by KHI News Service

Members of the Senate Ways and Means Committee today grilled a top welfare official about a controversial change in policy that has resulted in at least 1,000 children being dropped from the state’s food stamp program.

"Can you tell me how this fits in the governor's roadmap to take children out of poverty?" Sen. Laura Kelly, a Topeka Democrat, asked Michelle Schroeder, director of public policy and legislative relations at the Kansas Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services.

"This is a policy that's based on equality in the system," Schroeder said. "We had to look at the policy in totality as it affects every household."

"Which is easy to do when you're sitting in an office in Topeka dealing with them in the aggregate," Kelly replied. "It's a little harder to do when you're back home and can't go to the grocery store."

The previous policy for determining eligibility for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) allowed households headed by non-citizens to earn, on average, about $900 more per month than households headed by citizens and still qualify for benefits, said Schroeder, repeating what she told a House committee last week.

Kelly said that rationale seemed to be flawed. She pointed to a document with four scenarios under the previous formula where all-citizen households fared better than the same household with an undocumented member.

"The premise that households with an undocumented resident (were) being treated better, that doesn't appear to be the case," Kelly said.

Formula change

Prior to October, food stamp eligibility for Kansas children of undocumented parents — as in most states — was determined by a formula that counted a fraction of the household income to account for the parents’ ineligibility.

For example, if the non-citizen parents in a five-person household — two parents, three U.S.-born children — earned $2,000 a month, that $2,000 was divided by five and multiplied by three to determine whether the family met the program’s income threshold and to decide the amount of food aid it would receive. In this example, the monthly household income would be counted as $1,200, making the three children together eligible for about $365 a month in food stamps, or about $121 per child.

By contrast, if the parents were U.S. citizens, the five people in the household would be eligible for a total household benefit of about $425 a month, or about $85 per person.

SRS officials concluded that the potentially greater per-person benefit under the old “prorated” formula was unfair even though the total household benefit was less for the family headed by undocumented parents.

With the new policy, all household income is counted but only the number of citizens in the house is used to determine eligibility.

The change resulted in 1,042 children losing benefits in households with at least one undocumented parent, according to SRS.

Federal regulations do not allow illegal immigrants to apply for food stamps for themselves. They are, however, allowed to apply on behalf of their minor children, if the children were born in the United States. Citizenship is automatic for U.S.-born children regardless of the status of the parents.

SNAP, funded by the federal government but managed by states, is still commonly referred to as the “food stamp” program, even though beneficiaries now use a government-issued electronic swipe card to purchase groceries. About 141,000 households in Kansas receive SNAP benefits.

One of four states

Kansas is the fourth state to adopt the current eligibility requirements — Arizona, Utah and Nebraska are the others. The other 46 states use the eligibility formula previously used by Kansas, which changed its policy in October 2011.

"Why are only four states using this program?" asked Sen. Terrie Huntington, R-Fairway.

"I can't answer that," Schroeder said.

→ Continue reading, and view the document cited by Sen. Kelly, at khi.org/foodstamps.