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| President Bill Clinton signs PRWORA in the White House Rose Garden, Aug. 22, 1996. |
by Frank Mejia, CalWORKs Employment Services Division Chief, with Edna Terrell
January 1, 2018 marked the 20th anniversary of Santa Barbara County’s implementation of the CalWORKs/Welfare-to-Work (CW/WTW) program. As a member of the Department’s core CW/WTW implementation team, I would like to take you back for a retrospective of what it was like at DSS 20 years ago, when we worked collaboratively across the organization and the community to launch our program!
We had less than five months from the time the Governor signed the legislation enacting the program to implementation. To do such a marathon of preparation and implementation in such a short period of time was as an experience as giddy, exhilarating and harrowing as any roller coaster. I enlisted the input of retired CalWORKs DSS Deputy Director Edna Terrell to contribute to this article, journeying back with us to bring you this piece of DSS history.
Background
In August 1996, President Bill Clinton signed national welfare reform legislation that promised to “end welfare as we know it.” Known formally as the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996, and informally as “welfare reform,” it eliminated the federal “Aid to Families with Dependent Children” (AFDC) program, and eliminated the federal “Job Opportunities and Basic Skills” (JOBS) training program known in California as “Greater Avenues for Independence” (GAIN). In their place, it established the new “Temporary Assistance to Needy Families” (TANF) program.
TANF provided states with block grants to administer their own welfare programs with greater flexibility, but mandated a very strong emphasis on work participation and time limits on assistance. Welfare reform also changed some rules in the federal program then known as Food Stamps (today known as SNAP federally and as CalFRESH in California) that we in California quickly implemented shortly after.
However, it took until August 11, 1997 for then-Governor Pete Wilson to sign AB1542 into California law to establish and administer the TANF program in our state effective January 1, 1998, calling it the “California Work Opportunity and Responsibility to Kids“ (CalWORKs) program. The new CalWORKs legislation required each County to develop a plan detailing how it would implement the program, with input from community members, collaboration from many local community partners, and the approval of the Board of Supervisors. The legislation emphasized the need to develop new collaborative relationships with the employer community, transportation agencies, local community colleges, and adult education schools, to name just a few.
Developing a County Plan
Both Edna and I recall our then-Director, Charlene Chase, establishing numerous short-term committees led by various managers and Program Assistants (today known as Department Business Specialists) to develop strategies for running our CalWORKs and Welfare-to-Work programs. We formed committees for transportation, employers, educators, child care, and so on, and a committee to look at job reclassification. In addition, members of the implementation team joined our Executive Team on a road trip throughout the county to conduct town hall meetings over the course of a number of evenings to share the draft plans developed in our various committees and to solicit public input. Edna and I both recall how fun—and how tiring—it was to hold all those community forums!
Retired Deputy Director Bob Montgomery and now-retired Division Chiefs Carol Kurtze and Jack Williams were our project managers, and were charged with final authoring of the County CalWORKs plan that was presented to the County Board of Supervisors for approval on December 16, 1997. One of Jack’s roles was to keep all of us on the project team on track, and I recall one way he did that was by following us around with GANTT charts (a tool used at the time to track and manage projects) to provide him updates on our assignments, so he could in turn report back to our Executive Team! I also recall Charlene asking our IT manager at the time, Lucy O’Connell, to purchase some of those new portable computers known as “laptops” for the project team, so that we could work day in and day out on the road and ensure we could finish our assignments in time for the plan to be presented to the Board.
The Board Approves our Plan!
Though our Director Charlene Chase delivered the presentation to the Board, we were all required to be there with her, as she anticipated lots of questions from board members, and she wanted her “experts” (including then-AFDC Program Assistant Michael Watts and then-Child Care Program Assistant Allegra Shiner) at the ready to answer board member questions. As my luck would have it, being the GAIN and soon to be WTW Program Assistant, I recall nervously answering a number of questions from the inquisitive Board wanting to know about the vast array of WTW services we were going to offer. Of course, some board members favored our educational opportunities, while others liked the “work first” philosophy of the new program. They ultimately approved our plan with enthusiasm and congratulated us for forming strong community partnerships to serve our neediest families, while ending welfare as we knew it then.
Establishing Business Processes
Though we had secured approval of our County CalWORKs Plan, we still had our work cut out for us. We still needed to update policies and procedures for line staff to reflect what had changed from AFDC/GAIN to the new CW/WTW programs. Because the legislation passed so late and with so little time to plan and implement, we literally found ourselves developing our business processes based on the actual text of the AB1542 bill, as no All County Letter had been issued by CDSS yet to provide us with guidance. I recall us interpreting the law as we thought it was intended, often just issuing temporary procedures via email to supervisors so they could print and provide them to staff—line staff didn’t have PC’s or email quite yet back then! Once CDSS began issuing guidance, we would then reissue direction if ours was incorrect.
An important note is that our employment program (previously known as GAIN) was about to triple in size during this time, as the new WTW program expanded who would be entitled to such services and what services could be provided. This also meant we quickly had to grow our staff to accommodate the increased caseloads countywide.
An important note is that our employment program (previously known as GAIN) was about to triple in size during this time, as the new WTW program expanded who would be entitled to such services and what services could be provided. This also meant we quickly had to grow our staff to accommodate the increased caseloads countywide.
Transitioning from AFDC/GAIN to CalWORKs/WTW
We went from AFDC to CalWORKs and from GAIN to WTW with a flip of the page on the calendar. Both Edna and I recall this time of historic change as both challenging and exciting, as the new program opened the door for many clients to access services they had not been able to previously tap into, and it also opened new career opportunities for our own staff.
At the time, our Eligibility Workers operated in a manual work environment using CDS instead of CalWIN, and Social Workers in GAIN were moving from GIS to CalWIN and soon transitioning into the new job classification of Career Employment Specialists. We had manual paper case files (there was no such thing as DocStar back then) and were getting acclimated to numerous new forms such as the CW-7 instead of the CA-7 or the new WTW-7 instead of the G-7. The old AFDC program had not had a limit on the length of time a family could receive assistance, and the state had not yet figured out a way to track the new 60 month lifetime time limit or the WTW 18 or 24 month time limits, so we began manually tracking time on aid on a paper form.
We also transitioned quite a number of EW’s and ES’s to CES and CES Supervisor job classifications respectively, through work with our County HR, Unions, and a collaboration with Allan Hancock College and a consulting firm called Solutions West, to help selected staff earn the requisite college courses to meet the qualifications of the newly established job classifications. There was definitely lots of staff training during this time so people could learn the new roles and new business procedures.
The rules and philosophy of the outgoing programs versus the new ones were quite different. AFDC budgeting changed from $30 and 1/3 standard earned income deduction to $250 plus 50%. We instituted a requirement to have children immunized and school attendance verified, We established a Diversion program so that some clients who met a certain criteria could forgo CW and opt instead for a lump-sum payment, and we established a process to waive program rules for victims of domestic violence. We also worked with the local Chumash tribe to help them establish their Tribal TANF program, which meant natives living on the reservation would be served through their program instead of ours.
Expanding Services
During this time we had a large number of clients in need of transitioning to WTW from GAIN and from not participating at all to joining our WTW caseload. We therefore offered evening and weekend Orientations through our contractor, Curtis & Associates, to get people registered in the program. We did away with deferrals in GAIN, and added new services such as treatment for substance abuse and mental health so that these conditions could be mitigated to allow people to participate in WTW activities. This was the start of our collaboration with the Alcohol Drug & Mental Health Services department (ADMHS), now known as Behavioral Wellness, to establish CalWORKs Resource Support Teams in each region.
We also added a three-stage Child Care system that had newly hired child care EW’s to handle the workload, and contracted out Stage II and III to other agencies. Rules for child care became very complex, but offered the ability for clients to participate in the growing array of activities. Edna also recalls all of the tracking that Jack Williams helped with to check out how we were utilizing our new resources, with reports quickly developed to identify high-ticket child care and transportation cases as our expenses continued to grow. She also shared her recollection of doing several pilot programs such as collaboration with community colleges to create a Certified Nursing Assistant program (CNA) to train our clients to become CNA’s. Similar initiatives to train clients to be licensed child care providers and entrepreneurs were also in the works during this time, as we launched a partnership with the Women’s Economic Ventures organization.
At the same time, partner agencies were getting their own funding streams to target services to CalWORKs recipients. For example, community colleges began receiving their own share of CW funding to help CW students on their college campuses, and the now defunct Job Training Network Department received Department of Labor funds to serve the “hardest to serve” CalWORKs clientele. The challenge for us at the time with so many funding initiatives was our capacity to keep up with developing the various initiatives and aligning them with the needs and wants of our clients. Throughout this time, we continued to emphasize to our partners to create short-term training programs and create a “work first” approach so that we were aligned with the philosophy of the CalWORKs program goals and the federal work participation rates.
Edna recalled some early lessons learned in developing these courses with our community college partners. She recalls that they were so eager to meet the expected influx students that they scheduled some classes as early as 7:00 a.m.—not realizing the logistical challenges involved for our clients to get to class that early. Our clients primarily used public transportation, which meant they needed to drop children off at daycare first, and then get to class, and a 7:00 a.m. start date was not the ideal time to make it work! We eventually worked out all the challenges to better serve our clients.
By the end of the first year, we as a county had accomplished a great deal and produced outstanding outcomes. The state measured our outcomes by looking at our discontinuance rate due to increased earnings, as well as decreased grants due to increased client earning. Both of these measures demonstrated that in our county clients were getting jobs and/or increasing their earnings as a result of our program efforts. These measures earned our county several million dollars in TANF Incentive funds to re-invest in our programs and in our community in the subsequent years.
Conclusion
We hope you have enjoyed this trip down Memory Lane. Perhaps someone reading this article now will find themselves writing a similar article 20 years from now, talking about what it was like "way back when we launched CalWORKs 2.0!"
Conclusion
We hope you have enjoyed this trip down Memory Lane. Perhaps someone reading this article now will find themselves writing a similar article 20 years from now, talking about what it was like "way back when we launched CalWORKs 2.0!"