O.C. to Lose Millions in Welfare Funds

Orange County this month will lose millions in state dollars earmarked to help welfare families with child care because too few local parents have applied for the aid, officials say.

The news comes as a county grand jury report recommends several ways for the county to use the funds--not only on child-care programs that allow welfare recipients to work or take classes, but also to train them to become child-care providers themselves.

Local welfare officials acknowledge that Orange County, like many counties around the state, has not taken full advantage of state funding. “We have been underutilizing our child-care funds,” said Angelo Doti, director of Family Self-Sufficiency for the county’s Social Services Agency.

The state allocated $23 million in welfare-to-work funds for child care to Orange County for the 1998-99 fiscal year, which ends June 30. The county expects to have spent about $16 million by the end of the fiscal year, Doti said, but the unspent portion--nearly $7 million--will be lost.

Although the county will not be required to return the funds, the sum will be subtracted from next year’s state allocation, said Sidonie Squier, spokeswoman for the state Department of Social Services. The money “is not meant to sit in coffers at counties,” she said. “It’s meant to provide services.”

The county also lost child-care funds issued for the second half of the last fiscal year, when the welfare-to-work program began, officials said.

The problem is not limited to Orange County, Squier said. No county has fully used all its allotments from Sacramento for child care, job training or other components of the state’s welfare-to-work program, she said.

The county’s monthly welfare caseload averages 22,000 families with 48,000 children. But child care was requested for only about 5,000 of those children, Doti said.

The money results from the California Work Opportunity and Responsibility to Kids law, passed in response to the federal Welfare-to-Work Act of 1997. The state law requires welfare recipients to spend at least 32 hours per week working, training or learning. The act also entitles those recipients to subsidized child care while they are in the program.

“Child care is one of the No. 1 barriers for people not being able to maintain employment and training,” said Ellin Chariton, director of the county education department’s child development services office. “Child care is an essential ingredient.”

Some families may not have asked for the money because they rely on stay-at-home parents or have free child care through relatives, community colleges or other organizations. Additionally, a 1998 state law that tightened rules about child care reimbursement to nonlicensed providers, such as friends or relatives, may have had a chilling effect on funding requests, Doti said.

But no one really knows what the families who don’t request funding are doing. That’s why the county has launched a survey of welfare recipients about child care, Doti said. Results should be available in early September.

“It will definitely tell us why individuals . . . are not requesting child care,” he said, adding that the results will help steer funding priorities.

Doti said he’s not worried about the loss of child care funds this year because he expects an even larger allocation next year and has $10 million to $20 million of “incentive funds” that can be used for various projects.

The grand jury report, issued June 4, said the state welfare-to-work funds ought to be used to create extended-day educational pilot programs at public schools throughout the county, particularly in Anaheim, Garden Grove, Placentia, Santa Ana and Westminster. More than half of the county’s welfare population lives in these cities.

The grand jury also recommended a second pilot program to train welfare recipients to become licensed child-care providers for the school-based programs. English classes for participants and day-care for their young children should be included.

In Northern California, the Marin County Department of Health and Human Services developed a similar program in 1993. Parents as First Teachers successfully qualified welfare recipients for state licensing to become early childhood education teachers, the grand jury reported.

Annette Jewell, vice chairwoman of the Community Development Council, a nonprofit social services organization in Orange County, said welfare recipients must be involved in the creation of such programs to ensure success. “We really need to make what we offer to families relevant to the way they live their lives,” she said.

Doti said the grand jury’s ideas were “right on target.” But using the child-care money for such programs would be difficult if not impossible because of the state’s narrow funding limitations, he said. County officials will examine whether other funds could be used to carry out some of the grand jury’s recommendations, he said.