YOU'RE YOUNG, ambitious and hoping to cash in on a college degree in a jobs-rich economy. Why, pray tell, would you elect to be a caseworker in the Georgia Department of Family and Children Services?

As Journal reporter Jane O. Hansen pointed out in her most recent expose on the agency, Georgia's caseworkers are the fourth-lowest paid in the nation, with a starting salary of $21,000. What kind of people does the agency expect to attract for $10 an hour?

Well, people driven by idealism, not by earning potential. People driven by their love of children, not by their love of money.

Those who make such a choice deserve the public's salute, not its derision. But these young idealists, charged with protecting an ever-increasing number of children in violent families, need help. They need better pay, more colleagues to share the load, ongoing training and a record-keeping system that would make the system responsive and accountable.

The focus is on Georgia's child protective agency, and its caseworkers, because too many children, such as 5-year-old Terrell Peterson, have fallen through the system's large cracks. Too many children have died because DFACS failed to protect children in violent families, despite the pleas of neighbors, teachers and doctors. Too many excuses have been aired. It's time to fix DFACS.

Officials must start on the front lines and in the management ranks. Young caseworkers need to be backed up by a system of experienced managers who can help make critical decisions about when to pull a child from a potentially abusive home. They need better record-keeping abilities, which should come easily in this day of laptop computers. Smaller caseloads will prevent them from burning out on their jobs so quickly. Hansen reported that burnout claims more than one in three every year; the system, therefore, constantly loses experienced people.

And they need a public that backs them up. Like the focus on raising teacher pay and performance in recent years, the public also needs to focus on caseworkers. In many cases they're asked to do a job few would want: decide when a child is to be separated from a parent. They need the support of their bosses, they need the backing of citizens and they need the tools and the money to do their jobs.

We don't expect caseworkers to save every child in every situation. They are overwhelmed in large part because the number of toxic, potentially violent families has grown with the increasing numbers of divorces, never-married mothers and teens giving birth. There are too many unconnected "boyfriends" in the lives of young children these days; too many mothers strung out on drugs and alcohol, and of course, too few men owning up to their responsibilities. Ultimately the blame lies in family dysfunction, not in inept caseworkers.

That said, the General Assembly needs to give this system the tools it needs to save kids' lives. Even though many families aren't taking care of their own, Georgians aren't ready to abandon those kids to violence, the streets or an early grave.