Hunger and homelessness may still exist in Oklahoma, but they are no longer the unexceptional fact of life they once were. Children are no longer warehoused in state institutions. The poorest families have access to medical care. Parents who cannot earn enough to support their children have a chance at education and training that was unheard of two generations ago.
The 1995 fiscal year was a major turning point for Oklahoma human services programs. Sixty years after Congress passed the landmark Social Security Act of 1935, national debate centered on converting entitlement programs to block grants and giving states discretion on expenditures, and the Oklahoma Department of Human Services (OKDHS) had a head start on the nation’s welfare reform package.
Selected county offices began testing changes in client earnings, resources, and time-limited benefits under waivers of federal AFDC regulations. Changes were recommended by the Oklahoma Commission for Human Services in a January 1994 report, “Welfare Reform for the 21st Century,” and received federal approval in March 1995. All are designed to increase work incentives and remove roadblocks to independence for AFDC families.
Two former OKDHS components, medical services and juvenile affairs, became independent agencies by action of the Legislature; these actions followed the separation of Rehabilitation Services and the Oklahoma Teaching Hospitals in the previous year.
The Department’s original programs began in the Depression year of 1936, a time of desperate human need. Oklahoma voters by a 2-to-1 majority had approved a state constitutional amendment creating the Department of Public Welfare, a nine-member commission, and a director to carry out the mission stated in Article XXV: “the relief and care of needy aged persons who are unable to provide for themselves, and other needy persons who, on account of immature age, physical infirmity, disability, or other cause, are unable to provide or care for themselves...”
An early-day social worker made a home visit and found two little boys fighting over a biscuit, the last piece of food in their house. When federal officials questioned Oklahoma’s compliance with residence requirements, the Custer County director led them to a bridge where homeless families had sought shelter from the freezing weather. Dependent, neglected, and delinquent children were housed in segregated state institutions, where care was custodial and sometimes brutal. Oklahoma physicians accepted food as barter for medical care.
Since those days, OKDHS has used a mix of state and federal money and mandates to eliminate a tremendous amount of poverty. Starting in the 1950s, new federal requirements and legislative transfers expanded the Department into an umbrella agency for health care, social services, vocational and income maintenance programs. Landmark federal legislation, much of it drafted in Oklahoma, established the Medicaid program in 1966, and the federally financed Food Stamp Program began in 1974. Both opened human services programs to many thousands of Oklahomans who were not receiving cash grants under the public assistance program of Aid to Families with Dependent Children.
Until 1987, Oklahoma’s state funding for human services came from earmarked sales tax, a revenue source which accumulated carryover reserves in more prosperous years. Sales tax financing helped meet federal mandates and relieve overburdened state programs as legislators transferred state institutions for children and the mentally retarded, the vocational rehabilitation program, and state teaching hospitals to the agency. Physical plants at the institutions were in appalling disrepair, leading to massive renovation and construction along with intensive staffing and treatment programs.
Class action suits in 1978 and 1985 produced mandates for community-based services for children in state institutions and for residents of The Hissom Memorial Center for the mentally retarded in Sand Springs. By 1985 all but two of the children’s institutions had been closed; most of the physical facilities were transferred to the Department of Corrections. Teaching hospitals were transferred to a newly created Hospital Trust Authority in 1993. Hissom residents were moved to community placements by April 1994, while facilities at Pauls Valley and Enid limited residential options and expanded their outreach services to the community.
Severe economic hardship returned to Oklahoma in the 1980s after plummeting crude oil prices plunged the state into a major recession. Banks failed. AFDC caseloads broke records. Workers who had migrated from other states during the oil and gas boom years swelled the ranks of Oklahoma’s jobless. Echoing the Depression years, they camped around lake and resort areas until rangers told them to move on. OKDHS workers, placed on furlough themselves, brokered cash grants and social services to keep stranded families going.
OKDHS pioneered work programs for welfare clients: In 1965 the agency used concepts from the Federal Emergency Relief Administration of the 1930s to model its work and training program. Oklahoma was the first state in the nation to require mothers with children under age 6 to register for job training under a waiver of federal AFDC regulations, and it was among the first to implement the JOBS program under the Family Support Act of 1988.
As the year ended, computer technology was helping OKDHS workers deal with increased caseloads and shrinking budgets. The OKDHS Model County Project will allow workers immediate access to on-line policy, provide statewide tracking on case data — a critical need for Oklahoma’s highly mobile client population — and supply on-line forms to streamline paperwork in the agency’s public assistance programs. Data tracking for children’s services became available statewide as Child Welfare workers began using the KIDS automated case management system, a $30 million project with state-of-the-art technology and 75 percent federal funding.
The agency’s official name has changed twice since 1936, in response to federal mandates. It became the Department of Institutions, Social and Rehabilitative Services in 1970 and was renamed the Department of Human Services in 1980, but the constitutional name — Department of Public Welfare — remains, as does the constitutional mandate: “...to promote the general welfare of the people of the State of Oklahoma...for their protection, security, and benefit.”