By Steve Brawner
© 2016 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

While most of us this week will enjoy a Thanksgiving meal with our families, 5,200 children in Arkansas also will be fed a meal – but not by their parents.

That’s the number of children who are in the state’s foster care system, and it’s risen by more than 1,000 since 2014. According to Department of Human Services Director Cindy Gillespie, the system “truly is in a crisis.”

What’s happening is not so much that more children are entering the system, though they are, but that much fewer are leaving it.

Gillespie and her Division of Children and Family Services director, Mischa Martin, say a major cause is a declining number of front-line caseworkers who work with children and their families, biological and foster. In Arkansas, they average 28 cases apiece when the national standard is 15.

Caseworkers, who earn about $31,000 a year, are working a lot of overtime in a high-stress, high-stakes job. They walk into extremely difficult, unsafe family situations where parents are drug addicts or abusive, or both. Then they walk out carrying a kid, or dragging several, for whom they must find a place to stay that night. Sometimes, that involves long hours of making phone calls – surely one of the most stressful and heartbreaking sales jobs ever. Then they work with the biological family so their children can return. Meanwhile, they’re monitoring the children in their temporary home. They’re also spending too much time driving, making copies, and doing other work that doesn’t directly involve efficiently taking care of kids.

Naturally, turnover is high, so we have a corps of hardworking, dedicated, understaffed, underpaid caseworkers who in many cases are either burning out or learning on the job. Because of that, they’re less capable of achieving the ultimate goal, which is reuniting as many kids as possible with their newly equipped biological parents.

According to Gillespie, this is more than just a problem for the Division of Children and Family Services, which is in charge of foster children. It’s a problem for the entire Department of Human Services, a sprawling agency that handles many programs for struggling families. So for four months starting in May, she regularly convened the entire agency’s leadership in a “war room” environment to consider strategies. Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who has asked many other state agencies to be as lean as possible, has proposed $26 million next fiscal year to hire 228 additional staff members, including 150 caseworkers. Pay increases are also being considered, as is instituting a second shift so caseworkers aren’t working all the time.

Meanwhile, DHS is working with private organizations like The CALL in Arkansas to recruit foster families who can give children a temporary home – days, months or longer – until the biological parents are ready to raise their children again. Those homes are where many of those children will spend their Thanksgiving this year. There are currently 1,641 such families, along with 274 therapeutic homes for more serious cases, and the agency is hoping to increase those numbers to 1,749 and 350 by August 2017.

As long as I can remember, there’s been a big debate about whether government can do anything right. This is something government must do right. Children should be separated from their parents only when absolutely necessary – when those parents are strung out on drugs, in prison, physically or sexually abusive, or neglectful. Unfortunately, in a state with 3 million people, that’s going to happen sometimes. In those circumstances, someone must take the kids away and then assume responsibility for them, at least for a while. That’s probably going to be the state of Arkansas.

So yes, Gov. Hutchinson, if you’re going to spend my tax dollars on anything, spend them on this. Hire good people, and pay them enough that they’ll stay on the job and get really good at it. Of all the reasons for families to be separated on Thanksgiving, an inadequate number of caseworkers is one of the worst ones.

None of this is meant as a criticism of those caseworkers, who wade into situations the rest of us avoid to help kids and families in a crisis. On this Thanksgiving, I’m thankful they’re there, and I’m thankful that, assuming the governor gets his way, there soon will be more of them.

Related: Trading an empty nest for a full house.