WORKFARE MEANS DAY CARE

By JAMES COLLINS

By 6:30 each morning, Alberta Early has arrived at the Carter Development Center on Milwaukee's near North Side. Along with Shirlene Devougas, Early cares for eight infants in one of the center's day-care programs, and three of their charges show up before 7, so Early has to be ready for them. By 8:30 all the babies are present, and Early and Devougas give them breakfast. "Everybody wants to be fed at the same time," says Early with a laugh. The room is clean and bright, painted in a pleasant combination of green and white. Some infants crawl around a blue carpet, where they play with blocks, stacking toys, a plastic mirror on wheels. On one recent afternoon, Early pushed the mirror toward 11-month-old Aubrey. "See that?" she said, "That's you!" The youngest babies are placed in infant seats, unless Early or Devougas has got them in her lap. "We sit and hold them," Early says, "play with their hands and feet and talk to them."

It sounds just about perfect, and it is. In the world of day care, the kinds of programs run at the Carter Center can be considered the ideal. They provide good food, a safe setting, plenty of mental and physical stimulus, and lots of attention and affection. Equally significant, they serve the children of low-income families, kids who may be at risk for poor development. Troy Harris used to be on welfare and now works at the Carter Center, where her two children are in day-care programs. "If I didn't work here, I would still want my children here," she says. "[Otherwise] your child could sit at home all day or at the neighbor's home watching TV. That would be my worry--that my child's not learning enough."

Millions of poor mothers are soon going to be faced with the same worry. Under the new federal welfare law, even recipients with very young children are required to find work (although states may exempt a single parent caring for a child under one year old). According to the Children's Defense Fund, there are now about 9.75 million children on welfare, about 4.5 million of them under five. That translates into an enormous new demand for day care and raises concerns about the quality of that care.

In Wisconsin, which has pioneered welfare reform and is often touted as a national model, the crunch is coming sooner than in other states. That is partly because the latest phase of Wisconsin's law, which is called Wisconsin Works, or W-2, goes into effect Jan. 6 and requires mothers to get into a job program and parenting classes just 12 weeks after giving birth. But it is also because the state already has fairly high standards for day care in place. The challenge has been how to maintain those standards while accommodating thousands of new kids--and the struggle so far has been both painful and instructive.

In 1996 Wisconsin subsidized care for 17,000 children at a cost of $52 million (about $3,000 per child). Under W-2, the number of children requiring subsidized care is expected to triple, to 60,000. Yet in its original W-2 legislation, Wisconsin did not triple the state funds earmarked for child care. In fact, it planned to increase its own spending only negligibly and use federal block grants to bring the amount of money available for day care next year to $160 million (roughly $2,600 per child).

So just as it faces a flood of younger, poorer, needier children into state-subsidized day care, Wisconsin planned to reduce the amount it spends for each child--with consequences that would be felt throughout the day-care system. For one thing, the state proposed channeling more of this money to welfare families by reducing day-care subsidies to the working poor through higher co-payments and eligibility standards. (Some low-income families would have been required to spend as much as 46% of their gross income on child care.) The state also proposed a sliding-scale co-pay structure for welfare recipients based on their income and the cost of the care they choose, and created a new category called "provisional certified care." This care, to be provided by any adult who passes a criminal background check, in any home meeting basic health and safety requirements, would be exempt from most of the regulations aimed at ensuring quality in Wisconsin's licensed day-care centers--and so presumably would be much cheaper.

Children's advocates in Wisconsin were quick to criticize this version of W-2. Mary Babula, head of Wisconsin's Early Childhood Association, charged that it would create "a push for parents with low disposable income to choose the cheapest care they can find." Linda Bosetti, who works for the Silver Spring Neighborhood Center in Milwaukee, was worried because subsidizing provisional certified care--while it might provide some cash to the grandmother who has been baby-sitting for free--could also put children at risk by parking them with untrained strangers. Indeed, this cheaper, second-class day care might begin to drive licensed centers out of business.

Jean Rogers, who directs W-2, countered that "in the real world, families make [child-care] decisions based on a number of qualities and situations." When she talked to welfare recipients while drafting W-2, she says, "the single most common response was that they thought child care should be made more flexible so that friends and relatives would be able to receive the subsidy."

Nevertheless, the outcry prompted Governor Tommy Thompson to appoint a special panel of child-care providers, elected officials and policymakers to reconsider the co-pay provisions. Last week, on its recommendation, Wisconsin revised the plan. Day-care co-payments will be calculated primarily according to income and number of children, not the cost of care. And a family's co-payment obligation will be capped at 16% of gross income. To help close the spending gap between this formula and the earlier one, Thompson will use an extra $25 million in federal money for 1997 that the state had earned from reductions in its welfare rolls during recent years. "We're leading the country. Nobody has tried to adopt a plan of our magnitude that both eliminates welfare and makes a commitment to quality child care," he says. "We don't have all the answers. But what we've done is attempt to level the speed bumps that we have anticipated so far."

There may be more bumps ahead. Because what is at stake in the coming day-care crunch is of far more consequence than whether little Janie watches too much Rug Rats. Without a good solution to the day-care dilemma, welfare reform has no hope of breaking the "cycle of dependency" and may in fact exacerbate it. For starters, a study by Marcia Meyers at Columbia University's School of Social Work has shown that good, reliable child care is a key factor in whether a welfare mother can perform well on the job and stick with it.

But more fundamentally, inadequate care in the pre-K years may affect a child's later ability to learn, limiting it in ways that cannot be offset by the uplifting sight of seeing Mom march off to work. Brain-development research indicates that in the first two years of life, virtually all our vital neural connections are being formed. Other studies show the crucial role that responsive, sensitive and stimulating care plays in forming those synapses. A bad day-care situation, where a child is understimulated for long stretches of time or moved among ever changing caregivers, may cause long-term harm to a child's cognitive and emotional development.

For that reason, the day-care part of workfare is both an enormous risk and an enormous opportunity. Few of Wisconsin's poor children will get the excellent care that Alberta Early provides at the Carter Center, which charges $8,476 a year for an infant (less for an older child). In fact, some mothers may have to take their children out of the center because their co-payment will rise. What happens to the 2,700 children of the working poor who lose their subsidies altogether is one of the many imponderables as Wisconsin enters the next phase of its welfare experiment. But what child advocates continue to remind the Governor of is that while the W-2 program is susceptible to endless tinkering and adjustments, its effects on young children may be permanent.

--Reported by Wendy Cole and Erik Gunn/Milwaukee, Melissa Ludtke/Boston and Ann Simmons/Washington

With reporting by WENDY COLE AND ERIK GUNN/MILWAUKEE, MELISSA LUDTKE/BOSTON AND ANN SIMMONS/WASHINGTON