It was well into the afternoon when the telephone rang. But Peggy Cadell could not muster the energy to answer the call. She lay numbly on top of her bed, still dressed in nightclothes, feeling as though her life was being steered in a direction over which she had no control.
”I was beginning to feel a little desperate,” explained Cadell, a soft- spoken woman of 30 who lives with her three sons in the predominantly black Austin neighborhood on the West Side. ”I started thinking about my boys, two of them teenagers and wanting things that I couldn`t give them. I felt like I was caught in a trap.”
Sixteen years earlier, when she was 14, she dropped out of school in the 8th grade, pregnant with her first child. She went on welfare.
From time to time, she broke away from the public aid rolls and found a job. Peggy Cadell wanted to work. She was a cashier. A clerk. A laborer in a nursing facility. She even tried to better herself with a class to learn how to cut hair.
But she had never been on welfare for such a long period of time. She had not been able to find work since 1979.
It was not for a lack of trying. She had a strict routine. Every couple of weeks, she would go to neighborhood supermarkets and fill out applications. Every day, after getting the boys off to school, she would say a prayer and then sit down to work the phone, inquiring about want ads and calling stores at random to see if there was a job she could fill.
Then came the telephone call. One of the boys picked up the receiver on the fourth or fifth ring. He handed his mother the phone.
”Congratulations, Peggy!”
”You mean I got it? I got it?” Peggy Cadell could not believe her ears. She started dancing and screaming, her son eyeing her nervously as she snapped back to life.
”Somebody wants me!” she shouted. ”Somebody is giving your mother a chance!”
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Cadell and 18 other public aid recipients in the Chicago area are on their way off the welfare rolls.
They have been provided with job training and they have learned a marketable skill. They have been placed in jobs.
The rest is up to them.
All 19 are members of the first graduating class of Project Chance, the state`s ambitious experiment in welfare reform that has a goal of moving 100,000 people off welfare rolls and into jobs by June, 1988.
After seven weeks of training and hands-on experience in caring for the elderly in a suburban nursing home, all 19 passed state board exams that certify them as nursing assistants.
On Monday, each is to report to their first day of work in a suburban nursing home.
The program, one of several attempts at welfare reform being tested across the country, was announced in December by Gov. James Thompson and Gregory Coler, director of the Department of Public Aid.
In earmarking $3 million for the project, they credited The Tribune series of articles published last fall, ”The American Millstone,” for calling attention to deficiencies in a welfare system that has contributed to the growth of the urban underclass, whose lives have become mired in cycles of welfare dependency and chronic joblessness.
The nursing project is one five Project Chance pilot programs, each of which targets a different work experience but shares the common goal of weaning the welfare recipient off government support.
The nursing program, administered by LaSalle Government Consultants Ltd., is unique in that it is the only pilot that guarantees jobs. Paul Cymbalisty, head of the firm, explained why:
”There is a real shortage of aides in nursing homes, especially in the suburbs. The turnover rate is incredibly high. The work is difficult and at starting salaries between $4 and $4.50 an hour, it is not great pay.”
More than 100 welfare recipients showed up to interview for 22 slots in the first class.
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The project provides an early glimpse of how flexible a jobs program may need to be if it has any hope of reaching the massive pool of unskilled and poorly educated welfare recipients.
Cymbalisty laughed as he recalled the naivete of his firm when it invested in a marketing profile of the ”ideal” employee that it would rescue from public aid: a high school graduate, married, 8th-grade reading level, steady employment history and a resident of the suburbs close to the jobs.
”Reality” was an applicant like Jacquelyn Safian: unmarried, 24, a 9th- grade dropout. The mother of a 7-year-old girl, she lives on the West Side, has a spotty work history, no competitive skills and difficulties in reading and math.
Criteria were revised, but clearly, not all of the 100 were employable. A few admitted to being interviewed only because their caseworker had threatened to ”sanction” them, or cut off benefits if they refused. One applicant, a 35-year-old man from the West Side, had only a 4th-grade education and could not even fill out the job forms. Interviewers saw what they recognized as
”track marks” from intravenous drug use on the arms of seven female applicants. None were hired.
Though reluctant to hire those who would have to travel more than 45 minutes to the training site in a western suburb, officials found themselves accepting most trainees from the impoverished West Side. Commuting time, by public transportation, was at least 1/2 hours.
Of the 22 accepted, 60 percent had no job training; 37 percent had not worked in 5 years; 95 percent had once been employed, but only 75 percent of those had jobs for more than a year; and all of them had children, though only one, a man, was married.
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Up every day at 4 a.m. to give himself enough time for three separate transfers on buses and a train was Milton Howery, 35, from the Near West Side. He had been laid off after nine years with Zenith Corp., and had since been unable to find steady work. After 3 1/2 years on general assistance, Howery was eager to do anything to get off welfare and provide for his wife and three children.
He was never late.
”My wife says this is the happiest she`s ever seen me,” he said. ”I`ve accomplished something and there is a real opportunity here to take more classes and make this a career.”
Lynn Sherer, who taught the nursing skills at Triton College, said she found more than the usual level of enthusiasm in this class.
They formed study groups and car pools. And when one did poorly on an exam, others would help them study next time around.
The importance of flexibility was graphically illustrated when students were tested. On the first quiz, 75 percent failed. Reading deficiencies were the stumbling block. Though many had become impressively skilled in hands-on nursing care, they had great difficulty deciphering the textbook.
Triton restructured the program for more in-class discussion and provided individual tutoring.
”I had no idea what the word ambulatory meant,” said Safian, who can now recite definitions of that and a number of complicated health-related terms with ease.
Though the work is grueling and dealing with the patients can often be stressful, Cadell, Howery and Safian say that having a job that allows them to help others does something important for them: It makes them feel valued, important, and contributes to their self-esteem.
The most important part of the job?
”Reading the charts,” Howery chuckled as he explained that one day, while attempting to make an elderly man comfortable at the same time he was trying to impress his instructor, he spent most of the day chattering away at the patient. Had he read the chart, he would have discovered that the man was deaf.
Two students dropped out after illness caused too many absences. Another failed the certification test. Only time will tell what will happen to the other 19.
Cymbalisty said the most vulnerable time for nursing home aides is the first six months, when it is common for 75 percent to quit. He said he will be surprised if this welfare class loses 20 percent.
A thank-you card, signed by all the students, was presented to instructors. This is how part of it read:
”We thank you gratefully . . . for teaching us . . . and haveing patients with us. Each indivisual is going to make it. . . . We got a chance.”
The next class is to begin in three weeks.
