This report responds to a congressional mandate for rapid findings on WtW program implementation. The rest of this report contains six sections. Section A presents the policy background for the evaluation and its overall design. As the BBA requires, grantees are allocating substantial resources to getting participants quickly into work activity.
Grantees are in the very earliest stages of implementation.
About half of the local grantees surveyed were not awarded grants until the latter part of 1998, and it takes them several months to begin services. Many grantees are having trouble recruiting at their anticipated pace in the early months, suggesting that enrollment numbers may be lower than grantees had planned. Grantees surveyed feel the WtW eligibility criteria are too strict. Most grantees report that current eligibility criteria exclude some people from their programs who have serious barriers to employment, most notably individuals who have earned a high school credential but still have low skill levels. In its proposal to reauthorize the WtW program, the Administration addresses this issue by advocating that eligibility criteria be changed to allow WtW services to reach more people with the kinds of difficult employment problems that the program is designed to overcome.