By Jim McLean and Dave RanneyKHI News Service
TOPEKA, KAN. — Poverty is a political issue in Kansas.
Gov. Sam Brownback campaigned in 2010 on a platform that included as one of its main goals reducing childhood poverty. And since taking office, he has aggressively pursued that goal. But he’s done it his way.
Rather than putting millions more dollars into traditional public assistance programs, he has instituted policies that effectively limited access to them and instead steered would-be beneficiaries into welfare-to-work programs. The key to reducing poverty, he said, was getting people off the assistance rolls and into the workforce.
A Brownback commercial airing for his re-election campaign claims the strategy is working. It says that “welfare has been cut in half” by the governor’s welfare-to-work program.
The claim refers to a reduction in the number of Kansans enrolled in the state’s Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program. According to the Kansas Department for Children and Families, TANF enrollment has fallen by 54 percent over the past four years, dropping from 38,963 in the 2011 budget year to 17,681 in the 2014 budget year.
Similarly, the number of low-income parents – single mothers, mostly – receiving monthly child care subsidy payments has dropped by 27 percent during the same four-year period.
“We’re seeing individuals moving out of poverty through employment,” said Theresa Freed, a DCF spokesperson.
