Celestia Brown will head to Sacramento this budget season and scream into the political wilderness.

She's an advocate for the working poor. OK, she is the working poor. And a student and a mother and a home-schooler and a woman, who amid the chaos of her life, sees a bright future for herself and her kids.

The vision has helped her get as far as she's gotten. That, and a state welfare program that encourages many who receive monthly checks to find work and their footing quickly.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's budget proposal would shrink a key part of that program -- child care money for those who find jobs or who find training that will lead to jobs.

This being a budget proposal, contradictions swirl. The cut won't end child care help for anyone receiving it now. And Schwarzenegger says the money -- $114 million this year -- isn't needed because fewer people are re-entering the workforce.

Nonsense, say child advocates. They say the governor's assumption is based on bad data. And new federal laws will mean many more people moving from welfare to work.

Starving the beast

My take? The administration wants to starve the beast. If the child care money is reduced, county workers who run welfare programs will have less incentive to find those who are eligible for it.

Those eligible might become discouraged themselves and decide to find minimum-wage work and a patchwork of unreliable and sometimes dangerous child care.

Brown's analysis is more direct.

``Without child care, single parents just can't work -- plain and simple,'' she says.

A budget cut that hurts the vulnerable is no shocker. It's the first page of the playbook for the Republican majority in Washington, D.C., and it's a money-saving tip Schwarzenegger has used before.

Brown knows that. She helps lead the local chapter of Parent Voices, a group working for broader access to child care. But for her, the issue goes beyond party lines.

``I believe in the economics of politics,'' she says. ``The people who are under attack have the least amount of voice and usually the fewest resources to react.''

Turning to welfare

Brown became an expert the hard way. She left San Jose in 1988 to head to MIT. There, she fell in love and married. She quit college and opened a computer network design consultancy with her husband.

They had three children. He hit her. She left in 2001 and moved back in with her parents in San Jose. Brown looked for work in Silicon Valley and found nothing. Her ex-husband's business failed and child support stopped. The money ran out.

``It was beyond a shock,'' says Brown, 34. ``I was kind of stuck in a stupor for a while, especially to have worked and had a business and a home, going to having nothing.''

She turned to the welfare program known as CalWORKS, which comes with cash, child care payments and the requirement that participants find a job or train for a job.

Brown took nursing classes, while CalWORKS paid for her children's day care. After a year she left CalWORKS, but she'll never forget how the program saved her family. It was CalWORKS, return to her abusive husband or homelessness, she says.

Brown became a home health worker. Her income rose from $800 a month in government aid, she says, to $2,000 a month from her job.

Now she works nights, while her parents care for her kids. She home-schools her children, ages 8, 6 and 4, during the day. In the evenings, she takes classes in pursuit of a nursing degree. She plans to start her own home health care company.

Brown says she sleeps about four hours a day and, yes, she's tired.

But count on one thing: In this debate, she'll find the energy to scream.