number of students in the district, partially because the parents don't feel that they can get a quality education, and i think that needs to be the foe cal point of all of these conversations about how we can serve these students and move beyond the talk and how do we create a culture of accountability where these things are not acceptible in sfusd and these numbers, for african american students are similar to what you would see in places like mississippi or georgia. and we are one of the highest performing urban school districts and so it is unacceptable and i really just want to know how the board is going to address this and how we are going to create accountability to make sure that these things stop happening because they happened when i was in high school to now and even my older relatives, had

. >> welcome to the san francisco board of supervisors for wednesday, april 23, 2014. my name is mark farrell, i will be chairing this committee. i am joined by supervisor avalos. i want to thank the clerk of the committee miss linda wong as well as members of sfgtv

covering this meeting. >> please silence all cell phones and any electronic devices, please be sure copies of any documents be submitted to the clerk. >> thank you, madam clerk, please call item no. 1. >> item no. 1, ordinance amending ordinance 16013 to reflect the addition of 68 new positions at the human services agency for implementation of additional work associated with increases in state and federal funding. >> thank you. i believe we have clint moor here on this item. >> good morning, supervisors, trepbt row, director of human services agency. we have a powerpoint and i will walk you guys through. in brief, what we are

requesting is spending authority for increased state and federal revenue that's largely due to growth in case loads as well as initiatives at the state level either governor's initiatives or initiatives that were in the statute from prior years. the first slide is sort of an overview. two of the items and the largest item is the in home supportive services as well as the cal are really more technical in nature. i will walk you through nonetheless. the enhancements in services and increases in staff are really reflected in the cal works, cal fresh and children and family services areas. so i will start with cal works. in fiscal year 13-14 the governor and legislature approved a significant increase

in funding statewide for the cal works program. i want to give you a little context and history for this. two years ago the governor proposed shortening the time frame that families could be on cal works from 48 months to 24 months. the response from advocates and from county human services agencies was that if the time frame for being on public assistance is shortened, we need more tools to help our families move from welfare to work. and so the governor and the legislature agreed and in the subsequent year funded what you see before you, the $231 million in new state funding. >> you said from 48 to 24 months? >> correct. >> and that was state law? >> correct. essentially what it does is it limits the type of activities a family can participate in after they are on aid for 24 months so really the message it's sending is you basically have two years now to engage in cal works welfare to

work services and move towards self-sufficiency rather than 4, which obviously has a huge impact on our families, many of which aren't ready to move from --. >> was there opposition on that? >> there was. some of it was a budget context and part of it was his view of reforming the cal works program. the governor's view statewide there weren't enough families participating so the idea coming from his office was to shorten the time frame and create some urgency. >> some pressure on the families. >> right. sdpietz our opposition it did pass but the lemonedout of the lemons was the significantly increased funding before you now. basically what the funding is for, it recognizes many families are not ready to move into the work force. they

might be facing issues of homelessness, substance abuse, the whole range of issues many families are dealing from in dealing from public assistance to self-sufficiency. so the funding is for several things. the first is a state-wide standardized assessment that all counties should use for families and this is basically trying to assess hr employ bltd and their needs and strengths are in designing a welfare to work plan. the second area is what's called reengagement services. this is really targeted to families that have not been participating and provides funding for not only case workers to support families but also services to help folks reengage in their activities. and the third area, which is sort of what i think is the most important, is what's called stablization services. these are basically flexible state dollars that are allocated to our county to provide intensive case management if necessary, to

address homelessness, we could use it for rental subsidies, for example, domestic violence counseling, behavioral health needs, it's really a flexible pot of money. it's targeted for families who aren't yet ready to move from welfare to work. the idea would be a 6-month services that would be at least 6 months in duration and that 24 month clock would not start ticking until after that 6 months of stablization services are provided. >> so, mr. rourke, for the 7.9 allocated to san francisco, do they have the flexibility to spend it as you want or is it mandated within these buckets that you spend it on? >> it's actually fundable across, with the exception of one pot of money, it's fundable across the entire allocation for cal works. we can make the determination to use it for more case workers, child care, so we are doing just that. we've developed what's called a

family stablization plan that was submitted to the state department of social services for their approval. the other big area of funding is for subsidized employment. as you know, san francisco has for years had a very robust subsidized employment program called jobs now. some of the additional funding is going to expand that jobs now program which places parents who are on public assistance into paid work either in the public sector or private sector. the state funds are used to offset the wages that are paid either in the public sector or for private employers. so the second half of the slide is more the detail --. >> i'm sorry, on the jobs now, how have we seen the number of jobs year over year rise and fall? are they pretty stable? what do we see in terms of jobs now, jobs created. >> in terms of the actual subsidized slots or post subsidy?

>> will, those are two good things to talk about. >> we have been, and this funding will help, there was also an additional pot of state money two years ago under assembly bill 98 that provided more state dollars for subsidized jobs as well so our slots have been growing. i don't want to guess. i think our slots now are in the -- i think we have about a thousand placements now in our current jobs now program, roughly. >> that will be great. and if your office can send to me and jeremy in my office staff year for year what we see in terms of jobs and placements. >> be happy to. we do a year end summary report that we have in our agency. i'll forward that to you. so to continue on the cal works august mentation, to comply with these new mandates, we are proposing to add 22, a

little over 22 positions as well as services in the community an and additional subsidies for jobs now. what we will achieve by adding these staff, which are social workers and case workers as well as employment specialists, we will get families enrolled in their employment plan within a week. currently given our current staffing configuration it's typically 3 to 4 weeks to get into a plan. we'll be able it provide the family stablization services that i talked about before including expanding child care for homeless families, additional intensive case management and expanded behavioral health services, among other services. we're going to cease an ssi advocacy program. this is especially important for parents who are disabled and therefore unable to work but who are not yet on federal disability. so what the ssi advocacy program will do is help parents who are disabled, as well as children who are disabled, navigate that

process to apply for federal cash benefits which is a much higher cash allotment than is the cal works program. we will be able to add between 70 and 100 private sector subsidized employment slots and then we're going to leepbten public sector trainee slots from 6 months to a year and this is especially important because one of the exit strategies for the public sector subsidized employment program is actually entrance into city employment. we have been very successful, for example, in the human services agency, folks who have been in the subsector program being hired out of public assistance and into an agency that's helping folks navigate the public assistance system. so it's a great way to get sort of a peer to peer type employment client relationship which we think is really beneficial for our clients. anyway, by extending from 6 months to a year it allows them to meet those minimum

qualifications for many city jobs including clerks and eligibility positions and the like. >> so, mr. rourke, what is on average the suction diper employee? >> we have been kind of an iterate process. we've been adjusting it back and forth, but right now i believe it's $5,000 and it's spread over a number of months. basically what we're trying to do is sort of mitigate the r*ifk to a private employer to taking on someone who they might feel has some barriers to work. we pre-screen them, we train them, we actually help them get that job and we know they're qualified but it allows folks to engage. in the early jobs now program while in the stimulus act we subsidize 100 percent of the wages in the private sector so someone could be employed for up to 18 months and we would reimburse the

employer that whole wage. we just don't have the funding level to be able to do that for so long. >> just to be clear, i remember the jobs now, the implementation of it, it was great, but that's all dried up, right? >> right, that dried up the end of september two years ago, three years ago now. okay, so the next program area that we're seeing expansion and the state again recognizing the growth in case load and has allocated funds to support case workers to deal with the increased case led is the cal fresh program, formerly known as food stamps. we've seen, as you can see with the case load graph, a significant increase largely during the recession years but we still continue to see an uptick but more importantly we're going to see a significant increase as we target individuals who we have enrolled in medical through the affordable care act chl there's

one of the requirements of the affordable care act discusses what they call horizontal integration and the requirement that counties or states provide the tublt for recipients of affordable care act of medicaid or medical be offered public benefits to which they may be eligible. notably here it's cal fresh. so what we intend to do for the tens of thousands of people we have enrolled in medical is target those who are not yet on cal fresh and do we colleen an in reach strategy and get them to avoil themselves of the cal fresh benefits so basically two needs, one is staff to do that in reach and second is staff to manage that on-going case load. as you can see by the graph, the red line below, although fte's have grown, they haven't grown proportionate with the case load yet the state when they do their funding models to

county looks at that and funds us accordingly. so we are looking at that state money and know we can hire additional workers to do the in reach, to do the outreach, and manage the case load. i don't have to tell you the benefit to families but it's a huge need for families trying to manage high rents, high cost of living in san francisco and having a few extra dollars toward food is significant and one of the strategies for the food insecurity task force is to increase cal fresh food stamps enrollment and specifically approximately 36,000 households in san francisco we think are eligible for cal fresh but are not receiving cal fresh. so that's really the target population that we're hoping to hit. >> trent, you and i have talked about how changes in federal law might be impactinginging the federal food stamp program, snap, around the country but here in

san francisco or california we're somewhat protected. can you describe how and what the difference is in other places? >> it's a complex change in federal law that i'm not going to walk through the details. but the implications in the change in the farm bill that you note, supervisor, is that the average allotment for a family on food stamps, cal fresh, would be reduced by about $100 to $120 per year. the reason i said there's no implication for us is because the state of california is working within the context of the federal law to try to mitigate those federal cuts by back filling -- basically using state funds to back fill that loss of federal dollars. although the details haven't been worked out yet, the state has said its intention is to not have households of single adults and families be harmed by that change in the farm bill. it has to do with a deduction related to what's called the low income energy

assistance and it's related to the amount of money a family gets to liheap and food stamps. the next program is medical. although the budgets ask for mi medical, additional medical case workers, it does ask for staff to support what this slide is called, which is service integration and which i'm going it talk about a little bit. there's been an enormous growth in medical because of the affordable care act, over 33,000 applications, most of whom will be eligible once we finish processing the backlog of thousands of applications. >> this is just within san francisco. >> correct. you can see the graph, we've almost doubled our medical case load, we have not 94 are we proposing to double our number of case workers and the reason we don't need to do that is because we've changed

dramatically our business processes in determining eligibility of clients for all of our programs. in the old model, every client or customer in a human services agency had a case worker for each of the programs that he or she was involved in. so there was a food stamps eligibility worker, a medical eligibility worker or a cal works eligibility worker so a family or single adult would go to several offices and meet with several different case workers to deal with either problems with their benefits or to apply for benefits. as funding from the state started eroding over time our case loads for those case workers would increase significantry. you are not doing any case work if you have four or five hundred clients. what we have done,