The new reality postpones or ends the hopes and wishes scrawled across the women's palms.
Still more cuts were made in other programs meant to help the poor in a budget process that saw the Corbett administration push through a controversial last-minute Senate measure that shifts control of welfare funding from the legislature to his administration.
Defending the budget cuts, Michael Race, a spokesman for the Department of Public Welfare, wrote in an e-mail that the budget "strikes a balance between two important goals: preserving the public-assistance safety net for those in need while not placing additional burdens on the Pennsylvania taxpayers. . . .
"If we continue on a path of unchecked spending increases, these services will become unsustainable and so will the burden placed on taxpayers."
Roxanne Green, program manager of the PathWaysPA Earn Center in North Philadelphia, where the GED class had been held, said that her students were preoccupied by poverty and had no idea that budget machinations in Harrisburg could have such profound repercussions on their lives, she added.
"It's hard to warn people about a tsunami coming when they don't know what a tsunami is," said Green, who, like Fusco, was made jobless by the cuts.
The fretting was echoed throughout the area, as people living in poverty and their advocates began to assess the cuts late last week.
Along with the slashing of welfare-to-work programs, the legislature also cut $44 million, or 16 percent, of the welfare cash budget.
Further, it cut child-care subsidies, which welfare recipients use to have their children looked after while they work or train, by $17.6 million, or 9 percent.
And it eliminated $500,000 from the state's food-purchase program - the equivalent of denying 53 tractor-trailers filled with food to food pantries, according to Steveanna Wynn, executive director of the SHARE Food Program, which supplies city pantries.
