The headline-grabbing horror stories are over for the moment. The challenge ahead is how to fix Arizona’s child welfare system without the picture of a horribly abused or even dead child in front of our eyes. Answers have been proposed for a decade, yet they have been rebuffed by Arizona’s policymakers.

Arizona’s child welfare system has been crumbling for the past number of years in full sight of those whose job it is to shore it up.

We know today and have known for years that:

• Caseloads of Arizona’s beleaguered case managers are 27 per cent above the nationally recommended norm resulting in overwhelmed staff that can’t possibly do the job;

• More than one-third of the kids in foster care did not receive their required monthly visit by a designated case manager — not because the case manager is lazy or stupid — but because there simply was no time;

• We have a 24 per cent turnover rate of workers, which means the lifeline of these kids to their “surrogate parent” is severed over and over again;

• Foster parents don’t get the support they need and haven’t had a reimbursement rate increase since 1996;

• For every two children needing a foster home bed, we have only one bed available.

And, we know that during the last legislative session our elected leaders proposed to either eliminate or drastically reduce the budgets of the very services that are used to protect kids and bolster families.

Despite so many people across our state and nation talking about the importance of prevention, according to the 2001 Child Maltreatment Report of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the rate of children receiving preventive services in Arizona was only one-tenth the national rate.

The space shuttle Columbia blew apart, in large measure, because of huge budget pressures, a culture of doing more with less and unrealistic targets. Those same forces exist today in our child welfare system.

The Legislature will call hearings to try and figure out how best to make the bureaucracy function more efficiently. Maricopa County Attorney Rick Romley, who has made some recommendations that need to be carefully considered, will articulate his understandable outrage. Governor Napolitano has held hearings across the state in response to her recently released excellent report and will be implementing a plan for reform.

But until and unless we have case managers and supervisors who are well educated and trained; who have a pay structure that reflects their responsibilities; who have reasonable caseloads; who have a career path that builds on work skills rather than moving them up and out; and who have space and equipment that indicate the respect they well deserve, the system will not improve and we will continue to have tragedy after tragedy.

This will require an enormous infusion of resources into a starved system at the same time that the state budget is as tight as it has ever been. There are no other choices. The state budget is a reflection of our values and our priorities. The Governor has said that protecting children is her No. 1 priority, as have members of the Legislature. This cannot be done on the cheap.

Let’s find the public will and the resources to recreate Arizona’s child welfare system so that it has the staff and support necessary to make sure each and every child has a safe and nurturing place to call home.

Carol Kamin is the executive director of Children’s Action Alliance. The Alliance, founded in 1988, is a nonprofit, non-partisan research and advocacy organization.