Casper – If serious lessons about life can be learned from furniture, Tory Rathbun offers up a pair of her living-room chairs.
The mother of a mildly autistic 15- year-old, Rathbun can’t work a normal 9-to-5 job. She gets up at 5 a.m. to clean office buildings while her son is still asleep.
With less than $800 a month in cash income, Rathbun has perfected the art of getting by. She gets her bread from a charity. The chairs are a consignment-store special, with a fresh coat of paint and new upholstery.
In a country of disposable everything, the chairs represent the difference between her world and the one most Americans inhabit.
It’s a line you have to be poor to see.
In other states where she has lived, Rathbun has been helped by the government – $700 a month in Nebraska, a little more in Colorado.
In Wyoming, because she can’t leave her son to attend 20 hours a week of job-search training, she gets food stamps but nothing else.
“Here, it’s, ‘You follow the rules and you stick by them, or you fall through the cracks,”‘ said Rathbun, 50. “I don’t know why they call it a welfare system in Wyoming, because there isn’t anything.”
Rathbun is a survivor of what is, by one measure, the country’s most successful program of welfare reform.
According to the latest Department of Health and Human Services report to Congress, Wyoming has reduced the number of residents on welfare – formerly known as Aid to Families with Dependent Children, or AFDC – by 90 percent, to 400 families.
In nine years since Congress passed legislation meant to move the poor from welfare to work, Wyoming is as close as any state has come to putting an end to welfare as we know it.
But to its critics, Wyoming also is emblematic of the harsh edge of welfare reform in the hands of a conservative state.
Nearly 40 percent of the state’s single-mother families live in poverty. The number of children in protective custody is its highest ever.
And from 2000 to 2003, the number of single-parent families in the state dropped by 11 percent as the population overall grew by 1.6 percent, suggesting to critics that Wyoming’s most vulnerable families, unable to cope, are simply leaving.
Home to working poor
Now, even some of the state’s most prominent politicians are wondering what went wrong.
“It is a success story in terms of what welfare reform set out to do. That is not the same as saying we have successfully figured out an economy in which, as Kennedy said, a rising tide raises all boats,” said Wyoming Gov. Dave Freudenthal, referring to the former president.
Freudenthal, a Democrat, launched a major policy discussion about Wyoming’s working poor last year. His administration cited a series of troubling statistics, including that more than one-third of the state’s jobs pay less than $8.19 an hour – or below the poverty rate.
“We’ve learned that the goals (of welfare reform) should have been more broadly defined,” Freudenthal said. “The goals should have included strategies that are intended more to move them up, as opposed to just move them off” the welfare rolls.
One of the premises of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996, which handed more control to the states, was that local governments could better mold welfare to meet local needs.
But in the view of critics, it allowed the political slant of state legislatures to determine welfare policy.
In liberal New York, where rules are still generous, welfare mothers who won’t work still collect money. In Massachusetts, if they have a child under 6, they don’t have to work at all.
In conservative Wyoming, a mother must return to work 12 weeks after giving birth. Miss a day of monitored activities – usually 20 hours a week of classes and 20 hours of job searching – and a participant’s welfare can be cut off for two months.
And there’s no probation, no second chance. It’s what some participants here refer to as “one strike and you’re out.”
For some, it’s a bitter irony that the state that has cut welfare the most is also one where life is lived so close to the bone.
Choose welfare or school
Wyoming follows the pattern of a rural economy: Low-paying service jobs are plentiful; industries that propel workers into the middle class are few.
Even as an energy boom creates more well-paying jobs in oilfields and on construction sites, many in the state’s economy are left untouched. The proportion of people working two or more jobs in Wyoming is nearly double the national average.
Even in that economy, Lacy Raney sits near the bottom. After Raney pays rent and for electricity and other utilities, she has $40 left over to spend each month for everything food stamps won’t cover for herself and her 2-year-old.
Raney, 19, said she is befuddled by the logic of Wyoming’s welfare system.
Last year, as she studied to be a nurse and struggled to raise her son, she also worked part time. To get welfare money, Raney would have had to abide by the strict requirements of the POWER program, Wyoming’s successor to AFDC.
She would have had to spend 30 hours a week looking for a job. No matter that she already had a job and was going to school. Or that, with her part- time income, her welfare check would have amounted to $40 a month for a time commitment of 120 hours.
She didn’t get on welfare. Unable to make ends meet, Raney quit school.
“They just don’t realize how hard it is,” Raney said. “The people who make the decisions have everything they want. They don’t know what it’s like to need money to buy shoes or shampoo.”
Few in Wyoming want the old system back. Experts say one of the worst outcomes of pre-reform welfare was generational poverty – diminished expectations passed from welfare moms to welfare kids. For some, the fact that children now grow up in households where their parents provide a model of self-sufficiency justifies the reform.
“The system was doing enormous amounts of harm. It was developing a culture where you sit back and do nothing and the government provides,” said Charles Scott, the Republican state senator who co-authored Wyoming’s reform legislation.
But critics’ predictions that families would drop from the welfare rolls into an economic abyss have in some cases come true.
The Wyoming Department of Family Services conducts surveys each year of families that have moved from welfare to work. Data from 2004, the latest available, show that 59 percent of those families were surviving on less than $10,000 a year; 20 percent reported having no income at all. Only 10 percent of their jobs provided health insurance, and 38 percent of wage- earners had changed jobs within the last six months.
That reflects a puzzling result of welfare reform nationally.
In every year since 2000, the number of single mothers with jobs in the country has fallen, but welfare use has not substantially increased. The only conclusion, according to Ron Haskins, a welfare expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington, is that they are surviving any way they can – moving back in with parents, leaning on boyfriends or depending on friends.
Politicians take notice
In Wyoming, advocates for the poor cite the added stress on families for increases they see in child abuse, drug abuse and the abandonment of children to relatives or the system.
A recovering meth addict, Misty Fowler has had to let her two children go once – surrendering them to the Department of Family Services as she tried to get clean – and she vows it will never happen again.
Sitting on a bunk bed in a 10-by-12-foot room in the Central Wyoming Rescue Mission, Fowler, 23, tells a story of bad decisions and new starts that never quite took: abusive boyfriends, a self-destructive mother and difficulty escaping the grip of a dangerously enticing drug.
Fowler’s is the kind of case that proves the reformers’ point. Her mother spent 25 years on welfare as she raised six children. Fowler is a second-generation welfare mom, living on food stamps, disability and a small cash allowance from the state’s POWER program.
Her attitudes on the changes in welfare are mixed. From her childhood, she remembers special-occasion treats and Christmases full of presents. But her mother also used her welfare check to buy alcohol, which is responsible for Fowler’s spina bifida, a debilitating disease that makes it hard for her to work.
Now, Fowler is once again trying to start over. She ended up in the shelter after losing her subsidized housing because a boyfriend was abusing her children. And this month, she has a court hearing because the state is challenging her disability claim.
But she does have hope – mainly, Fowler said, because she is on the waiting list at Seton House and expects to be able to move in any day.
For many of Casper’s post-welfare mothers, Seton House, a mismatched collection of buildings on the city’s poor north side, is both the last stop on the way down and the first rung on the way up.
Pam Kozola, who has worked at the privately funded charity for 13 years and is its director, said that before welfare reform, its main function was connecting homeless mothers with the right state services.
“Families would come to Seton House, and our main goal was to get them set up with food stamps and welfare and get them on a list for low-income housing, and they were set,” said Kozola.
But in an era when welfare has virtually disappeared, private charities like Seton House have taken over much more of the burden.
Since the reforms, Seton House has revamped its mission, creating a two-year program that tries to take mothers from crisis to self-sufficiency. It provides housing and group counseling. Any resident who doesn’t have a high school diploma must work toward a GED, and half the subsidized rent goes into a savings account to get the women on their feet once they leave.
Last year, Seton House received more than 700 calls for 14 spots. Even as its staff finishes construction on five more units, Kozola knows the demand far outpaces the shelter’s ability to keep up.
One of her few consolations is that politicians have begun to take notice.
In October, Gov. Freudenthal will announce the results of a two-year policy effort called the Children and Families Initiative. It will include new worker-training programs to boost wages. A new state program will allow individuals to receive welfare while going to school without also having to work.
“Welfare reform had two promises: We would reduce the rolls; and we would provide jobs that pay well enough to get out of poverty,” said Rodger McDaniel, head of Wyoming’s Department of Family Services, the state’s welfare agency.
“We’ve only done one of those.”
Staff writer Michael Riley can be reached at 303-820-1614 or mriley@denverpost.com.
