Jackson Free Press

With the large corporate incentive package behind us that will, hopefully, create jobs down the road, it's time for legislators to start working on more pressing issues, including how the state will spend its limited budget for the coming year. For all the squabble about economic development and making jobs available by 2020-something, if the state's workforce is not healthy enough or able to go to work by that time, it will quite literally all be for nothing.

Lawmakers can do several things for kids this session—to ensure that the next generation of Mississippians is healthy and able to work—and they should start talking about them immediately instead of worrying about same-sex marriage and trying to limit constitutional rights.

First, the state's foster-care system is still in crisis. Just because there's a new division doesn't mean it's out of the woods. David Chandler, the executive director of Mississippi Family and Children's Services, said last month that his division has until mid-May to show significant progress and turnaround in order for the state's system to not go into federal receivership.

"We have two major objectives," Chandler told Jackson State University social workers in January. "First, the Legislature must increase our budget, and number two, we must employ more social workers and raise their salaries."

The Legislature needs to increase their budget by May 15. Fiscal-year 2015 data show that 7,557 children are in the state's foster-care system, and the number of Mississippi kids in foster care has steadily grown since 2011.

How the budgets will be adjusted to accommodate the funding needed is yet to be decided, but we can only ask the Legislature to not just consider but seriously find as many dollars as possible to keep our system out of receivership. If the feds take over our system, we will be at the top of another list we don't want to be on: the first state foster-care system the federal government has to run.

Other legislative priorities for kids require no additional funding. Legislation asking the state to use leftover Temporary Assistance to Need Families funds for childcare will be introduced soon. This change is not asking the state to use its own money—it just asks that the federal TANF funding we leave sitting on the table over and over again be used for childcare in the state.

Forty-seven percent of black children in the state are living at or below the poverty line in comparison to 15 percent of non-Hispanic, white children. That must change.

This is about empowering and providing for the poor children in the state and enabling them to live healthy, successful lives in Mississippi. This is about the future of the state. We call on lawmakers who say they care about kids to put their money where their mouths are—because really, it just might be many of these kids' last chance.