President Bush last week granted Wisconsin a waiver of federal regulation, thus clearing the way for the state to proceed with a welfare overhaul that would offer incentives for teenagers to work and marry and discourage them from having additional children while on welfare.
Wisconsin’s welfare-reform proposal is the first to be approved since the President indicated in his State of the Union that the Administration wanted to ease and expedite the process of granting waivers to states seeking to reform their systems. (See Education Week, Feb. 19, 1992.)
“I am renewing my call to states to come forward with reforms which, like Wisconsin’s, replace the assumptions of our current welfare system,’' Mr. Bush said.
Besides requiring participation in education and employment activities for teenage welfare clients, the plan would remove disincentives to marriage and work and limit additional benefits to half the current amount when recipients have a second child while on welfare.
The Senate last week rejected an effort to transfer funding from defense to education and other social-service programs, as debate began on the 1993 budget resolution.
The Senate tabled an amendment to S Con Res 106, the budget resolution, that would have trimmed defense spending by $8 billion and transferred $4 billion to such education and children’s programs as Chapter 1, impact aid, and Head Start. The proposal was contingent on changes in budgetary rules needed to allow such a transfer--a change that has failed to win sufficient support in the Congress, despite several attempts in recent weeks.
The Senate also tabled a proposal to roughly double the defense cut proposed by President Bush and devote the savings to deficit reduction.
The Senate was expected to vote on the resolution late last week. It must then be reconciled with one approved last month by the House, which allotted $800,000 more to the budget category that includes education.
President Bush has announced that he intends to nominate Wade F. Horn, Commissioner of the Administration for Children, Youth and Families and Chief of the Children’s Bureau at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, to be Deputy Director for Demand Reduction for the Office of National Drug Control Policy.
Besides heading A.C.Y.F., which administers Head Start, Mr. Horn has served as a member of the National Commission on Children and in Mr. Bush’s Presidential campaign. He is a pediatrician who has held administrative posts at Children’s Hospital as well as academic positions.
No successor has been picked to head A.C.Y.F. if Mr. Horn is confirmed. co dc
A U.S. district judge last month refused to dismiss a case in which proprietary-school students are claiming that they should not be held liable for their student loans because the school they attended did not provide them a good education.
Judge Charles R. Richey said that although federal law protects lenders, guarantors, and the Education Department from having to assume defaulted loan costs, some state laws, including those in the District of Columbia, may not.
The defendant is the Culinary School of Washington, and the plaintiffs are some of the school’s former students. Several lenders, guarantee agencies, and the department are also defendants.
