After more than a year off welfare, UH student Jenny Duhaylonsod recently decided to try to get back on public assistance. She is at ease taking the bus to the welfare applications office downtown.

Hawaii's welfare rolls are on the rise, the state the solitary holdout bucking the trend of the Clinton administration's highly-touted welfare reform.

While other states have seen welfare recipients slide smoothly into jobs since the reform bill was signed into law in 1996, Hawaii's welfare recipients have increased by nearly 13 percent.

One reason? This reform package comes several years into a slow rebound in the nation's economy, providing more jobs for people who, under the new system, will have only five years to get off welfare. This rebound, however, never reached Hawai`i, where the economy has stagnated and -- according to one leading island economist -- won't get any better before the turn of the century.

Yet, while the number of people on welfare in Hawai`i has grown, the new system has left the state with less money. Federal support shrank from the $114 million once provided as federal entitlements to $94 million under the block grant system.

"We had less money to serve more people," said Linda Tsark, program manager of the benefits, employment, and support services division of the state Department of Human Services. "We knew we were dead in the water."

"The formula, based on our caseload for 1995, had nothing to do with the cost of living, just the number of people on our caseload," she said. "That's why this was the only state that really got burned."

Welfare reform also brought the end of the state's Job Opportunities and Basic Skills program, which reduced work requirements to allow for education, including vocational training and college.

"With the JOBS program, this state really went heavily into education, moreso than any other state," Tsark said. "But with welfare reform, it was very obvious that the focus was on work."

"I think this state realizes that education is where it's at," she said. "But we don't do a lot of education -- The push is employment now."

So the state has struggled, Tsark said, winning some exemptions from some federal requirements.

For example, able-bodied single parents in Hawai`i are expected to work at least 18 hours per week, versus the 20 hours required of recipients in other states. And the state was simply unwilling to impose Washington's "impossible" 35-hours-per-week expectation for two-parent households.

"Because we didn't want to meet this requirement, we pushed them over into a fully state-funded program," she said. "I think the feds are still trying to figure out whether it was legal or not."

But while Hawai`i grapples with the new numbers game, some are worried that Hawaii's poor will lose out in the end.

"There are reasons to be concerned that recipients will be treated in ways that are not in their best interest if the emphasis is moving them into jobs in order to meet quotas," writes Sanford Schram, a former instructor at the UH School of Social Work.

Schram, who has published several reports on welfare reform and poverty in Hawai`i, also argues the quotas only create more hurdles for single mothers, who make up the majority of recipients.

"It is questionable that ... sufficient numbers will have received the requisite services in child care, education and training so that they can take jobs that will enable them to provide for their families without public assistance."

"They" includes Jenny Duhaylonsod.

Continued on next page...

[ TOP ]