Welfare reform begins

By BETH LUCAS
Collegian Staff Writer

Welfare reform takes another step in Pennsylvania today.

Recipients who have not met the two-year time limit for finding a part-time job will be at risk of losing welfare benefits.

Welfare reforms placed a five-year lifetime limit on benefits in Pennsylvania beginning March 3, 1997. This meant any recipient, including those with prior assistance, could receive only an accumulation of five years of aid in their lifetime.

Pennsylvania passed additional laws, including the two-year time limit for finding work.

"It is required that a recipient be working at any approved work activity, including employment, training and education, after being on welfare for 24 months," said Jay Pagni, spokesperson for the Pennsylvania Department of Public Welfare.

If recipients qualify past that time, they will be allowed to stay on welfare for three more years. Recipients also can renew bids for welfare at later times.

Some people have expressed concern about recipients who lose benefits because of welfare reform, said Harold Leibovitz, communications director of the Urban Institute.

"A lot of welfare rolls have declined in other states, not because the recipients have gotten jobs, but because they have been sanctioned off welfare for not meeting requirements," Tasha Snyder (graduate-human development and family studies) said.

Snyder assists Linda Burton, Penn State professor of human development and sociology, who is one of eight professors working on a Johns Hopkins University national study concerning the effects of welfare reform on families.

The group will observe 1,400 welfare families and 1,400 poverty-level families in Boston, Chicago and San Antonio during the next four years to compare child care options and constraints on working.

"Our basic interest is the effects of welfare reform on parenting and children," Snyder said.

As welfare decreases, so does intake of food stamps and Medicaid, two programs related to but not included in welfare, Leibovitz said.

"Across the country, one-third to one-half of those off welfare are not working," he said.

But Pagni sees the reform as helpful to society. The state can now focus on education of recipients because it allocates to the department a grant that can be used in any form, he said.

This year's state welfare grant was $11.5 billion, making it the largest agency in the state and one of the largest in the nation.

The number of recipients has been declining for years, Pagni said. In 1994, 209,000 families received benefits, but in 1998 only 118,000 families received benefits in the state.

"We have taken 130,000 recipients from welfare (in the past two years) permanently," he said. "Seventy percent of these people have never come back."