ustxtxb_obs_1971_04_09_50_00013-00000_000.pdf

April 9, 1971 13 I Call PICK’ Before You Pack I FOR SAN ANTONIO Enjoy real money-saving value, and relax at the p ir ALBERT C Ky MOTEL 96 N.E. Loop Expressway Adjacent to San Antonio International Airport Color TV in every room Restaurant & Lounge Heated Pool Family Plan Free Parking ALL AT MODERATE RATES RESERVATIONS: CALL TOLL FREE American Express Space Bank 800 A E 8-5000 s I= OM MN MI MI ME NO MI $8.42 a year The director went on to say, “With seven weeks to go in the program in one Texas school district, we found the school board hadn’t gotten around to the dental program [ for migrant children] because the board had not yet decided which dentist was to get the contract.” Miss Stockburger said later that she was referring to the Harlingen district in the Valley. “Most of the schools were operating on a ‘business-as-usual’ basis with no attention devoted to migrant children,” the report entitled “Wednesday’s Children” said. “The major exception to this was the six-month school in Texas where classes were operated on a segregated basis for six months for migrant children.” \(This program is designed to school migrant children between the time farm workers return from harvesting one year’s crop in the fall and the time they leave the following spring to begin planting the new The report added, “Probably the most flagrantly indefensible denials of free lunch were encountered in Texas, where $578,000 or almost half the fiscal 1969 Title I Migrant Amendment funds budgeted for food services were unspent and where the migrant parents were subjected to humiliation and refusal when they requested the free lunches which these funds were intended to supply. “In the Texas school district we visited, no figures were provided on the number of migrant children receiving a free lunch,” the report continued. “Of the 10 migrant families selected at random for interviewing by our consultants, only three had been granted free lunches for their children.” “The children of one migrant family in Weslaco were denied a free lunch after it was discovered that the family was making payments on a newer pickup truck after the old one broke down. The truck was necessary to transport the family to the fields to earn more money,” the director said. “Free lunch cards were taken away from the children of another family because their mother had found some work in a nursing home for the elderly.” According to the report, migrant children fared little better in getting medical services. The schools visited by committee consultants had services “limited to physical examinations, including tuberculin tests for some children and innoculations for some children. Observers found no evidence of medical follow-up services for migrant children and no health services at all for migrant adults.” Commenting on “Wednesday’s Children,” Sen. Walter F. Mondale of Minnesota, past chairman of the Migrant Labor Subcommittee of the Senate Labor and Public Welfare Committee, called the migrant situation “the cruelest human institution in America today.” Austin The Texas Department of Public Welfare annual report always makes engrossing reading, provided you add just a dash of moral imagination, a pinch of Charles Dickens. The report for 1970, just out, shows that all this welfare, about which our politicians complain so much, costs the average Texan $8.42 a year in state and local taxes. With this sum, we make our contribution to the 472,181 poor and handicapped Texans who were on the welfare rolls as of last August. Each of us is giving one penny a year in state and local taxes to each group of 573 indigent men, women and children among us. This makes us 43rd in the U.S. in spending for the poor among us from state and local revenue sources. The average American pays $26.75 a year, three times what the average Texan pays. Excluding medical assistance, as all these figures do, we spent an average per welfare recipient, from state and local sources, of about $18 a month. The thing everybody is so outraged about, though, is these big families \(you this free-loading stuff. In August, 1970, the average poor child helped by “aid to families with dependent children” in Texas was receiving the benefit of the extravagant sum of $37.81 for the month. Per family, the sum was $119 \(about three and a half among the states in these payments for the year. We ranked, in fiscal 1970, among the states, 32nd in average old age assistance payments, 41st in aid to the permanently and totally disabled and 38th in aid to the blind. We didn’t coddle those slackers one bit, even if they’re five years old. We ranked ninth from the bottom among the states in the number of dependent children each case worker is expected to handle 79 children per worker. And as for those adult welfare cases, we were right at the head of the sock-’em parade: every Texas welfare MARTIN ELFAISIT Sun Life of Canada 1001 Century Building Houston, Texas CA 4-0686 Observations case worker was assigned 400 slackers. No other state could match that record not even Alabama or Mississippi and the national average was 140 adults per case worker. Texas welfare recipients are probably a potent pressure group for the federalization of the whole welfare thing. They couldn’t do much worse. A human matter In a dispute over the bill passed by the Texas Senate to move the board of pardons and paroles from Austin to Huntsville, some interesting facts have come out. In testimony before House and Senate committees, Dr. George Beto, director of the state prisons, revealed that in the nine years he has been director, the board has visited the Huntsville prison complex only once, and then for only one day. The three men who decide who is and who is not pardoned do not see or interview the men whose fates they are deciding, nor do they