Part 2: With husband jailed, mother of three struggles to make ends meet

Editor’s note: In September, the Caledonian-Record published an exclusive series by AP award-winning writer Bethany Knight of Glover on poverty and cash welfare benefits in the Northeast Kingdom. The Caledonian-Record and Knight have generously allowed VTDigger to republish an edited version of the series.

Watching her husband return to prison wasn’t the biggest heartache that July day for Crystal Beaucage, 25.

The worst part was being left in Gilman with nothing to feed her three children, no car and facing eviction.

“I had no food and not a penny in my pocket,” she says.

The Stratford, N.H., native had moved to Vermont in April, after her husband was sentenced to house arrest for dealing drugs here.

The only affordable housing available was in the village of Gilman, with no yard for her children. “It’s so far away from everything,” and so small, the burg of some 70 folks doesn’t appear in the 2011 online U.S. Census population database.

A few months after the family settled in, her drug-addicted husband was again arrested for selling drugs and violating the terms of his probation. Beaucage learned he is similarly charged in Massachusetts and faces up to five years in prison.

With her husband in prison and her support system in another state, she scrambled.

“I needed to do something. I found the number to call the state,” she said. She dialed 1-800-479-5161, the 24-hour automated line for the Department for Children and Families (DCF) , and was sent an application for public benefits. With her hungry children — a 3-year-old, a 2-year-old and a 9-month-old- – she waited for close to a month before benefits started.

“My landlady refused to sign paperwork for me to get assistance, and they had to close out my New Hampshire account,” she said.

Because she loves this man, the father of her children, she wants it known that he once was a good provider, making good money at Montgomery Wire in Littleton, N.H. When the plant closed, they hooked up with New Hampshire’s welfare programs, receiving benefits, “off and on for the past three years, when he wasn’t working.”

The day Vermont’s “comprehensive integrated benefits package for young parents” reached Beaucage, she remembers thinking, “I was rich!”

Reach Up, the welfare program to help parents with children under 18 find work and work towards becoming self-sufficient, requires Beaucage to work to receive her monthly package. That package includes $770 for rent, utilities, diapers and other household necessities; $600 in 3SquaresVT, formerly known as food stamps; federal and state earned income credits (see sidebar below); a telephone lifeline benefit of $13; and child care for her three children. She also has food staples delivered to her every week by the federally funded Women Infants and Children Program (WIC).

“I get peanut butter, eggs, cheese and milk, but my refrigerator is broken and I can’t afford a new one.” Her apartment didn’t have a refrigerator, and the used one she bought died.

The whole family is transported by Rural Community Transportation (RCT) five days a week to the Lincoln School Northeast Kingdom Community Action (NEKCA) center in St. Johnsbury, where Beaucage contributes 20 hours cleaning or doing maintenance or clerical work, while her children go to daycare. She also takes advantage of ongoing trainings and workshops, covering work readiness, customer service and other skills needed for seeking gainful employment. Reach Up’s program design assumes every Reach Up participant will find employment.

The Beaucages are now Vermont Medicaid clients, and this winter, they will receive fuel assistance.

Reach Up, known as welfare before 1996, when President Clinton transformed it into a work requirement program, serves adults with children. Only single or married people with dependent children qualify for Reach Up, though frequently the adult in the household is a 60-plus-year-old grandparent.

“We’ve been offering support groups for seniors raising children,” says Ken Gordon, executive director the Area Agency on Agency in the Northeast Kingdom. Respite funds are also made available to exhausted elder caregivers, to cover the cost of another caregiver while they take a break.

All combined, while unemployed, Crystal Beaucage’s family of four receives about $17,800 in cash benefits annually, with an additional value of nearly $13,000 for Medicaid enrollment, or close to $30,000 in benefits a year.

But when she starts working, child-care costs again will become Beaucage’s worry.

About 1,000 children receive subsidies of $5,100 annually.

“Everyone on Reach Up gets a full child-care subsidy,” says Paul Dragon, DFC’s director of Reach Up. “However the state only pays up to a certain rate, so for more expensive child care, the family will have to pay a co-payment which can be significant.”

About 1,000 children receive subsidies of $5,100 annually.

“I know now that I can’t live on this,” Beaucage says, “I am looking for jobs and I actually got one with Home Health, until they found out I didn’t have a car.”

If she starts working a 20-hour-a-week job at minimum wage, earning $727 a month, the family loses the $700 grant, but gains significant earned income tax credits and retains the rest of her original package. Her total household budget would be $4,000 more a year than what she receives while unemployed. (For more on EITC, see sidebar)

If she lands a 40-hour-a-week job at minimum wage, she’ll earn $1,455 a month and the Beaucage family will have an annual income around $10,000 more than her unemployed package.

Working full time, Beaucage would have to pay for daycare for three children, 240 hours per month if she works part time or 480 hours full-time. Her child-care subsidy will drop as her earnings increase to 250 percent of the federal poverty line; a sliding-scale formula is applied by DCF’s Bright Futures child-care subsidy program to determine the size of subsidies.

Her grandfather is helping her find a car and she is looking for an apartment in a larger community. Right now, she walks 1.5 miles to Dalton, N.H., to buy her groceries, paying higher prices than she would at a supermarket.

“Once I get a car, things can fall easily into place,” she says confidently, “And I will repay my grandfather.”

Beaucage’s husband sold their car for drugs. Her computer also disappeared, when she was just a few hours short of completing her online associate’s degree through the University of Phoenix.

“I finished high school and started college because I want my children to be proud of me, so I can provide for them.” She proudly recalls completing a college assignment as she was going into labor.

An attractive and engaging young woman, Beaucage worked as a nurse’s aide until her first baby was born. She was raised to work hard; her father drove truck for more than 30 years and always provided. “We never struggled,” she says, “And we never needed welfare.” Her father, the one person she always considered her greatest supporter, died in New Hampshire, the same month her husband was first arrested in Vermont.

One month into their marriage, Beaucage learned her husband was addicted to drugs. He comes from a family of addicts, she says. “When he was 10 years old and had knee pain, his father gave him some of his mother’s methadone.”

What Beaucage didn’t know until this summer was that her husband was stealing checks and selling drugs, “all along, even when he was in a drug detox program in New Hampshire.”

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Reach Up tries to prepare recipients for jobs

In 1996, close to 28,000 Vermonters were enrolled in the welfare program called Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). That year, President Bill Clinton and the U.S. Congress did two things: They changed the name — from AFDC to Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF) — and the game — to collect welfare, every parent who could work had to work.

Single parents are required to participate in work activities 30 hours per week, 20 hours if they have a child under 6. Two-parent families must participate in work activities 40 hours a week. To be clear, a work activity requirement does actually require the welfare parent have a paying job.

Vermont’s welfare workers were charged with helping unemployed parents of children under 18 get ready to work, enroll in government programs supporting families and ultimately, get a job. Idealistically, Vermont renamed TANF “Reach Up.”

Sixteen years later, the state’s welfare caseload is nearly halved, to 15,762 parents and children. At a cost of $49 million annually, Vermont supports 6,248 families, 939 in the Northeast Kingdom.

“Ninety percent are single mothers. Children make nearly two-thirds of our program,” says Paul Dragon, Reach Up/TANF director. “For Vermont, it is about stabilizing the family and promoting family self sufficiency.”

Lea Bijolle left home at 14. Her parents divorced and she didn’t hit it off with her father’s “new woman.” At 15, she was living with her boyfriend and at 16 she was pregnant, living with her boyfriend’s grandmother in St. Johnsbury.

The grandmother enrolled them in Reach Up, as she was on state assistance and knew the process. The couple soon moved in with his mother. Considered a two-parent family, they were given a 40-hour weekly work requirement, which they met in part by taking high school classes.

“We each did four hours a day,” Bijolle says. “If I don’t meet my hours, I don’t meet my children’s needs,” she says, referencing aid reduction triggered by avoiding the work requirement.

That was seven years and two more babies ago. Still on Reach Up, the 24-year-old rents a two-bedroom apartment in Lyndonville for $600, where she lives with her daughters, ages 2 and 4. The girls have the same father, but don’t live with him. Her 7-year-old lives with his father and Bijolle’s present boyfriend is in prison.

In the Northeast Kingdom, Reach Up participants are assigned state case managers or contracted case managers from NEKCA. Younger parents have a NEKCA case manager, so they can participate in the Agency’s Parent Child Center.

Through the Community High School of Vermont, the public school Vermont created for prisoners to receive a diploma rather than a GED, Bijolle fulfilled her work requirements by completing high school. NEKCA workers diplomatically dance around the subject, but it seems few pregnant teens or young mothers successfully attend the area public high schools or academies.

With her $684 Reach Up grant and $502 in 3Squares food assistance, Bijolle pays all the monthly bills: rent, food, diapers and personal needs. A relative pays for her prepaid cell phone.

“I have no car. I have no TV. Fuel assistance fills my tank,” she says.

She and her children ride the RCT van five days a week to the NEKCA worksite at Lincoln School, where she works on finding a job and her children attend daycare. “I can choose another daycare, but I like being here with them.”

A month after graduation she got a job as a daycare assistant and her benefits were reduced accordingly. Her next job, at McDonald’s, proved disastrous.

“I left because I got no respect from the manager,” she says, adding she is thinking of applying there again.

If she does get a job, Bijolle will continue to receive a $463 federal earned income tax credit (EITC) as well as Vermont’s similar tax credit of $148. Earned Income Tax Credits allow low- and moderate-income families to keep more of what they earn.

The Department of Children and Families describes the EITC in a Reach Up flyer: “If your family’s earned income falls below certain limits, you can collect up to $5,000 even if you don’t owe any income tax. You may qualify even if you’re working and not getting Reach Up. If you are receiving Reach Up, this tax credit is not counted as income. It’s worth looking into.”

Of the 22 states offering what some call the most effective anti-poverty program in America, Vermont awards one of the highest credits, 32 percent of the federal EITC, bested only by Minnesota, at 33 percent.

Helped to get off welfare and get a job, single mothers earning minimum wage can only cover 40 percent of their expenses, and must depend on tax dollars to pay the rest. Have they truly “transitioned to self-sufficiency”?

“It makes me feel better to work; it gives me more to do and I get more money,” Bijolle says, adding she would like to be in management someday.

The single mother of three believes the work readiness workshops she attends at the NEKCA worksite are helpful, but can’t attend anything offered in the afternoon, since her family’s prearranged RCT ride leaves by 1 p.m.

Bethany Knight of Glover is a former newspaper reporter, magazine editor, college journalism instructor, gubernatorial speech writer and health care executive. She co-authored five reports on Vermont issues produced by the Ethan Allen Institute, www.ethanallen.org. A licensed nursing home administrator, Knight’s books for caregivers are sold by Hartman Publishing. Her first novel, “On the Edge of Tickle,” can be found at www.smashwords.com.