Missouri Department of Social Services Director Jessica Bax says her agency is developing a plan that could lead to higher pay for investigators who handle allegations of child abuse and neglect.
It’s a move that child welfare advocates have sought for years while Missouri’s Children’s Division struggled with high turnover, massive backlogs and uneven rollout of new programs.
The Department of Social Services is one of the state’s largest governmental agencies, overseeing Missouri’s Medicaid program and assistance programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. It’s also in charge of Missouri’s Children’s Division, an agency tasked with managing the state’s foster care system and looking into allegations of child abuse and neglect.
One of the lingering problems for Children’s Division is that the starting salary for child abuse investigators is about $45,000 a year – much lower than in other states like Illinois or for nonstate government jobs. The combination of high caseloads and low pay leads to staffing shortages exacerbating past case backlogs and uneven rollouts of new programs.
In an interview for the Politically Speaking Hour on St. Louis on the Air, Bax detailed a new program that could help child abuse investigators make more money.
“One of the things that we’re looking at doing, without a specific dollar increase from the General Assembly, is thinking about the work in terms of what are some elevated roles that are really necessary within Children’s Division to help out the frontline worker,” Bax said.
Under the plan, Bax said that an entry-level child abuse investigator could move into a more specialized job at a higher salary providing assistance to workers looking into alleged abuse or neglect.
“So do you need frontline workers to have an extremely low caseload to be successful? Or can that caseload be just a little bit more on average if they had a consultation team who had a lot of experience with children with complex medical conditions or children who had unique safety situations with drug use,” Bax said. “And those are jobs that would become a career ladder and really incentivize someone to stay.”
Bax said Children’s Division Director Sarah Smith is implementing the plan now.
State Rep. Keri Ingle, D-Jackson County, worked as a Children’s Division investigator before she became a legislator. She said the plan Bax detailed is promising.
“I absolutely think that the career ladder is something that should be looked at as far as not just recruiting but retaining staff at Children’s Division and other parts of DSS as well,” Ingle said. “Those jobs are so specific. They’re high need. And they require really, really skilled clinicians.”
But Ingle also said that this type of plan could be difficult to implement if the state budget situation deteriorates.
“Offering a career ladder as a form of salary enticement would be great,” Ingle said. “Are we going to be able to do that with this budget? I don’t think so, especially if we’re looking at cutting even more revenue.”
A time of big challenges
Bax is a veteran of Missouri state government, having worked in high level roles in the Department of Health and Senior Services and the Department of Mental Health.
She said those experiences prepared her for a job with broad responsibility for programs serving vulnerable Missourians.
“You have to have the mindset that behind every decision that you make is a child, a real person in Missouri, and how does that affect them?” she said. “How does that ultimately impact the programs in a positive way and get those individuals what they need?”
But some of the programs Bax’s agency manages are facing seismic changes driven by federal policy.
Last year, Congress approved wide-ranging legislation known as the Big Beautiful Bill that significantly altered programs like SNAP and Medicaid. States like Missouri will have to pay a portion for SNAP based on what’s known as the “error rate,” which is the percentage of SNAP recipients who either receive too much or not enough of the benefit.
Before the Big Beautiful Bill passed, the federal government paid for all of SNAP benefits. Bax calculated that based on the program being a billion dollars, the state may have to pay “$100 million as a middle ground.”
Bax’s agency will also have to oversee the implementation of a system that verifies that Medicaid recipients are working. Missouri needs to have that in place by the end of the year – unless the federal government grants a waiver.
She said the state is working on a system that can verify whether someone is working without the Medicaid recipient having to do anything.
“The path that we’re working on is automated for as many people as possible … where we are able to verify through our data sources,” Bax said.
“St. Louis on the Air” brings you the stories of St. Louis and the people who live, work and create in our region. The show is produced by Miya Norfleet, Emily Woodbury, Danny Wicentowski, Elaine Cha and Alex Heuer. Darrious Varner is our production assistant. The audio engineer is Aaron Doerr.
