Georgia Division of Family and Children Services

How do you build and maintain an effective child protection system when faced with the challenge of a high-profile child death? While leaders often react by making immediate changes and promising reform, a calm, measured approach is much more effective.

When children are unable to remain safely at home with their parents or guardians, a state’s child welfare agency must step in and place the children in a home where they can be protected from abuse and/or neglect.

In a key budget hearing Monday, Georgia’s child welfare agency described its plans to increase foster care payments and first steps toward implementing a recently passed federal law that will impact child welfare systems across the country.

Georgia State Rep. Mary Margaret Oliver (D) plans to push for increased payments to relatives who care for foster children during a budget hearing Monday. Oliver will ask her colleagues on the House appropriations subcommittee for human services to commit roughly $2.68 million annually for unlicensed relative caregivers who receive significantly less from the state than licensed foster parents.

Eight months after Bobby Cagle left Georgia to head the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services, his former right hand is L.A.-bound to work on child welfare issues with him again.