Ten years ago, a series of compelling news stories about abused children by Atlanta Constitution reporter Jane Hansen resulted in a public outcry and brief flurry of legislative action. But there was no real reform.

When Hansen launched a recent re-examination of the system that is supposed to save children from negligent and abusive --- sometimes murderous --- caregivers, she found things much the same as they were a decade ago. As her thorough reports have shown, children are still left to languish --- sometimes to die --- in settings too depressing for most of us to imagine.

So what are we to do? Do we give up on a problem too overwhelming to be solved? Do we harden our hearts because the stories are too horrendous to bear? Do we turn away because no laws are sufficient to force violent psychopaths to be good parents?

Don't give up yet. The state child welfare system can be dramatically improved with a little commitment from Gov. Roy Barnes, the state Legislature, and, by extension, the voting public.

There will always be parents who drink too much and care too little, who prefer the lure of narcotics to the joy of giving a hug, who'd rather beat a child than teach him. But the system that monitors those parents can be strengthened and reformed so that the children suffer less at their hands.

The best place to start would be substantially raising the pay of the caseworkers of the Division of Family and Children Services.

This is one of those rare instances where throwing money at a problem would go a long way toward solving it. The reason some DFACS workers perform so poorly is that the salaries are too low to attract the most competent social workers to the job.

Currently, DFACs caseworkers, who are required to have college degrees, start at salaries of $21,000 a year. While Barnes has proposed raising that starting salary to $22,044, that's still not much for the work they are expected to do. (Several days ago, Barnes said that he had raised the starting pay from $17,000 to $21,000, but the figures were incorrect --- a rare error for Barnes, who has mostly mastered the arcana of public policy.)

DFACs caseworkers are expected to make life-and-death decisions --- quite literally.

They must visit homes to assess whether caregivers are violent, whether a child is in danger, whether a grandmother may be trusted to care for the children of her drug-addled daughter. They must determine whether a mother with a drug record has cleaned up her act, or whether she might return to her old ways. They must decide whether a mother's boyfriend poses a threat, and whether the mother can be trusted to keep her children away from him.

Generally speaking, you won't draw the skills necessary for those sorts of decisions for an annual salary of $22,000. The Atlanta Public Schools starts schoolteachers with bachelor's degrees at $31,608, and they get two months' annual vacation to boot. Atlanta's police officers, whose jobs are more hazardous but hardly more harrowing, start at nearly $29,000.

The low salaries haven't kept some highly qualified and dedicated social workers from taking jobs with DFACS, but they are burdened by case loads that make their jobs impossible. Some struggle with 30 or 40 or more open cases. As teachers cannot teach in crowded classrooms, so social workers cannot keep up with 30 to 40 families each.

While the state has already moved to provide more social workers to child protective services, a monitoring system should be in place to make sure case loads actually decrease.

Keeping enough caseworkers in place requires money, of course. But the lives of children will be saved, making it money well spent.

Cynthia Tucker's column appears Wednesdays and Sundays.

Editor of the Constitution editorial pages