, former head of social services in the
county and now a state administrator. She discovered that two-thirds of the
children were in the care of relatives, mostly grandmothers, where they had
landed after being abused by their parents,

abandoned, left homeless when a parent went to prison or shuffled aside by
drug-abusing adults.

"I don't want to do anything to punish these grandmothers who have stepped
up to the plate," Coston said.

But if the county discovered that many of the families were deeply poor and
equally troubled, it also found that a handful of these grandmothers

were middle class, a group quietly labeled "country club" grandmothers,
legally entitled to assistance because the relatives they have taken in are
destitute. And other communities have discovered that many are under age 40,
young enough to be able to work.

Propelled by these findings, some states have designed new programs, using
the funds and freedom they were granted when the 1996 welfare reform law was
enacted.

Two states – Wisconsin and Florida – are moving some or all of their
child-only families off welfare and into a new program that pays relatives
to care for children. By creating a separate category in Wisconsin, state
officials simply eliminated a substantial portion of their welfare cases by
relabeling them. And this way, they also ensured that these children or
their guardians are not enmeshed in a program that otherwise requires work
in exchange for welfare benefits.

The search for ways to address this group isn't new. Even back in 1994, when
President Clinton was designing his welfare proposal, administration aides
were considering whether they could force these grandparents to work or take
into account their income to avoid the "country club" grandmother problem.

The proposals were rejected then, but they are rising with a new urgency

now, as states compete to push their welfare rolls closer and closer to
zero.

Five in a Battered Trailer

In a backwoods corner of Craven County, N.C., Katie Bell Oliver, a former
cook, is rearing her four grandchildren in a decrepit trailer while her
daughter searches aimlessly for a permanent place for the children to live.

The battered front door of Oliver's trailer, third back on a narrow plot,
swells in a light rain, and the handle dangles loosely from where it has
been ripped out of the wood. Inside, Deshawn, 3, Xavier, 2, and Kayakenea,
5, are lined up on one of the two couches. Eight-year-old Demetrice, who

has a severe mental disability, clings to his grandmother and demands
attention, raking her arms with his fingers, uttering more and more urgent
sounds.

"It's like you're living in Vietnam," Oliver said. "Something has got to
give before I have a nervous breakdown."

Oliver, who is 57, receives a check for $272 a month to raise the three
youngest. Demetrice is entitled to disability payments, leaving the family
income still well below the official poverty line.

Families like Oliver's were one of the targets last year when Craven County
put together a commission to design a start-from-scratch welfare plan, aimed
in part at addressing the needs of grandmothers raising young children on
their own.

Officials quickly recognized that many of these families were fragile, the
grandmothers near the end of their rope, struggling to raise a second, or
occasionally even third, family in abject poverty. Furthermore, welfare
checks were dispatched month after month with virtually no oversight from
the county.

But officials also knew that without Oliver and similar relatives, the
children could become part of the foster care system, at far greater cost to
the taxpayer. Craven County has only 70 accredited foster families, and the
county would be swamped if overburdened grandmothers simply gave up and
turned the youngsters over to child protection officials.

Oliver has no intention of giving up her grandchildren to the state. But she
also despairs that the children's mother, her 29-year-old daughter, Emma,
doesn't take responsibility for her family's life. "She takes off," said
Oliver. "I don't know where. . . . These young girls have these babies, and
they

just don't think. I have called the sheriff to have her come home and help."

If Oliver were a licensed foster parent, she would get four times as much
money, but she'd have trouble meeting the requirements: For one, her
trailer, with its cramped space and rusty well water, would likely fail the
health department inspection.

The trailer leaks, the floor is about to cave in. The furniture is in
tatters, but she has food in two freezers for the children. Alternately
proud and threatening, she brags about the two boys, noting that the
3-year-old learned his ABCs before many of the other children in Head Start,
and then taught his 2-year-old brother. Both boys are wiggling with energy
on the couch. "You see this switch?" She brandishes a thin tree branch. The

children fall silent.

Periodically, she threatens to call the county and turn the children over to
social services. "I'm human," she says. "You gets tired of them."

This seaside county at the base of the Outer Banks, where the economy runs
on tourists, agriculture and the Cherry Point military base, has struggled
to design a program aimed at families like Oliver's. At first, it planned to
establish a system that would have paid them slightly more than they now
receive but also would have poured on the services when necessary and
subjected child-only families to inspections to determine that the children
were well cared for. And the program would have tried to lure grandparents
like Oliver to parenting classes with a $100 incentive payment.

As it turned out, the proposal was never put in place because the state
legislature drew names from a hat and Craven County lost its bid to test its
own welfare design.

But the questions raised about these families linger.

"I feel like the grandparents need all the support they can get," said
Craven County Commissioner Johnnie Sampson. "They're working on minimum-wage
jobs themselves. They have bills they have to pay."

Sampson's arguments were countered by conservative officials in the county
who believe that some mothers are leaving children with relatives

to avoid welfare's new work requirements. Others complain that some
grandparents don't need the money. "If you go back 30 years to my childhood,
grandparents did not get compensated for taking care of their

grandchildren. It's not something we want to perpetuate," said Michael
Gorman, vice chairman of a community board overseeing social services in the
county. "I believe that government should only do those things for us that
we cannot reasonably do for ourselves."

'Country Club' Grandmothers

When conservatives in Craven County spoke of "country club" grandmothers,
they may have had families like Alice "Gail" Brinson in mind.

Brinson doesn't belong to a country club, but she lives with a friend who
parks his power boat in the front yard, moors his dory in the back and
stores his plane at the Craven County Airport.

A judge awarded Brinson legal custody of her grandson, Aaron, 6, after she
convinced the judge that her son and his girlfriend were unfit parents and
had failed to provide Aaron a home.

Unlike Oliver, who was disabled in a fall several years ago, Brinson, 54, is
healthy and could work full time. In fact, she said she's hoping to get
full-time hours at her current job, a secretarial position for the state
liquor board.

In the meantime, she lives in a spotless bungalow overlooking the Neuse
River, with a tire swing in the back yard, a puppy bounding around outside
the sun room, and Aaron's toys and clothes arranged neatly in his own room.

The house belongs to her friend, Phil Bowie, a graphic artist and
photographer. And with Bowie, Brinson has whisked Aaron away to Disney World
and Busch Gardens, and to Cape Canaveral to watch the space shuttle take
off.

"I want to open up his horizons," said Bowie. "I want to try to keep him

away from drugs. I want him to know there are alternatives. I want to be a
good friend to him."

Brinson supports Aaron on the $161 she earns every two weeks from her
part-time job and $181 monthly in welfare payments from the county. She
tries to contribute to the household expenses as best she can.

Brinson hesitated to ask for welfare for several years after Aaron came to
live with her, she said, but she needed the help and knew the money was
available, and her friends urged her to apply.

Now, Aaron leads a solidly middle-class life, comfortable and loving, full
of karate lessons and homework help and what would look like unimaginable
advantages to the typical child growing up on welfare.

But Brinson and Aaron are guests in Bowie's home. "I have no hold on him,"
said Bowie, refering to Aaron. "I'm not related to him in any way."

"I am just grateful to Phil for taking us in," Brinson said.

Other Tools for Child-Only Cases

With all of the instruments of welfare reform aimed at getting adults to

work, state and local officials agree that, for many, the challenge now is
to find other tools to tackle their child-only cases.

In North Carolina, the state laid out its priorities last month in a meeting
with county officials, telling them they must first get as many welfare
adults as possible into jobs, but with any additional funds could
concentrate on helping the child-only families.

Counties are now free to provide job training, counseling or other services
to grandparents and other relatives to help them become self-sufficient,

said Coston, now the state's deputy director of social services.

Not only are the counties very aware of the growing dominance of child-only
cases, they worry that their numbers could grow if more welfare mothers turn
their children over to relatives after losing welfare benefits.

"I don't think there's any doubt that this is an area we're all going to
have to address as we move forward in welfare reform," Coston said. "Just
the

fact that they're becoming almost half of the population, you feel you have
to spend some time figuring out what these families need."