The children behind the statistics

The pressures on Georgia’s child welfare and foster care services have been well documented in recent years. Fortunately, they have also attracted political attention and some long-needed budget help.

But a Wednesday story in the Rome News-Tribune is a reminder that the care crisis for Georgia’s most vulnerable population is far from over, and the need for more help as acute as it’s ever been.

The Georgia Budget and Policy Institute is a private nonprofit think tank that primarily studies social issues such as health and education. One of GBPI’s chief policy analysts, Melissa Johnson, shared some child welfare numbers Monday with an Optimist Club audience — numbers that offer few reasons for optimism.

Georgia currently has more than 12,000 children in foster care, a figure that is straining the state’s supply of foster families, to put it mildly. Those 12,000 children represent a stunning 50 percent increase over less than three years, from mid-2013 to the end of 2015.

Johnson attributed the scale of the increase to better reporting of child abuse and neglect, which has led to more at-risk children being relocated. (The widely publicized 2013 deaths of two children whom DFCS had left in their families’ custody despite allegations of abuse left caseworkers, Johnson said, “more likely to be safe than sorry.”

And there is, of course, the well-documented shortage of those workers, whose caseloads in some parts of the state have been many times what is considered a reasonable workload.

The Child Welfare Reform Act of 2015 has begun restoring funds to hire more workers, but it’s a long way from reversing the losses of the previous six years, when budget cuts took 750 case managers off the DFCS payroll. Many of those managers’ duties, Johnson told her Rome audience, were the recruiting of foster families: “The cuts meant job losses, which meant that DFCS workers were just trying to keep children safe.”

We can and should resent the social ills — and, yes, sometimes just bad luck — that result in such misfortune. What we must not let ourselves forget is that these victims of those ills had no part in creating them.

Economic engines

Ten years and change ago — March 13, 2006, to be exact — then-Gov. Sonny Perdue and Kia Motors President E.S. Chung made official the agreement that would bring the new Kia plant to West Point.

Tuesday, the 2 millionth vehicle manufactured at that plant rolled off the line.

In the decade in between, Kia Motors Manufacturing Georgia has invested, according to a KMMG news release, more than $1.1 billion in the area economy and become the area’s principal employer, with more than 15,000 jobs.

That has all happened, remember, in an area devastated by the collapse of the domestic textile industry that for decades had been the upper Chattahoochee Valley’s economic base.

It’s a remarkable story that began 10 years and 2 million cars ago, and it is still being written.

This story was originally published March 30, 2016 at 5:29 PM with the headline "The children behind the statistics."