Does this Family Deserve Welfare?

SIX-YEAR-OLD Joshua Wilson, with his blond hair, vivid blue eyes, and missing front teeth, can at times look angelic. But not today, in this conference room at Children's Hospital and Medical Center. Repeatedly, and increasingly loudly, he lets out something between a moan and a grunt. He starts tearing at his overalls; he finds clothes, for some reason, insufferable. His mother, Dolores, finally strips him, removing the special harness he wears to keep him from pulling off his clothes. But even naked, he runs around restlessly, issuing disturbed sounds and grabbing at everything in sight, including an array of files that he scatters into a crumpled mess.

Around this behavior, a group of professionals sit in a circle of chairs quietly talking. They are assessing Joshua's medical and behavioral condition and, most important, its impact on his mother's ability to get a job and get off welfare, as the law says she must within a year's time.

The medical professionals tell a welfare social worker that Joshua, whose chronic seizure disorder caused brain damage, leaving him developmentally akin to a baby, is neurologically hard to read. They say Joshua would be almost impossible for any day care to handle; they feel he needs to be cared for by the person that understands him best in the world, his mother, Dolores.

FOUR YEARS AGO, welfare reform was hailed as the beginning of the end of welfare, and the ethos behind it was tough-minded: No more handouts; the age of entitlement is over. While those sentiments still exist among conservative legislators in this state, among others, it is now becoming clear to many who work with welfare recipients that some people need public assistance for substantially longer than five years, perhaps even indefinitely.

On many levels, welfare reform has succeeded dramatically. Both nationally and locally, the welfare rolls dropped more quickly and more substantially than anybody expected. In Washington, the number of beneficiaries has dropped almost 40 percent since reform began in August 1997, from 88,000 to 55,000.

"One of the real keys to this is the fact that it became a mandatory program," says Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS) administrator Alan Kiest, whose Eastside office has been one of the most successful in the state at getting people to work. He says past efforts were hampered by power struggles with recipients who claimed they couldn't work because of special circumstances in their lives. Now, he says, there's no arguing. In addition to setting time limits, Workfirst (the state's new purposefully named welfare program) requires everyone to prepare for and seek out work while they are receiving benefits. "Even if you have a special-needs child," Kiest says, "you have to participate."

That approach, combined with an unprecedented level of resources to help people in their employment search, has worked for many, including some with daunting hurdles to overcome. But it hasn't worked for approximately 3,000 state residents who have stayed on welfare since the beginning of reform. Welfare reform is like an onion: The first layers to peel off were those best equipped to find work. Now, with less than a year to go before the first batch of people hit their five-year limit in August, we're down to the onion's core: the hardest cases that four years of effort—classes in life skills and r鳵m頷riting, internshiplike job opportunities, and problem solving around issues such as day care and transportation—have been unable to solve.

Dolores Wilson is only one such case—and not even the hardest one. "We have a lot of cases where there are multiple, multiple issues," says Pat Smith, who administers the DSHS Lake City office that handles Dolores' case. "We might be dealing with someone who had mental health issues, who has been in a domestic violence situation, and who has learning disabilities. . . . We have people who have 11 kids and [immigrants] who are illiterate in their own language."

Though welfare workers knew they would be hitting some difficult cases, the reality has been eye-opening. "You do get the feeling sometimes that people are not trying their best," says Rich Parker, the DSHS social worker on Dolores' case. "You wonder, is this person jerking me around? But every single time I've felt that way, I've ended up feeling guilty. I've gone into these people's homes and found out there are real problems."

Welfare workers are now considering extensions to the five-year limit. Federal law allows states to grant extensions to up to 20 percent of their overall caseloads. But who will get them, and for how long, will be debated over the next few months. The results will have profound implications for people like Dolores Wilson, yet this will be just the latest chapter in a tumultuous saga that has shaped their lives for the past four years.

DOLORES IS an ample woman in her early 40s, with light-brown hair and oversized bifocals. That her circumstances have not allowed her a tidy, orderly life is apparent from her appearance, her manner, and her Northgate apartment, whose bare floors are obviously not often cleaned. But the needs of Joshua and his older brother, Eddie, are clearly central.