Brownback suggests federal government should change food stamps program to block grants
by Dave Ranney, KHI News Service
Topeka — Gov. Sam Brownback announced Monday his administration’s acceptance of a federal grant aimed at helping food stamp recipients find jobs and exit the program.
“Jobs are one of the key ways people can get themselves out of poverty,” Brownback said, addressing a morning press conference at the Department for Children and Families regional office.
Joining the governor at the press conference was Audrey Rowe, head of the Food and Nutrition Service within the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which administers the nation’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), also known as food stamps.
Rowe said Kansas’ three-year, $13.5-million grant will help expand a DCF-proposed initiative, called GOALS (Generating Opportunities for Attaining Lifelong Success), that will train SNAP recipients for living-wage jobs known to be available in their communities and provide case management-type services meant to help them remain employed.
DCF currently offers similar services for SNAP recipients in eight counties in northeast Kansas. The grant is expected to make them available in an additional 35 counties throughout the state.
Kansas was one of 10 states chosen to participate in the $200 million grant program, which was spelled out in the five-year farm bill that Congress passed into law last year amid repeated calls for reining in SNAP spending.
SNAP cost $74 billion last year, twice what it cost in 2008.
Brownback said he thought the program would be better administered if the federal government were to turn it over to the states in the form of block grants. Such an arrangement, he said, would let “Kansas develop Kansas solutions.”
Rowe politely disagreed, saying “…there are many benefits to a nationwide benefit delivery system, including responsiveness to markets, the stability of funding, and the protection afforded to individuals who participate in the SNAP program.”
She and Brownback agreed on the overarching goal of the grant.
“The most important thing for me is so that every child born in America, regardless of his or her zip code, can look up and see that the sky is the limit,” Rowe said. “We are in this to make sure children and families see the sky is the limit.”
Rowe said that an earlier USDA press release had erroneously reported that Kansas’ grant was for $3.4 million. The release, she said, has since been corrected.
Ruth Arensdorf, a DCF program manager charged with overseeing the state’s SNAP and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families programs, called reporters’ attention to a training program in southwest Kansas that successfully trained SNAP recipients for long-vacant “food safety inspector positions” in the region’s meat-packing plants.
The former SNAP recipients from the training program, she said, are now USDA employees and earning a living wage.
A newly-trained inspector earns $15.30 an hour, said Paul Kiecker, a district manager within the USDA’s food safety inspection service.
His agency, he said, had learned that it had “a great talent pool” of potential inspectors “sitting in the lobbies at DCF.”
Kiecker said the DCF program last year generated 100 qualified applicants for inspector positions that had proven difficult to fill.
“I’d say that in the past year we’ve hired 10 SNAP recipients,” he said.
The jobs, Kiecker said, involve inspecting severed heads and internal organs, and making “incisions into the lymph nodes.”
Only about one-fifth of the nation’s 48 million SNAP recipients are likely to benefit from job training. The rest are elderly, disabled, children, or already employed.
In Kansas, the average per-person SNAP benefit in Kansas is roughly $125 a month or $4.15 a day.
Of the 275,400 Kansans on food stamps in January, almost 132,000 – 45 percent —were children.
Generally, U.S. citizens are eligible for SNAP benefits if they are living in households at or below 130 percent of the federal poverty level, about $2,150 a month for a single parent with two children.
DCF arranged to have Sarah Bloxsom, a former realtor from Lawrence, address the gathering.
Bloxsom, a now-divorced mother of four children, ages 3 to 16, shared that she had received SNAP benefits for 18 months after the nation’s real estate market collapsed in 2008. She later landed a job Heartland Works, a company that helps people on public assistance find jobs, and was able to exit the program.
Though she found the job on her own, Bloxsom said she was the “face of poverty in Kansas” because she was skilled and wanted to work but couldn’t “find a match for what I was able to offer.”
Her SNAP experience, she said, led to her current full-time pursuit of a master’s degree in social work at Washburn University. She hopes to become a case manager in an employment training program.
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