Do you remember the U.S. Marines’ recruiting slogan, “We’re looking for a few good men”? Tiffany Wright is looking for 130 child welfare warriors.

Wright is director of the Division of Children and Family Services, which responds to reports of child abuse and neglect and administers the state’s foster care system.

DCFS has more than 130 job vacancies, including 69 for front line workers who manage an average of 24 cases. It is advertising job opportunities through social media, recruitment webinars, and a new webpage, humanservices.arkansas.gov/u/dcfs-jobs.

Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ state employee pay plan last year increased front line workers’ starting salaries from $36,155 to $52,137. Average annual turnover has since fallen from 60%-70% to 43%, which is still high. 

And not surprising. The hours can be long and irregular, and caseworkers work with families undergoing challenging times.

“It comes with rewards, though,” Wright said. “It’s not all bad. I don’t want the perspective to be bad. There are rewards that come out of this work when you can help a family succeed and a baby reunification occurs or a child gets adopted.”

The Marines didn’t shy away from the fact that the job would be tough. Neither does Wright, who spent six-and-a-half years fresh out of college as a front line worker.  The native Nebraskan previously had worked in her home state at Boys Town, an organization serving at-risk young people, and as a part-time county jail correctional officer.

As a front line worker, most of Wright’s cases involved children who had already been placed into the state’s foster care system. But there were times when she would respond to a report of potential child maltreatment.

Wright would arrive at a stranger’s house, ask personal questions, and, along with a supervisor, determine if the home was safe enough for the children to remain.

It could be scary. She didn’t know what would await her on the other side of the door. At times she made sure she was accompanied by law enforcement. Occupants have brandished weapons and have refused to open the door and fled.

“So I’ve had a life of experience of different reactions,” she said. “And then I’ve had the parent who was like, ‘I need help.’ And we move quickly to, ‘What does that mean and what help do they need?’”

The job involves engaging a family, meeting them where they are, and asking questions to determine if drug abuse or physical abuse are occurring in the home. Speaking from experience, Wright said most people weren’t going to be honest because they feared they would lose their child, so she had to build rapport.

As a young front line worker, she was making life-changing decisions about whether a home was safe and whether she should remove the children.

She said she made the best decisions she could with the information she had.

“It takes your breath away,” she said. “I mean, could you imagine being 23 saying, ‘I’m removing someone’s kids from their house?’ … It is hard. It is really hard. And then you have to tell the kids what’s happening, and they’re scared. You’re a stranger to them, and you’re removing them and placing them in your car, and then driving them to the [Department of Human Services] office, and they don’t know what’s happening next. So it is a lot of emotions. I have a lot of emotions sitting here thinking about that and talking about that with you today, and we do that at DCFS.”

Some children in foster care can’t be returned home and need to be adopted. To raise awareness about them, Wright last year ran 179 miles – one for each waiting child at the time. The current number is 146.

But other families with help end up in a better place. One mother whose children were removed twice due to her substance abuse got clean through Methodist Family Health’s Arkansas CARES program and kept her children. Wright recalled two cases where it took a little while for the parents to trust the system. Both cases involved supportive foster parents. DCFS was able to reunify the families. She checks on them occasionally, and they’re doing well.

“That is why we come to work every day, for success stories like that,” she said. “Like parents who overcome all the odds and get their kids back.”

Again, DCFS is looking for roughly 130 good people ready to go to war for children and families. The website is humanservices.arkansas.gov/u/dcfs-jobs.

© 2026 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Steve Brawner’s column is syndicated to 24 news outlets in Arkansas. Email him at brawnersteve@mac.com.