Welfare recipients decline as deadline approaches

By Scott Moyers ~ Southeast Missourian

He was a bull rider and she was a barrel racer when they met at a Jackson rodeo. The attraction wasn't instant, but when it took off, as they say, it really took off, and a year later Jennifer Leimer was pregnant.

But this isn't some dimestore-novel romance.

When Leimer found out she was pregnant, she was 17 and single.

And a high-school senior.

And living in Leopold, Mo., a town that Leimer describes as a place where you have to work for what you have and nothing's free.

"I was in disbelief," the 20-year-old Leimer recalls now. "We had almost no money. I didn't know what I was going to do. I was really scared."

The couple married and Leimer's new husband, Bryan, all but gave up the rodeo, focusing most of his time on his job working for his dad's fence-building business.

The money wasn't bad, but it wasn't enough. The couple was forced to turn to the federal government, applying for Medicaid, which paid the hospital bills for baby Dakota, and another program -- Women, Infants and Children, or WIC -- that paid for the baby's formula, juice and cereal.

"It was a lifesaver," Leimer said. "It was hard, but what else could we do?"

Leaving welfare behind

Of course, the Leimers aren't alone. Their story and others like theirs are all strands from the same thread. It's called welfare, and millions of poor families receive government assistance of some kind each year.

But it's gotten better. Much better, by most accounts.

Caseloads have dropped 52 percent within the past five years. In 1996, 4.4 million families -- 12.2 million individuals -- received cash benefits, in the form of checks or credits through an electronic debit card.

By September 2001, that number had dropped to 2.1 million families consisting of 5.3 million people.

The local numbers also show a sharp decline. In June 1997, there were 1,286 families in Cape Girardeau County who got cash benefits, and as of January 2002, that number had dropped to 481.

The decline's timing is not arbitrary, considering it coincides with the massive overhaul of the nation's welfare system, signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1996.

While some say the booming economy of the 1990s helped, most -- including President George W. Bush -- credit welfare reform. Welfare reform turned control of welfare over to the states, limiting lifetime benefits for cash benefits to five years, but also requiring adults to work after two years.

The 1996 law replaced a system of unlimited monthly welfare checks with a new program, facilitated through federal grants, that gives poor families cash benefits while navigating them into jobs.

The law is set to expire in July, and in February Bush set forth his vision for the "next steps of welfare reform." But Bush acknowledges the success of the program and has vowed to only "tinker" with it.

With the clock about to run out, those families who received cash grants for 60 consecutive months no longer will be eligible for their cash benefits.

Cape Girardeau's four

In Cape Girardeau County, only four families will stop getting their welfare checks in July, said Randy Yancey, the Division of Family Service's welfare reform coordinator for Southeast Missouri.

If they get a job before the July deadline and stop getting their cash benefits, they will still have some benefits left. So if one of the family members gets a job now, that means they'll still have about four months of benefits left should the job be lost.

The average welfare check is about $260 a month.

"I think there's a misconception that people get on welfare and stay on it," Yancey said. "I think what this has done is allow us to focus in on families who are on assistance for a longer time and try to help them specifically."

Statewide, 33,465 families get cash benefits, and 1,781 families will get their last benefits come July, when their benefits run out, Yancey said. Some of those families -- including the four in Cape Girardeau County -- may be exempt from the deadline because of such reasons as substance abuse, mental health, a disability in the family, or domestic violence situations, Yancey said.

Yancey was quick to point out that there is no expiration date for people who receive other benefits, such as child care, housing, food stamps and Medicaid. The programs are based on income levels and family size.

Yancey also said that he doesn't believe that the low number of people being forced off welfare is an indication that people are slipping into and out of the system.

"Of course you see some of that, but that's not the rule," Yancey said.

Working single moms

Before welfare reform, the single moms were the hardest to get back into the workforce. But that's been changing.

From 1996 to 1999, employment among the nation's never-married mothers rose 40 percent. In 1992, only 38 percent of young single mothers worked; by March 2000, 60 percent of that group were employed.

In Southeast Missouri, more and more welfare recipients are going back to work, too.

"We've put 999 people back to work since December, and that's full-time employment," Yancey said. "We've helped nurses, the service industry, manufacturers and even social workers. People want to work."

The highest wage someone received was $23.66 an hour, the lowest was $4 an hour, likely for waiting tables. The average is $6 an hour, he said.

Leimer is an example. She didn't want to stay on welfare. Leimer and her new husband and daughter were getting by, but it soon became apparent that she, too, would have to work.

Leimer had finished high school in the mean time by taking correspondence courses.

That's when she heard about the Missouri Mentoring Partnership, a welfare-to-work program that helps people prepare themselves for work and then places them in jobs.

At first, they placed her at Davault Marketing Group, actually an insurance company for the elderly. She performed clerical duties there, typing and answering phones.

"That helped get us through a tough patch," Leimer said.

Someone at Missouri Mentoring heard that a job as a pharmacy technician was open at Southeast Pharmacy at Doctor's Park, so Leimer sought and got the job, and later the program paid for the books and fee for Leimer to take the boards to become certified.

The job offers better pay and great benefits. She just celebrated her first-year anniversary.

"Before, the taxpayers were paying for us, and now we're taxpayers," said Leimer, who is proud of her credentialed name: Jennifer Leimer, CPhT.

Group support

There are several groups in the state and in this area that are state-funded and dedicated to helping get welfare recipients on the job:

East Missouri Action Agency

Caring Communities

Workforce Investment Board

Spirals

Missouri Mentoring Partnership

Project Hope

Shawn Seabaugh is the coordinator of the work site program for Missouri Mentoring, which was set up in 1993 to focus on at-risk youth. While helping teen-agers find jobs was always a part of it, once the program got funding from the Workforce Investment Board last year, they have been targeting more welfare recipients.

Seabaugh's agency works with clients between the ages of 16 and 22.

The program participants are taught rudimentary skills, from good hygiene -- taking a shower every day, using deodorant -- to the proper handshake. Job readiness classes include mock interviews, filling out job applications and even how to quit a job without burning any bridges.

"Some of these things sound basic, but they're not if you were never taught," Seabaugh said.

Instilling a work ethic at an early age is important, he said.

"If you teach young adults about work at 16, you're really showing them there's promise in the outside world for advancement," he said. "If these kids aren't working by the time they're 18, they're really behind the eight ball."

Some of the young adults in the program come from families that have been on welfare for generations, Seabaugh said.

"Most of the kids we work with are very eager to break the cycle," he said. "The youth we serve come from multigenerational situations where being on welfare is a family tradition. But these young adults are growing up in a more materialistic world. They know there's more to life than an EBT card."

An EBT card -- for Electronic Benefits Transfer -- is the plastic card that welfare recipients use to receive and use food stamps and cash benefits, though some still receive printed paper checks.

Welfare recipients get the plastic card and an identification number.

Missouri Mentoring serves about 200 young adults a year and since July has received more than 100 referrals from employers seeking workers.

Offering hope

Project Hope is a faith-based mentoring program connected to 25 different area churches. It uses development and training programs to help families back to work. Their approach is to send four-people teams to deal with families, to help them do things like set up a budget, self-esteem building and relationship repair, director Dennis Rigdon said.

"When we see people, they are not going to church, they feel beat down and useless," Rigdon said. "They feel like failures. In that state, they don't work because they feel productive."

Project Hope connects such families to other resources in the community, as well as helps them write resumes, or allows them to make job calls from the Project Hope office, and directs them to businesses that are seeking workers.

"The goal is really self-sufficiency and dignity," Rigdon said. "Once these families get over these obstacles, they're calling businesses all over town trying to find a job."

Out of the 60 families that have gone through the entire process since the program began in March 2000, all have at least one family member back in the workforce.

Rigdon said that the families in this situation aren't the only ones at fault for their situation.

"We paid them to stay at home and have these kids," he said. "To correct that and bring the cohesiveness of families back is going to take time. But we all stood by and watched it happen."

Of course, there would be no welfare-to-work if businesses didn't cooperate. Yancey with the Division of Family Services said that hasn't been a problem in Southeast Missouri, and he provided a list of businesses that hire welfare recipients. That list included names of most of the fast-food chains, both Cape Girardeau hospitals, grocery stores and others.

"They see this as a good employee pool," Yancey said. "But I think they also see it as giving people a chance to better themselves. Not that we go in there and announce this is a welfare recipient, please hire him. They're really no different than anybody else, except they've had economic problems."

Businesses receive a variety of benefits for hiring those going from welfare-to-work, including wage supplementation, trained workers and tax credits, which gives the employers a credit of about 40 percent of qualified wages for a maximum allowable credit of $2,400.

Jimmy John's sandwich shop owner Ed Johnson said he's hired three people from welfare-to-work programs, and two of them still work there. The third left unexpectedly.

"These I still have are great," he said. "But I told them don't bring anybody that didn't want to work. Based on my experience, I think it's a pretty good program."

He also said he didn't mind the tax credit.

Giving chances

Lowe's has hired eight welfare-to-work employees within the last 18 months.

"That's what we do is give them a chance," said Lowe's personnel training coordinator Tom Young. "They're dependable and as long as it stays that way, we'll keep hiring them when we need someone."

Davault Marketing Group, the business that hired Leimer, has also hired several other women, most of whom are pregnant, said Wanda Moore, director of administration for the company. The women are hired to do clerical work or to answer phones.

"They're always eager to work and easy to work with," she said.

Jennifer Leimer recently went to Jefferson City with a group of others who have benefited from welfare-to-work programs. In a tough budget year, Gov. Bob Holden is proposing making millions in cuts from programs like Missouri Mentoring.

Leimer attended as an example of how the program works. She and her mother now mentor people who have found themselves in situations like she did a few years back.

"I want to be able to help somebody and tell them my story," she said. "Maybe they'll see what I've been able to do and say 'Hey, I can do that, too.' "

smoyers@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 137