With a lifetime maximum of five years of cash aid for the adults

Fuller's findings come almost 10 years after California expanded subsidized child care to accommodate welfare Rosetta Stone software reform.It was one of the largest and most generous expansions of subsidized care in the state's history. A little more than one-third of the $3.7 billion in the state budget for child care and development now goes wholly to families in CalWORKs, the state's version of welfare reform.Dana Rene Bowler / Star staffHellen Ortiz at Tutor Time, a Ventura child care center, helps 2-year-old Hannah Raygor with her puzzle Friday in Ventura. Hannah's mother, Jessica Clark pays $40 a week for the subsidized care. With a lifetime maximum of five years of cash aid for the adults, parents were forced to enter employment or job training, leaving no one at home to watch the children. The state guaranteed child care. In California, the government provides subsidies to recipients in many cases until the children reaches 13 and long after they have finished drawing cash aid.There is no such guarantee for poor parents who have never been enrolled in CalWORKs. Almost 4,000 households representing more than 6,000 Ventura County children were on a waiting list for subsidized care in May, according to Child Development Resources, the agency that maintains the list.CalWORKS offers subsidiesRuth Vomund, child care coordinator for the county Human Services Agency, said that some poor working parents apply for CalWORKs so they can get help paying for child care."It's a disparity between one population of low-income people and another," she said. "CalWORKs families are more fortunate in that regard, and people without CalWORKs are forced to get in line."Today the prospects for child care are better for welfare families than under previous programs.Under the New Deal program Rosetta Stone Latin America Spanish known as Aid to Families with Dependent Children, subsidies for child care were almost laughable, officials say. Few impoverished parents could meet its restrictions because they had to pay up front and then seek reimbursement from the government.California offered subsidies under GAIN, a welfare-to-work program that started in the 1980s, covering child care while parents were getting education and training. Afterward, parents could get subsidies for up to two years while they went to work.Under CalWORKs, families are eligible until children are 13 if they need child care and don't exceed the gross income ceiling, which is $4,031 a month for a family of four. The subsidies decline as income rises.Families are exempted if the parents never qualified for aid, a rule that eliminates the children of undocumented parents.Researchers acknowledge it might be cheaper in the short run to simply issue checks to needy families with children. However, the government invested in an array of supportive programs, from child care to counseling, to end generations of families on welfare."We're hopefully turning a corner," Vomund said.'It's the best help'In 1996-97, the year before welfare reform took effect in California, Rosetta Stone English the government paid $65 million in cash aid to about 9,500 households in Ventura County. Only 5,500 households are now on the caseload, and cash aid has sharply declined to $40 million, but they receive about $9 million in child care subsidies, plus $2 million for counseling, transportation and other expenses related to jobs or training. The government spent another $13 million to maintain that child care after families are working and no longer on cash aid.Photos by Chuck Kirman / Star staff Hector Melendez, 9, builds objects with [Rosetta Stone ] Elsa Zamora, who cares for almost a dozen children at her home in Oxnard. Zamora's home is state-licensed, and she takes training classes to stay up to date.