Repealing the “Family Cap”

The nationwide effort to repeal a decades-long attack on poor mothers and families; how disabled students get left behind in responses to school shootings; plus, the Trump Administration’s latest HUD rule that cruelly targets immigrant families. Subscribe to Off-Kilter on iTunes.

A decades-long experiment that caps public assistance for families by penalizing mothers who give birth while receiving assistance — known as the “family cap” — is at long last being put in the rearview mirror by lawmakers in Massachusetts. Massachusetts is on track to join at least eight other states, including California, that have repealed their own similar policies in recent years, as part of a growing nationwide movement to overturn a policy that has deep roots in the myth of the welfare queen. To dig into how a policy many antipoverty advocates had long said could never be overturned is now the subject of a nationwide repeal campaign, Rebecca talks with Jessica Bartholow, legislative advocate at the Western Center on Law and Policy, who’s been leading the charge on this issue in California and across the country.

Later in the show: “On a below-zero January day in early 2018, Katie Shelley was working on the fourth floor of a building on her college campus in Northwest Ohio when the fire alarm went off. She proceeded to work through the conflict she has faced her whole life: How to get out of the building as a wheelchair user. No plans were in place for her evacuation. Growing up in the aftermath of events like the Columbine shooting and 9/11, she was used to having to worry about whether or not she’d be safe in a school emergency.” So writes Disability Justice Initiative fellow Valerie Novack in “Disabled Students Are Left Behind in School Shooting Responses” over at TalkPoverty.org, which she joins Rebecca to discuss.

And finally: if you’re starting to feel like there’s a new administrative rule attacking low-income families from the Trump administration every time Off-Kilter airs another episode… you’re not wrong. The latest proposed rule, released just last week, would prohibit so-called “mixed status” families from living in public and other subsidized housing. To unpack what it would do, who would be hurt, and how we fight back, Rebecca talks with Heidi Schultheis, senior policy analyst and housing and homelessness guru for CAP’s poverty program.

This week’s guests:

• Jessica Bartholow, legislative advocate, Western Center on Law and Policy
• Valerie Novack, Portlight Fellow for the Disability Justice Initiative, Center for American Progress
• Heidi Schultheis, senior policy analyst, poverty program, Center for American Progress

For more on this week’s topics:

• Learn more about the history of state “family cap” policies here — plus more on Massachusetts’ repeal effort here and California’s successful repeal here.
• Read Valerie’s TalkPoverty piece: “Disabled Students Are Left Behind in School Shootings.”
• Get up to speed on the Trump administration’s proposed rule targeting mixed-immigration-status families in public housing and find everything you need to submit a comment at www.keep-families-together.org (deadline: July 9, 2019) #KeepFamiliesTogether

This week’s transcripts:

REBECCA VALLAS (HOST): Welcome to Off-Kilter, the show about poverty, inequality, and everything they intersect with powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m Rebecca Vallas. This week on Off-Kilter, “I just in theory had to wait in a burning building until someone came to get me. Even at 10 years old I knew this was a horrible plan, and I was not a fan,” remembers Katie Shelley, a wheelchair user whose school literally didn’t know what to do with her in case of an emergency like a school shooting. I talk with Disability Justice Initiative fellow Valerie Novack about how disabled students are left behind in school shooting responses and other emergency responses.

Later in the show, as the executive actions just keep on coming, the latest new proposal from the Trump administration released last week would throw tens of thousands of families out of public housing for the crime of having mixed immigration status. I talk with Heidi Schultheis, Housing and Homelessness guru for the poverty program at the Center for American Progress about the proposed rule, what it would do, and how we fight back.

But first, a decades-long experiment that caps public assistance for families by penalizing mothers who give birth while receiving assistance known as the “family cap” is at long last being put to rest by lawmakers in Massachusetts. Massachusetts is on track to join at least eight other states, including California, that have repealed their own similar family cap policies in recent years as part of a growing nationwide movement to overturn a policy that has deep roots in the myth of the welfare queen.

To dig into how a policy many anti-poverty advocates have long said could never be overturned is now the subject of a nationwide repeal campaign. I’m joined by Jessica Barthallow, legislative advocate at the Western Center on Law and Policy. She’s been leading the charge on this issue in California and in states across the country. Jess, thanks so much for taking the time to join the show.

JESSICA BARTHALLOW: Thanks for having me, Rebecca.

VALLAS: So, before we get into the good news from Massachusetts, from California, from really what’s become a movement to repeal these policies, it feels necessary to sort of start at the beginning, which is the origins of these stigmatizing and ugly policies. They have their origins in the ’90s as do many such policies that are of this nature. And it started with what some people call “welfare reform.” Tell a little bit of that story: how did we get to a place where family cap policies were in so many states?

BARTHALLOW: You know, leading up to welfare reform, people might not know if you didn’t live through it, but there was really a campaign against low-income families. There was a narrative-changing campaign where, throughout the country, people started to kind sell this myth about welfare recipients and then their children and the female-headed households that frequently turned to the program to pay for their basic needs. And that narrative led to welfare reform, and it also created these various policy campaigns that happened pre-welfare reform. A lot of people refer to these kinds of myths as the welfare queen myth: the idea that low-income families headed by women were having babies just so they can get a little bit of money from the state government.

And so, before welfare reform happened, the states came up with these policies in places like New Jersey and California that had the governor at the time of Pete Wilson, and they were making proposals to get waivers to the Federal Aid to Families with Dependent Children, AFDC laws which allowed the states to deny aid to the babies.

VALLAS: And AFDC, of course, was the law that predated TANF, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, which replaced it as part of that misnomer of welfare reform.

BARTHALLOW: That’s right. And so, our law in California was passed in 1994, before welfare reform, and a lot of states had this policy in place before welfare reform as a waiver that was approved. We had our waiver denied by the Clinton administration because we refused to include a research component that was required of the waiver. So, it was pre-welfare reform, but then when welfare reform happened, a lot of states like California said we’ll go ahead and do it now without the waiver. Because at that point in time, they could make their own policy choices about the program.

VALLAS: So Jess, you said it well: there are few policies that are so directly tied to Reagan’s myth of the welfare queen. I mean this really is kind of the poster child policy that stems from that kind of a myth. What were the outcomes or the effect that people thought that these kinds of policies were going to have when they put them in place? And have they been born out?

BARTHALLOW: You know, it was really important to me, I think, in this campaign but especially really in any campaign to sit down with the architects of the policy if possible or go back to the original documents and see what people were thinking: what was in their head when they passed this policy? So, the people I spoke to — a couple of people who were involved from the beginning — said that they really had the intent to make lives better for low-income communities and to prevent the harm of childhood poverty by simply preventing the child itself. That they really believed in their heart of hearts that if they denied $100, or $130 as it was in California, to a welfare-recipient family that that family would then choose not to have a child. But 20 years of research — As I said before, the waivers were not provided without a research component. So, there was, thankfully, this kind of many years of research that was able to show that there really wasn’t any connection at all and that low-income families, as we know, have children for the same reasons that other people do, sometimes because they intentionally choose to grow their family, sometimes because it was an accident, and they chose to keep the pregnancy. And that 100 bucks is never enough to pay for a kid and certainly not going to influence whether or not a child is born.

VALLAS: Well, and that last point I feel like just really bears underscoring. I feel like how many times have we all heard people say the thing, right, of, “Oh, you know, poor women are just having babies so they can get welfare,” right? That’s that horrible, disgusting myth that’s out there, that gets repeated by Fox News and other kinds of platforms. But when you break it down to how much money we’re talking about, no person in their right mind would actually have a child for like $100 and change a month.

BARTHALLOW: That’s right. As I always said, so, let me get this straight. Welfare recipients are so conniving, they’re so kind of forward-thinking that they’re going to go get themselves pregnant, go through nine months of pregnancy, and have a baby for $100, but they’re not smart enough to figure out that $100 doesn’t even pay for the diapers and the wipes, right?

VALLAS: It just doesn’t pan out.

BARTHALLOW: And in California, our great campaign on this issue was Senator Holly Mitchell, who is the budget chairperson in the Senate. And she would say, whoever thinks that somebody is going to have a baby, and you know, get pregnant and have a baby for $90, $100, even $130 a month, they’ve never been pregnant. Because there’s no woman who’s been pregnant who’s going to say that that would even be possible.

VALLAS: So, we watched following the 1996 welfare law that created TANF and that cut assistance in a whole bunch of different ways and that created this policy, we actually watched 21 states and D.C. all adopt similar caps by the end of the decade. By earlier into the following decade, we had more states joining them. And that was sort of where the legislative fervor started to subside, and the narrative shifted a little bit. But in the years where these policies have been in place, you on the frontlines have seen many of the ways that they’re not just incredibly stigmatizing, as from the narrative perspective or from the public opinion perspective, but they also have really, really significant, harmful, if unintended consequences. You’ve actually told stories about what types of situations your clients have been forced into because of the family cap. Would you share a little bit of that perspective?

BARTHALLOW: Yeah. The family cap in California impacted over 100,000 babies that grew into children. And one of the most devastating impacts, of course, were to those children. To kind of not respect their humanity and not recognize that they have very basic human needs that, if left unmet, will result in short-term harm, discomfort, even pain, and long-term consequences. And so, I just want to put that first and foremost, that these policies, they were just so cruel to the children and families experiencing them. But they also had long-term impacts on people’s privacy.

You know, we had clients, for example, in California, there was an exemption to the rule for people who had been subjected to rape or incest. But in order to get that exemption, they had to bring a copy of their rape report to their county social worker. And this is a violation of their own privacy in that circumstance, but it was also really horrible for the caseworkers too. We had one caseworker testify that you know, their job is to help a family become economically stable and economically self-sufficient. And to start that relationship with a person in this very kind of awkward and impersonal kind of way was not helpful to the end goal of ending poverty or reducing poverty for anybody. One family that we talked to, Vivian Haines, she was an incredible advocate on this issue for years, and over a decade she advocated to make a policy change. She had a child impacted by this, and they were homeless when they went without the aid. They lived in a building that was shuttered up and had dirt floors, and her child had very high lead poisoning during that time period. This is, again, really harm for children and their families and the privacy of the families.

And then finally, I would just say that once in a while, there was a family who you know, even though we know that across the board, families didn’t change their reproductive decisions based on this policy, there were some that were scared. They got pushed into poverty, they had a child on aid, and they got pushed so far into poverty they were scared about what would happen if they got pregnant again with their spouse. And so, they sought out a permanent form of contraception and had really horrible health consequences as a result. People, you know, our law built in this kind of language about permanent forms of contraception, including Depro-Provera and other kinds of permanent forms of contraception. And so, our county social services agencies encouraged women to go get these procedures done, and some women had infertility as a result. Some people became very sick, and I don’t think that people expected those kinds of outcomes or even considered them.

VALLAS: And to put some numbers to some of what you were talking about in terms of people might be wondering how are these policies harmful to children. And in long-term ways, there is all kinds of research that now tells us, because these policies have been in place for so long, that not only do they increase child poverty and actually increase deep poverty overall among children by 13 percent — that comes to us from the Urban Institute — but that they can actually cause lifelong damage to kids’ learning, to their development, to their cognitive function, all of these things that end up staying with children, as you said, when they grow up and become adults.

BARTHALLOW: Right. That’s exactly right. And we did this to a whole generation of kids. And I expect that California will be paying through our education system, through our continued welfare support for those decisions that we now know actually didn’t help reduce childhood poverty, and in fact, they increased the likelihood that a child — because they lived in deep poverty — will grow up to be an adult in deep poverty. So, this really was a failed intervention by all means. Even if we come to the conclusion that some people who were seeking the change were doing so out of the best interests of children, if you look at the policy now, and in fact one of the champions of this policy, Mr. Ron Haskins in Washington D.C., he supported this policy and recently came out to say it doesn’t look like it was the right decision. So, even if you believed this was the right thing to do at the time, you look at the data, you look at the research, and you must now conclude that it was not. It was a failed policy in addition to being cruel, a violation of people’s reproductive rights and their privacy rights, and just wrong on all levels of humanity.

VALLAS: And that’s a lot of what we’ve heard from some of the folks on both sides of the aisle who have been party to state legislative efforts to repeal these policies. In California, a Republican state assemblyman who was a part of the movement within your state legislature to repeal the family cap there was quoted at the time as saying, “There was clear evidence it didn’t have the impact they hoped it would have. This was a policy that was proven to be counterproductive.” So, not just progressive stalwarts saying this, but really recognition on both sides of the aisle, and including, as you said, by some of the architects of this policy themselves.

So, talk a little bit about that California campaign that you played such a big role in mounting. And what was it like really trying to turn the tide on an issue that has frankly been one that a lot of anti-poverty advocates across this country have said wasn’t a fight worth picking because it wasn’t a fight you can win?

BARTHALLOW: That’s right. I mean even people at my own organization at the Western Center on Law and Poverty had given up. I went back and talked to the person who held my position at the time of, in 1994, to ask you know, I didn’t see their opposition letter on file. I wondered what advocacy they did at the administration. And very kind of curtly, they said to me that this wasn’t any possibility we would have won. And I think that for a long time, there were some advocates out there really working on the issue day in and day out, trying to get bills introduced into our state legislature. But our state legislature and even Western Center had given up.

And it wasn’t until we saw in 2011, it was actually in Pennsylvania, there was a proposal that a new state add a family cap. And in that community, women’s groups and religious leaders and anti-poverty advocates joined together to kill that bill. And it was proposed by Republican who then later came out just a couple short weeks after the campaign to kill the bill and said, “We made a mistake. We didn’t realize all the negative repercussions of this policy, and we are pulling back our proposal.” And it was that movement was very short in the fall of 2011 that inspired us. I saw a reporting about it. This is why progressive reporting is so important. Because had that not been covered, I might not have known that this was something we could do. I wouldn’t have seen it. But I saw it reported in the news, and I thought, hey, maybe we could create a coalition here of reproductive justice advocates and women’s rights advocates and even the faith community and the anti-poverty advocates to move against our bill, against our law that did the same thing.

And so, we went to Senator Mitchell was our first choice, and she immediately said yes, that she really wanted to do this. It turns out — we didn’t know when we went to her — it turns out that she had actually been a staff person for the senator, the single, lone senator, the first Black woman senator in California to stand up against the bill when it was heard on the Senate floor in 1994. And Senator Mitchell, our champion for the bill, had been there that day and ever since then couldn’t stop thinking about the policy. So, she was thrilled to be our champion. She was a great champion. And we built, it took us though four years to build support even within the progressive community. And because there is, regardless of what people say they believe, all of us are impacted by bias that we see in the news and that we’ve been taught our whole lives. And so, it was really an effort to get people to understand that the policy was based on a myth and that we had to, in our work, we had to not just repeal the law. We also had to repeal the narrative that allowed the law to be passed in the first place.

VALLAS: And now Massachusetts is on its way to joining California, and I believe eight states total that have repealed their cap since they were put in place in the ’90s and the years following. Lots of excitement coming out of Massachusetts for finally being able to do this. And with headlines like Cap on Kids Was a Failed Welfare Experiment. I don’t love the use of “welfare” there, but amazing headlines coming out of, say, the editorial board for the Boston Globe. You’ve been talking to folks who are in Massachusetts, and you’ve been aware of that campaign. Share a little bit about what’s going on in Massachusetts.

BARTHALLOW: Well yeah, so just like what happened with us in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and New Jersey reached out to us when they saw that we were gaining momentum and said, hey, can you share with us how the campaign was built, who was in the campaign? What were some of the messages that worked and didn’t work? What’s the narrative change strategy that you used, and how do you win that? And we were happy to provide technical assistance. There’s a growing community of people nationally that want to work on this and want to make sure that not just our states are family-cap free but that the entire nation is. And so, we shared everything we had, including our heartbreak when they had their first bill passed and then it was vetoed by their governor. And you know, we’ve been following along the whole time here from California, and now they’re turning back to us and saying, who should we talk to next? Which states should we reach out to help? This really is a growing national community that is going to be taking back. We are taking back the narrative that is failed. We are taking back the policy that is failed and demanding a new truth and new justice for these communities, these women, these parents, and their children.

VALLAS: How many states do these policies still exist in, and where does the work go from here?

BARTHALLOW: Yeah. I think it’s about a dozen left throughout the country. And you know, we believe that you could have a national conversation which would remove the ability to deny a child aid based on their birth order, based on the way they were conceived. It seems to me that that should be a national policy. But it doesn’t, I don’t think that we can look to the federal government and our Congress to pass legislation on this issue. And so, this really is a state by state campaign that must be won, and the national community can help those states have the resources and the tools that they need to keep things going. Some of our legislators that have led the charge and our governors, our Democratic governors, who have been supporting the bills, they’re going out to their communities and their national associations to inform them and legislators in the remaining states about the policy and about the national support to repeal the policy. And there’s a growing movement of poor people across the country through the Poor People’s Campaign and making sure that people impacted by these policies are front. And center on the advocacy is part of the success. We expect that that those campaigns will also build momentum to this work.

VALLAS: In the last minute or so that I have with you, Jess, is there a larger lesson here about what people tell us is or is not possible when it comes to anti-poverty policy? Is that something that you take away from the campaign that people all told you wasn’t ever actually going to be successful?

BARTHALLOW: Yes. I think it’s that we have to understand that our job is not to pass laws that are possible to be passed today. Our job as advocates and as movement builders are to create an environment where justice can be achieved. And if that takes years, if that takes decades, we have to do that. We have to start today. It might take us a long time, but if we’re only working on things that can be passed today, then we’re not really making the kinds of big leaps forward that we need to reverse inequality and make ourselves a more just society for everybody. So, that’s what I would leave people with, is think about what you can’t do today, and don’t say, throw up your hands. Figure out what are the first steps to get to a future where you can.

VALLAS: Well, and I suspect your phone’s going to be ringing off the hook with people who want to take this campaign plan and bring it to those dozen states or so that still have family cap policies in place. But now they’ll know where to find you because Jess Barthallow, legislative advocate at Western Center on Law and Policy, Jess, we’re going to be sharing you on our nerdy syllabus page as a resource for folks who want to get their hands dirty and get in on the action. Jess, thanks so much for taking the time to join the show. And as I said, Jess Barthallow is a legislative advocate at the Western Center on Law and Policy, which is based in California. I’m just in awe of the work that you’ve been able to do against incredibly long odds on an issue that is so incredibly important.

BARTHALLOW: Thank you so much, Rebecca, for having me. And please light up my phone. We’ve got a toolkit for you, and we’re happy to share.

VALLAS: You heard her say it. She’s got a toolkit, so you guys know what to do. Jess, thanks again and good luck to you in where this campaign goes from here.

BARTHALLOW: OK. Bye-bye.

VALLAS: Don’t go away. More Off-Kilter after the break. I’m Rebecca Vallas.

[hip hop music break]

You’re listening to Off-Kilter. I’m Rebecca Vallas. “On a below-zero January day in early 2018, Katie Shelley was working on the 4th floor of a building on her college campus in northwest Ohio when the fire alarm went off. She proceeded to work through the conflict she has faced in her whole life: how to get out of the building as a wheelchair user. No plans were in place for her evacuation. Growing up in the aftermath of events like the Columbine shooting and 9/11, she was used to having to worry about whether or not she’d be safe in a school emergency,” so writes Disability Justice Initiative fellow Valerie Novack in one of the articles we’ve been reading this week over at TalkPoverty.org. It’s called Disabled Students Are Left Behind in School Shooting Responses. And she’s joining us in studio. Valerie, thanks so much for taking the time to join the show.

VALERIE NOVACK: Absolutely. Thanks for asking me to be on.

VALLAS: I should say for coming back on the show.

NOVACK: Yes.

VALLAS: So Valerie, just to get right into it, when it comes to school shootings, we hear a lot about this run, fight, hide thing, right? That those are probably the words coming to people’s minds as they’re thinking about what emergency preparedness in school shootings means. But as your piece lays out, this just doesn’t work for a lot of students with disabilities.

NOVACK: Yeah, and I think it doesn’t work for students at all, particularly for students with disabilities, right? So, this is recommended from Homeland Security on down as kind of the response that we have, but there’s not a national standard for how to enact this policy. So, the idea behind it is that if a school shooter, if you suspect that there’s a school shooter, that you need to try to run to get someplace else, hide if you can’t do that, and then the last resort is to fight if you can’t hide or run. Really that’s not ideal at all for students, right? That I think if it was any other kind of situation that we were talking about that wasn’t as maybe contentious as gun rights are in the US, we wouldn’t be saying to our kids, “Well, if there’s danger, just run, and we’ll hope for the best,” right? “Worst case, try to defend yourself against somebody with a potential fatal gun in their hands,” right?

VALLAS: When you put it like that, I mean it sounds bananas.

NOVACK: Yeah, right. And this is also what’s suggested of adults. This is what we can recommend, because we know this happens at work, and this happens you know, at the movie theater or what have you. But it shows a particular problem when we start thinking about students with disabilities and kind of some of the more basic ideas behind this. So, probably the first thing that comes to people’s minds when they think of somebody with a disability is somebody using a wheelchair. That’s just kind of iconography that we have, but so that right away, just kind of removes the first option, right? Well, if you use some kind of mobility aid, then running from a shooter might not be the easiest thing for you to do.

But then you start to get to things like hide, and some people feel like that’s maybe a little bit more doable. But I’ve read stories and talked to people, and you think things like some of the drills they have with kids hiding under their desks. OK. Well, same thing if I use some kind of mobility device, maybe I can’t get up and down off the floor. Or maybe the desk isn’t big enough to hide me, right? Or you hear about teachers kind of herding students into closets or different things like that. If there’s a step getting into that closet, if you have maybe a student who has a developmental disability and is terrified of the dark, right, these just kind of different things like that that you start to think of.

And so, then we have what is often called areas of refuge that are recommended and in some instances required of building codes, and these have certain requirements. So, there needs to be a sign that somebody can write on, there needs to be a phone that the people can access, something to put in front of the floor so that smoke doesn’t come in in a fire. But then in that situation, you’re essentially saying — especially when it’s a shooter, right, it’s not something like a fire — you’re saying go to this one place, stay there, and hope that somebody gets you before the threat does, right? And that’s really what we’re asking for even a fire or something like that. But it’s different in that a shooter is mobile and is moving around and maybe isn’t as occupied to one space as something like a fire or a flood might be, right? And so, to tell people, “Well, just wait in the 3rd floor girls’ bathroom, and we’ll get you when we can,” essentially, it speaks in a very maybe not intentional but still accurate way of how we’re valuing those students maybe compared to other students that were able to get out of the building.

VALLAS: There’s this incredibly powerful quote — there’s a lot of powerful quotes in your piece — but one that really is ringing in my head as I’m hearing you describe all of these basic principles that just don’t work and haven’t been thought through for students with disabilities. You quote Katie, who you profile in this piece, who grew up in Michigan, and she discloses that using a classroom as a refuge area, like you were describing, is the solution that her school was using when she was in 5h grade. And she is quoted as saying, “I just in theory had to wait in a burning building until someone came to get me. Even at 10 years old, I knew this was a horrible plan, and I was not a fan,” is what she said.

NOVACK: Yeah. And she’s certainly not the only one. And there have been students, who I think I mentioned a little bit later in the piece, at least one lawsuit that has been filed where it wasn’t just a drill, where there was an actual incident or emergency that happened, and they were either not evacuated, or there’s some instances where they’ve just been forgotten. And I think part of what makes it so much worse is that this isn’t new. I mean I think the first lawsuit that I could find is well over two decades old, so that even predates things like Columbine. That predates these instances that were kind of, that should have been wake-up calls for us.

I think, so we have for example, legislation that came out in the Disaster Emergency Management world that came out after things like Katrina, right? You have these horrible things. We saw what happened after 9/11. You have these wake-up calls, and you say OK, we need to fix these issues. But this continues to happen in our schools, and we’re not. And if we go away even from just the guns conversation and just pretended that wasn’t even a factor, we know that we’ve had these instances, and we have these practices in place that for years and years and years have said hey, we’re not paying attention to students with disabilities, who are a large part of our population. But we’re not taking those wake-up calls and saying hey, maybe we should talk about this and figure out a way to do this.

And I don’t know how many people that I’ve even been able to ask just in general when talking about this, well, what about those signs that say, “In case of fire, use stairs,” and who have never thought about well, what if I couldn’t use the stairs? But everybody knows that sign, right, that oh, in a fire, you’re not supposed to use the elevator. But so many people aren’t thinking about OK, well, what does that say for people who have to?

VALLAS: The other thing that’s not new isn’t just this problem. It isn’t just people ignoring the problem. It’s also the Americans with Disabilities Act itself, right?

NOVACK: Yes.

VALLAS: The ADA, which was passed in 1990, right? So, we’re talking about three decades of a civil rights law that applies to places that are open to the public: governments and schools. So, this isn’t just you saying this is the right thing to do, right? This is the ADA. This is federal law that applies to schools and has for a long time in a way that they’re just openly not even complying with.

NOVACK: Yeah. And I mean we can go back even further than that with the Architectural Barriers Act ,which was passed in the late ’60s, which provides some access requirements regarding buildings that have received federal funding, which we go a lot of schools do. And there are schools that maybe are privately funded, but they’re still open to the public, so they would still have ADA requirements as well. So, this isn’t really something that you can hide from, from where you are. And I think part of where people maybe get away with it is that some of them don’t have something in place, right? So, it doesn’t have to be accessible if it doesn’t exist. Or there’s this idea that the accommodations that they’ve decided, like holding up in a classroom, is a sufficient accommodation to the plan that they have.

And I think what I’m hoping to point out in this piece, and what I’m hoping people start to realize more broadly, is that those kind of accommodations are not accommodations. They should at best be a starting point of what we do now with every intention to make it better going forward. And I think instead what’s happened is we’ve said OK, well, this is good enough. And we’ll just leave it.

VALLAS: Now, one of the things that has been recommended is using what some people might be familiar with as IEPs, Individualized Education Plans, right? Which parents maybe who are listening who have kids with disabilities might be familiar with because that’s how you, if you’ve got a kid in special education who has a disability, that’s the plan for how to make sure that they’re getting a free and appropriate public education under the law. And that’s where accommodations, extra time on tests, having an aide in the classroom, those kinds of things can come from. Some people have proposed using that as a strategy for sort of adding in like the emergency and lockdown piece of this.

NOVACK: Yeah.

VALLAS: But you don’t think that’s necessarily the right way to handle this.

NOVACK: Yeah, I don’t. I don’t know that I would say that it’s the wrong way. I think I strongly believe that it’s too narrow of an idea. So, there was two professors — actually there was a handful of people but two professors — Embry and Clark are kind of hailed as, they were the main authors of this idea of putting some of these lockdown and evacuation requirements into students’ IEPs. And I think that that’s probably a really smart way to go about it. But where I think I kind of splinter is that it sort of does the same thing we’ve done with some of these refuge areas, is OK. That’s a solution. We’re not going to take it any further.

But the thing is that only certain students have IEPs. Only certain schools, right? So, an IEP is a federal requirement. Certain private schools, for example, would not be required to have these. Certain charter schools might not be required to have these. So, one, not all students with disabilities will have these. And also IEPs aren’t for every student. And I think my thought is if you can find a solution for each single student with an IEP, then we should be able to implement those solutions for all students. Because you don’t get an IEP if maybe you haven’t been diagnosed. You don’t get an IEP if you just broke your leg, and now you have crutches, right, or something like that. But those students still may need some of the same accommodations that you’ve now found in an IELP.

Additionally, it doesn’t talk, you know, teachers don’t get these. School visitors don’t get these. And because of the way that these situations happen, the students aren’t the only people that are in danger when we have these events. And so, looking at that is focusing on the children with disabilities first and foremost, which I very much appreciate. But my thought is that if you can find a solution for that one student, why aren’t we applying that solution to all students? And then that would hopefully extend to then also visitors and staff who may have disabilities and benefit from cue cards or evacuation chairs or whatever it is that has been worked in to these plans.

VALLAS: One of the points that you make is that disabled students spend, on average, more than 60 percent of their time in a general classroom. Some people call that mainstreaming, right? It’s been a very positive direction so that we’re not in a place of separate but equal when it comes to students with disabilities. And that’s part of the argument you make here for why we need to be thinking about integrating accessibility and inclusion into overall school plans.

NOVACK: Yeah, and I think depending. So, an IEP team is going to include your special education teacher and your parents and maybe some health professionals that the students working with. But when we start to, especially when you start looking at maybe middle school and high school, you have seven different teachers that you might have for your different classes. And if you have a special ed teacher, that that might be separate, or you have a sub. There’s so many different hands involved. But mostly, you’re going to be with these other students that are around you, and if the teacher, if the only person who intimately knows what you need is say, that special education teacher, and you happen to not be with that special education teacher when something happens, then even if it’s written into your plan, the person with the most intimate knowledge of that may not even be around to help you.

Or you know, we’ve read teachers’ accounts when these happen, and sometimes these teachers are grabbing in students they’ve never even met to hide in their classrooms, right, because you’re just trying to help whoever you can. And so, that teacher is definitely going to have no idea of what’s in a specialized plan for a student versus if we took those and said hey, you know what? We’ve noticed several of our students would benefit from having cue cards on what to do in these events. Let’s make sure every classroom has one. Then that teacher is able to assist that student whether or not they know what’s in that EILP because it’s become part of just the main aspect of how they’re handling these events, rather than being something that maybe only this one teacher knows when they’re not even with that teacher the majority of the time.

VALLAS: What are the other types of things that you think should be in place? You’ve mentioned cue cards. But people might be listening to this and going yeah, this sounds great, but what are the types of steps that schools should be taking? And what are the types of integrated resources and different ways of doing things that could be a little bit more inclusive?

NOVACK: Yeah, I think that there is a lot of, hopefully, a lot of talk around some of these ideas. I know some things that people talk about that might help for students that maybe have sensory disabilities or things like that, maybe outfitting classrooms with soundproof headphones might be something. And it’s not that you have to buy one for each, for every kid that you have in a school, but making sure each classroom has one. Because then if you are say, employing that hide strategy, and you have a student who is particularly agitated when they heard loud noises, that’s gonna be a very difficult situation. Cue cards is a big one. Regular inclusive drills. And that really can help even just in the elementary schools that continuing to do something over and over again, that repetition just to help children be aware.

But then there’s definitely more kind of broader ones. There are tools like evacuation chairs, elevators that run on backup generators, things like that that we look at and say, well, that’s too expensive, or we don’t know how to train somebody to do that, or we’re very much it’s going to happen to somebody else. So, we don’t want to put in the resources to make things safe now.

I think a big part is just education. I think also we need to have — One of the things I’ve heard so many times from people is an inability or a lack of flexibility for either a school to become accessible or to then work around student schedules to ensure that they have access. I’ve talked to several people who were like, “You ,know I can’t do stairs. I haven’t been able to. My school didn’t have an elevator, but they were saying, just deal with it, or we can’t put all your classes on the first floor,” right? So, I think sometimes just responding directly to those needs in a broad way will help make it easier for everybody who’s maybe not vocal about the needs that they have.

VALLAS: I’ve been speaking with Valerie Novack. She’s a Disability Justice Initiative fellow who wrote a piece that everyone needs to read to learn more about this subject. It’s called Disabled Students Are Left Behind in School Shooting Responses. You can find it on our nerdy syllabus page or at TalkPoverty.org. Valerie, thank you so much for writing this piece and for taking the time to come on the show.

NOVACK: Yes, yeah. Hopefully it will help start some more conversation and make sure that we’re making some of those changes that we need.

VALLAS: It already is, and I look forward to seeing more of that.

NOVACK: Absolutely. Thank you.

VALLAS: Don’t go away. More Off-Kilter after the break. I’m Rebecca Vallas.

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You’re listening to Off-Kilter. I’m Rebecca Vallas. If you’re starting to feel like there’s a new administrative rulemaking attacking low-income families from the Trump administration every time we air another episode of this show, you’re not wrong. Another week, another evil proposed rulemaking.

The latest proposed rule released just last week would prohibit so-called mixed-status families — families with mixed immigration status — from living in public and other subsidized housing. So, here with me to unpack what this rule would do, who would be hurt, and of course, how we fight back is my colleague Heidi Schultheis. She’s the senior policy analyst for the Center for American Progress Poverty Program and one of our homelessness and housing gurus as part of that team. Heidi, thanks so much for taking the time to join the show.

HEIDI SCHULTHEIS: Thanks for having me.

VALLAS: So, just to start at the beginning, what would this rule do?

SCHULTHEIS: This rule is a doozy. It was published by HUD last Friday in the Federal Register. And what it would do is prohibit families with mixed immigration status from living in several different subsidized housing programs. That includes public housing — sort of the big programs — public housing, play space rental assistance, the Housing Choice Voucher Program, and some others. And it would enforce this by basically requiring that everyone living in programs like this and receiving these subsidies under the age of 62 have their immigration status checked through a program with Department of Homeland Security. And then members who are deemed ineligible by HUD would be forced to leave their home in 18 months or less. And so, families are going to have to face this just unbelievably heartbreaking choice to either stay together as a family and leave their housing or kick out ineligible members so that they can stay in their housing.

VALLAS: And part of what is implied in how you just described what this rule would do is that it’s not just prospective. It’s not just going to make people ineligible moving forward. It’s also retrospective, in that people under this rule, if it takes effect, will actually lose their housing.

SCHULTHEIS: Mmhmm. Yeah. A few different news outlets have noted that very thing. So, the two would be very different approaches going forward versus retrospective. And so, because it’s retrospective, we’re talking about many thousands of people. This is something we can break down in real numbers and real families and real people. It’s not something we have to speculate about.

VALLAS: And so, who are some of those people? Who would be hurt if this rule takes effect?

SCHULTHEIS: So, we know that the total number of folks who could be affected is over 100,000, and that includes over 25,000 families. This is a really significant number of children. It’s over 55,000 children who live in these mixed-status families who are potentially facing losing their housing, potentially facing homelessness. There’s also 50,000 adults in that group and more than 2,000 elderly people.

VALLAS: Now, people might be wondering what are mixed-status families? Some of this gets a little bit technical, but it’s actually helpful to understand who are the families who are potentially at risk if this rule does go into effect.

SCHULTHEIS: Yeah, it is. It is important to understand. So, we can start with just under the current way that these programs operate, HUD allows families with members who are ineligible based on their immigration status to live in these programs with other eligible family members. One important thing to know is just because HUD considers someone to be ineligible for a housing program based on their immigration status does not mean that they are undocumented. So, this rule would not be a way to prohibit undocumented immigrants from living in subsidized housing programs.

Under the current rules and the way these programs operate, families with ineligible members actually get smaller subsidies than families where every member is eligible. They are not allowed to count these ineligible members in their household size, and so that shrinks their subsidy. So, they’re already literally paying a price for just having the household composition that they have. Not only do they receive smaller subsidies than other families, but because of, or I’m sorry, the ineligible members, if they have income, that income is counted toward the household income. So, they’re paying again in a literal sense for the composition of their household. So, this is another way to even more harshly penalize mixed status families and to terrorize and harass immigrants.

VALLAS: Now, what is HUD’s stated goal here? Why does the Department of Housing and Urban Development say that they’re pushing this policy through?

SCHULTHEIS: So, HUD claims that its goal — I believe Secretary Carson was quoted as saying that the goal is or that — this roll was born out of concern over the length of public housing waiting lists. But we know that because of the way the roll’s set up and what it’s going to do, it just will not have any effect on those waiting lists. So, HUD actually in mid-April created an impact analysis that has been in recent days circulated by several news outlets. And HUD’s own analysis shows that the average mixed-status family actually has higher income than the average non-mixed-status family. The difference in income plus the fact that mixed-status families pay more because they do not include all their members in their rent calculation means that if every mixed-status family was replaced with a family where all members are eligible, which frankly seems to be the goal here, it would actually cost HUD between $193 and $227 million additional dollars just to operate the programs the way they are. So, this is certainly not a cost-saving measure. We know that much.

And we also know that this will not have an impact on waiting lists. It will not shorten waiting lists because this additional $193–227 million, in their own impact analysis again, HUD acknowledges that Congress is highly unlikely to appropriate these funds. HUD is also unlikely to be directed to reallocate funds within its existing programs and structures. And so, HUD acknowledges that the likeliest scenario is that it will “reduce the quantity and quality of assisted housing in response to higher costs.” It also goes on to say, “This will mean fewer families getting housing choice vouchers.” And for public housing, it specifies, “This will impact quality of service, maintenance of units. It’ll lead to the deterioration of units and could also mean smaller subsidies for families.”

VALLAS: And these are quotes that you’re actually pulling directly from HUD’s mouth as it were. This is their own impact analysis, which the federal government is required to publish when it does a proposed rulemaking like this. I mean I feel like I’m preaching to the choir when I tell our listeners how rulemaking works because it feels like it’s the playbook at this point, right? And so, we could all, everyone could sing it together. But that impact analysis is part of what they have to do, and that’s where they have to sort of show their work but also tell some of the stuff that they don’t want to say out loud and that they hope gets buried about what would really happen if it takes effect.

SCHULTHEIS: Yeah, absolutely. The language is just you know, very frank. I can appreciate that it’s very honest language. It acknowledges these are some of the things that could happen such as Congress appropriating funds or HUD reworking how its funding programs and operating things. And you know, those probably aren’t going to happen. So, the likeliest outcome is smaller subsidies and/or fewer subsidies and units going neglected that we know have already been neglected for such a long time. So, yeah. It’s a very frank, very eye-opening analysis from HUD itself.

VALLAS: Now, one piece as you were describing what this rule would do that I want to not get buried here, because I think most of the focus in the media coverage has been about people at risk of eviction, people at risk of not having housing moving forward. But there’s a piece of this that actually has to do with people having to, across the board, actually reup their immigration status. Talk a little bit about that piece and some of what you think is likely to take effect.

SCHULTHEIS: I mean I think what we can see, what’s really clear from this rule, is that this is, the administration is using HUD as another torture tool in its arsenal to terrify immigrants, to harass them, to keep them in the shadows, to deny them benefits that they are actually eligible for. But there will be, as we’ve seen with attacks on other programs, there will be a chilling effect. Families who are eligible for this assistance are going to be less likely to seek it out. They’re going to be less likely to apply. It’s going to drive people just further into housing poverty, housing instability, and it’s going to deny people who are actually eligible for benefits from getting assistance that they desperately need.

VALLAS: Now, in the last couple minutes that I have with you, we’ve talked extensively on this show, and particularly for the past several months, about rulemaking attacks, which really have, as I said, become this administration’s new playbook for how to cut programs that help people afford housing in this case but also food and health care and other basics. Just a backdoor way to cut those programs without legislation is basically what they’ve figured out that this administrative rulemaking process is a way to do. But that doesn’t mean that there’s nothing that people can do to fight back, and there actually is an active campaign that’s working to defeat this rule on the heels of the public charge rule that we’ve talked a lot about on this show and which is still out there kind of in limbo as we speak. How are people taking action? What does that campaign look like? And what should people know if they’re hearing this and want to take action?

SCHULTHEIS: So, yeah. It’s extremely important that people take action because that’s the way this whole rulemaking process works. If they don’t receive public comments through the Federal Register, they’ll assume people are fine with what they’re proposing. So, it’s extremely important that we all push back in every way we can. The opposition to the rule is being co-led by the National Low Income Housing Coalition and the National Housing Law Project. You can visit the site that they have specifically set up to help people learn about and understand and take action against this rule. The website is Keep-Families-Together.org, and it’s up and running. You can submit public comments between now and July 9th. The website that I just mentioned has a section about comments that makes it really easy to do that. Tomorrow at 3:00 p.m., there will also be a tweet storm using the hashtag #KeepFamiliesTogether. People are welcome to participate in that. The website has great information, and I think, sample social that folks can use to participate as well.

VALLAS: #KeepFamiliesTogether. Also www.Keep-Families-Together.org. And you can of course, find all of that on our nerdy syllabus page. And Heidi, thank you so much for taking the time to brief folks on what’s going on with this. And I mean the hits just keep on coming with one proposed rulemaking after another, but that doesn’t make it less important for us to be engaging in these public comment processes. It makes it more important so that we can hopefully, with large numbers of comments, just like with the nutrition assistance attack, just like with the public charge rule, that this is our opportunity not just to raise our voices but to try to bog them down so that they can’t actually move forward with this rule.

Heidi Schultheis is the senior policy analyst on the Poverty Program at the Center for American Progress. She’s also a guru of housing and homelessness, as you have just heard. Heidi, thank you so much for taking the time to join the show.

SCHULTHEIS: Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

VALLAS: And that does it for this week’s episode of Off-Kilter, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m your host Rebecca Vallas. The show is produced by Will Urquhart and David Ballard. Find us on Facebook and Twitter @offkiltershow, and you can find us on the airwaves on the Progressive Voices Network and the We Act Radio Network or any anytime as a podcast on iTunes. See you next week.