CUMBERLAND -- From her small red-brick house hard by the highway, Virginia Curry called her pastor. As they sat at the dining table covered in flowered cloth, she told him she wanted to commit suicide -- that leaving welfare for work was ending up to be no kind of life.
Across Allegany County in rural Oldtown, Veronica Crites creeps in worn tennis shoes to her midnight shift at the nearby Superfos plant, trying not to wake her sleeping children.
The former welfare recipient couldn't be happier with her $6.75-an-hour job making buckets; she has left behind the dilapidated trailer, where she and six children squeezed into three bedrooms, for a better home.
Curry and Crites are the very different faces of a quiet revolution in rural, conservative Allegany County -- a leader in the state's welfare reform effort and an unlikely seat of social change.
Since January 1995, the small county's welfare rolls have dropped by 91 percent -- the largest percentage reduction in Maryland during that period -- from 4,829 recipients four years ago to 417 at the end of June. In a community of 77,000 people with the state's lowest median income and fourth-highest unemployment rate, where a good job is hard to find even for an experienced worker, welfare reform has come surprisingly quickly -- bringing with it a complex mixture of pride and misery.
Other problems increase
As dependence on welfare has fallen, other ills have continued to rise. Complaints to the Department of Juvenile Justice have skyrocketed, from 400 in 1993 to an expected 1,700 by the end of this year. While the reports are most often of nonviolent crime that would not even register in more urban areas -- teen smoking, broken windows and the like -- they have kept police increasingly busy, a sign of more youths bored and unsupervised while parents work.
Of the 675 people whose cases have been closed by the Allegany County Department of Social Services since June 1997, 217 left for jobs, and 108 were forced off the rolls or quit because they weren't participating in job-training programs, said Patricia Winebrenner, the agency's data manager. The rest of the cases were closed for miscellaneous reasons -- clients began receiving child support, they began receiving other benefits from Social Security or they moved.
The department has not been tracking how many people forced off welfare subsequently got jobs, or how many people who got them in the beginning have lost them.
Some former welfare clients find themselves in jobs that still do not pay their bills.
Curry, for example, should be a success story. She left the welfare rolls on her own initiative, finding a housekeeping job at a nursing home. But every time she gets an extra shift, her food stamps are cut. Her eligibility for medical benefits ran out, and she can't afford the $40 per paycheck she would have to pay for insurance. Her youngest two children mostly stay inside -- in Cumberland, there's little for a kid to do that's both legal and free.
For Curry, 38, independence has brought mind-numbing depression. Her pastor talked her out of suicide -- reminding her she was the only person who could provide for 10-year-old Kevin and 13-year-old Jack -- but her problems remain.
"It's really sad because you can never get ahead in life," she said. "I'm stuck. They will not be there to help you."
Domestic violence reports are on the rise in Allegany County, from one or two calls a week to the sheriff's office two years ago to one or two per day now. So are reports of child abuse, in a place that already has the second-highest rate in the state. Food pantry patronage has gone up 25 percent.
"Huffing," the practice of inhaling paint and gas fumes that has become popular around the nation, has gotten so bad that local stores have taken to limiting the number of spray cans that can be purchased by patrons younger than 18. Fledgling gangs, so far relatively harmless, have sprouted on the north and south sides of Cumberland.
'Quit the denial'
"We can't get better until we first admit to ourselves that we're this bad," said Maryland House Speaker Casper R. Taylor Jr., an Allegany Democrat working on an initiative to improve conditions in seven distressed Maryland counties, including his own.
"In some ways, we're like the person who is an alcoholic. The first thing you have got to do is quit the denial."
With a rush of new programs, Allegany officials are trying to do just that. Next month, the county school system will expand an already booming after-school program into a "K to Gray" menu of offerings that will keep some schools open as late as 9: 30 p.m. weeknights, with opportunities for parents to learn technological skills side by side with their children.
The goal is to cover the hours between 3 p.m. and 7 p.m., when, police say, most problems with unsupervised kids occur. A more modest after-school program for middle school students has proved extremely popular, attracting about 750 students each day and 97 percent of the sixth-graders in one school.
The programs also aim to break down barriers between teachers -- who in this rural county often are on the higher end of the income ladder -- and parents who may have a lifelong distrust of schools.
"The impact of economic distress is low expectations and false hopes," said John O'Connell, the superintendent of Allegany's public schools. "There's a resistance to change. People feel things are being done to them. Everybody wants progress, but nobody wants change."
At the same time, a pilot project will expand the county's small Department of Social Services -- the agency responsible for trying to move welfare recipients into training and jobs -- by 31 staffers, many of whom will be sent to far-flung communities.
Working together
Representatives of a host of agencies that once worked independently -- the health department, the county sheriff, the school board and the Department of Juvenile Justice -- have formed a local management team to manage their complex problems together. They'll share case information about the families they've all seen separately for years.
Their ambitious goal: to reach virtually every parent of children up to 5 years old and try to offer parenting classes, transportation to work, child care and whatever else could keep a family from slipping into crisis.
Allegany's local team, one of several county teams being created with state funding in Maryland, is "a national model," said Roann Tsakalas, director of community partnerships in the Governor's Office of Children, Youth and Families. "Hearing the anecdotal stories of how they're helping families tells me they are definitely going to make a difference in a very positive way, and I do believe the statistics will show that in time."
They'll be looking to help people such as Amanda and Scott Ansel, who are raising 2-year-old Tyler and 3-month-old Alexander on food stamps and Amanda Ansel's salary at Martin's Market. Scott Ansel has tried unsuccessfully to find work after being fired from another market.
"We really try to stay off welfare," said Amanda Ansel, 19. "I made good grades in school. Now I have to rely on the system to help me."
Some say welfare reform is only adding to the problem of unemployment, by pitting new prospective workers against those who already compete for low-wage jobs.
"There's more people competing for jobs, but there's no jobs here," said Paula Arnold, a single mother who is a chef at a LaVale restaurant. "And the ones that are here? They don't pay the bills."
Ted Flanagan, 19, moved to Cumberland from Martinsburg, W.Va., to be with his fiancee. He's filled out job applications at Murphy's and Super Fresh, at RG's and Value City. So far, none has been willing to take him on.
"I moved up here and lost everything," he said.
Michelle Andrews of Cumberland, a single mother of two, credits the Department of Social Services with getting her the job training she needed to leave the welfare rolls. The department also subsidizes day care for her young sons.
But her experience shows the way of things in Allegany County -- the Super Fresh store where she works part time is closing at the end of the month.
Andrews, 23, has lined up another job -- in the dietary unit of Memorial Hospital -- that she hopes will lead to more responsibility and more money.
Crites, the mother of six who left welfare behind in Oldtown, said jobs exist in Allegany County. The trouble, she said, is people who think they're above the work.
"They're offering jobs right and left," the 38-year-old said. "People work a little while, then they say: 'I don't like this.' Do they know how lucky they are to have a job?
"None of my kids can look at me and say, 'Mom ain't worth it.' "