In Welfare’s Defense

HUNTINGTON BEACH â€”  When Tracy Evans turned to the Orange County welfare system for help for herself and her son 3 1/2 years ago, she did it amid a whirlwind of emotion. There was fear and nagging disquiet. Uncertainty. And the resigned despair that comes with feeling forced to do something you don’t want to.

“It’s not a shame thing, but you definitely have to swallow your pride when you’re on AFDC [Aid to Families with Dependent Children],� Evans said. “I can’t even tell you how embarrassing it is when you see someone you know when you’re going through the food line� with food stamps.

Evans stands far from the image of a welfare mother that Gov. Pete Wilson invoked when he called last week for revamping the way the state cares for the poor, including limiting enrollment to one year at a time and requiring AFDC mothers to work 32 hours a week while receiving benefits.

She wonders whether she could have pulled herself up toward success had Wilson’s reforms been in place when she signed up for AFDC, and she fears the reforms might stop women like her who will need a leg up in the future.

Evans has used AFDC to forge a future for herself and her 12-year-old son, taking the $479 in monthly grants to help keep home and hearth together while earning an associate degree in nursing from Golden West College. When she graduates in May--she’s maintaining a 3.4 grade-point average--she expects to step into a career where jobs start at about $15 an hour. And she intends to continue part-time at Cal State Long Beach to earn a bachelor’s degree in nursing.

Had Wilson’s plan for welfare reform been in effect when Evans needed help, her vision of her future would have been much different, she said.

“I come from a middle-class family,� Evans said. “What about people who don’t have a background like mine, who can’t find out what’s available? Just signing up for a class can be intimidating.�

And now, she would not be keeping her head above water.

“AFDC has helped me when I basically would have had to go back to work, and school would have taken a back seat, and we would have just been struggling along,� said Evans, who has paid for college with the help of federal and state grants to low-income students. “We would have still been on the fringes of poverty, even when working. It makes me so angry. Everybody is self-responsible, but there has to be some safety measure for people.�

She also is incensed by the governor’s related proposals to let counties cut general assistance for single adults and have caseworkers recommend that impoverished mothers give up their children for adoption.

“I can’t get over that,� Evans said. “Why doesn’t he just go ahead and just require abortions for anybody who doesn’t have a proven way to support a child?�

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John Nelson, spokesman for Assembly Republican leader Curt Pringle of Garden Grove, said the reformed system would still be a safety net, but a temporary one. And while he lauded Evans’ ability to improve her life, he thinks she likely would have been just as successful without so much AFDC support.

“She would have known going into it that it’s a different system,� Nelson said. “To say that it can’t be done with a one-year limit for new folks, that just isn’t giving credit to people’s survival skills.�

Nelson said single mothers often can turn to friends and family to help with child care and other hindrances to signing up for education or job-training and still improve their lives.

“Welfare is still there, but it is a very temporary solution,� Nelson said. “Most people will rise to that challenge.�

Robert Stutzman, spokesman for Sen. Robert Hurtt (R-Garden Grove), said he thought the reforms would allow for people like Evans to continue receiving AFDC as long as they were in school, which is included in the new and broader federal guidelines. Officials for the Wilson administration could not be reached for clarification.

It remains unclear how Wilson’s plan will fare once it reaches the Democrat-controlled Legislature. But the governor has made welfare reform a key personal issue, saying he wants to end a system “that reduces the work ethic, discourages marriage and has driven fathers out of the home.�

Wilson’s comments add to a chorus of welfare-bashing that grates on Evans, who fell into the system reluctantly, appreciates the help it has afforded her and can’t wait to get out.

“I got my first job when I was 15 and my parents couldn’t afford to buy me the things I wanted,� said Evans, who was born in Westminster and grew up in Orange County. “I worked until I was six months pregnant. I’m not a slacker. I went back to school, cleaning houses while I got my medical assistant’s certificate.�

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It was the collapse of another perceived requisite for a stable modern society--her marriage--that led Evans to the welfare rolls, she said. After the marriage ended seven years ago, she and her son survived by sharing a house with her sister while she worked as a doctor’s assistant.

“I was thinking that would give us some stability,� Evans said. “Then my sister lost her job and moved to Texas. Just two weeks’ notice. That happened 4 1/2 years ago. I just knew I had to do whatever I could so that we wouldn’t have to depend on someone else.�

Evans’ son was 5 when the divorce came, and her husband, a contractor, was to pay monthly child support of $495, she said. Payments were erratic. When she decided to return to school four years ago, she asked him to live up to his obligations to help her get through.

“I went to him and asked him to guarantee that he would pay child support in full and on time, then I wouldn’t turn him over to the D.A.� Evans said. “But he wouldn’t pay me on time. He went like, ‘I got to pay my own bills.’ Then I turned him over to the D.A.’s office.�

When her ex-husband sold his home last summer, she said, the district attorney’s ombudsman’s office had a lien in place that reimbursed the county for the time Evans was on AFDC and that will support her through the end of January. But, Evans said, her ex-husband now has no traceable assets to resume child-support payments, so she plans to re-enroll in AFDC Feb. 1 to help carry her and her son through her planned May graduation.

She is angry that she had to rely on AFDC in the first place, but angrier still that the system that has helped her keep her life in order is being threatened. She wonders why Wilson’s proposals single out welfare mothers--able-bodied single parents in California are overwhelmingly women--and mention little about the men who have left them in such straits.

“He’s not paying his child support, so I’m the welfare mom,� she said. “He’s not the welfare dad. You don’t hear that. . . . Everybody can think of the two or three welfare moms they’ve seen buying beer while paying with food stamps for their food. But there are plenty just trying to get by and doing the best for our children.�

In Evans’ case, that means driving her son to school in the morning in her ’84 Honda and relying on relatives to pick him up at the end of the day while she’s in class. She and her son have lived the past four years in a rented 1930s one-story beach cottage that, to make way for oil drilling, was moved years ago from near Pacific Coast Highway to the heart of Huntington Beach.

It’s a comfortable but crowded home. Textbooks on “Pathophysiology� and “Psychiatric Mental Health Nursing� are stacked on a desk next to an aging off-brand personal computer. The walls and a dresser hold family photos, mostly black and white, including a military portrait of Evans’ late father in a U.S. Navy sailor’s hat. Two worn books of Robert Service’s poetry, a literary passion handed down from her father, stand on a corner of a sideboard. Plants abound, including a deep-green fishtail palm anchoring the living room.

Only Evans’ close friends and family know that she has relied on AFDC to survive. They have been supportive, she said, and some of them even encouraged her to apply in the first place.

It’s the comments of strangers, she said, that rankle.

“People talk when I’m in the room and they don’t know I’m on AFDC,� Evans said. “They start riding up one side and down the other about welfare mothers. It’s hard not to feel like you’re an inch high. In the political arena, you hear that welfare is ruining the nation.

“This isn’t a lifestyle you choose. . . . This is not the way we choose to live our life. This is the means we’re using to get to the point where we want to be.�