Parents in the state’s welfare program would no longer have to send their children to school to receive full benefits, under Gov. Jim Doyle’s proposed budget.

Officials with the Doyle administration said a 2004 audit showed this requirement in the Wisconsin Works program failed to help more children attend school. Since most families only stay on W-2 for a few months now, the requirement doesn’t affect a student’s long-term attendance, said Department of Children and Families spokeswoman Erika Monroe-Kane.

The program — a holdover from the time before welfare reform when parents received benefits longer — can’t be justified in the face of the state’s massive budget problems, she said.

"It wasn’t working," Monroe-Kane said. "This is an accountability improvement."

But Republicans said the move would let bad parents off the hook by stopping the practice of docking parents’ checks by $50 per child per month, up to $150 per month, if a child is skipping school repeatedly.

"The least we can do is make sure that (these) children go to school," said budget committee member Rep. Robin Vos, R-Caledonia, who wants the state to fix the program if it doesn’t work. "If you don’t have a good education, you can’t expect to succeed in society."

Wisconsin’s landmark welfare reform, now more than a decade old, requires parents to work or get job training in exchange for a check and child care. Doyle’s proposed changes to the program would offer some new benefits and cut others and are drawing mixed reactions from both lawmakers and advocates for poor families.

Doyle is creating a unit to better investigate fraud in the Wisconsin Shares program, which provides child-care subsidies for poor working parents, and is working to change the overall program to make fraud easier to detect.

Doyle’s budget proposal also would:

• Tighten eligibility standards and raise co-payments for parents receiving child-care subsidies, saving nearly $16 million over two years.

• Allow for a waiting list for parents seeking child-care subsidies, saving $2.3 million.

• Stop paying subsidies to child-care providers for the days when parents don’t bring their children to day care, saving $38.8 million.

That last change particularly worries Wendy Rackower, executive director of Red Caboose Daycare Center, 654 Williamson St., where nearly 10 of the 52 slots are filled by Wisconsin Shares participants.

"Every parent pays for a slot because we have the teachers here, we have the food prepared," said Wendy Rackower, executive director of the Red Caboose. "If one child is not here for a day or an hour, our costs do not go down."

Monroe-Kane said the changes were tough decisions that were needed to maintain a financially strapped program.

In addition, Doyle’s proposal would also:

• Allow benefits for a qualifying parent staying home with a newborn for six months, up from three months under current law, at a cost of $2 million over two years.

• Allow women with a late-term at-risk pregnancy to receive welfare benefits, at a cost of $1.4 million.

Vos said the newborn benefit was more than ordinary families would receive. But fellow budget committee member Rep. Tamara Grigsby, D-Milwaukee, said the first months of a child’s life are critical and that the state as a whole would benefit from giving poor families the extra time.