Both major candidates for Missouri governor support boosting salaries in the state’s Children’s Division.
It’s a policy stance that comes as the agency has struggled for years with recruiting and retaining employees — especially investigators looking into allegations of child abuse and neglect.
The starting salary for Children’s Division investigators, which is around $44,000, is far lower than those for comparable public and private sector jobs. Illinois’ starting salary is $72,000 for child abuse investigators. And school districts and hospitals can often pay better than the state, especially for investigators with graduate degrees.
Lt. Gov. Mike Kehoe, the Republican governor nominee, said increasing Children’s Division salaries, particularly for investigators, will be top of mind if he’s elected in November.
“I'm a big fan of making sure we have appropriate staffing … and that they have the appropriate pay.” Kehoe said. “And our most vulnerable citizens are children. So making sure that they're in a safe environment is very much a priority to me.”
Democratic nominee Crystal Quade, who serves as the Missouri House minority leader, said she would “absolutely” push for higher Children’s Division salaries if she’s elected governor.
“It's a thing that I have tried to champion in my time in Jefferson City,” Quade said. “I am a social worker by background, and obviously protecting Missouri's children is a huge priority for me. We've had children unfortunately pass away due to lack of investigators being able to follow up and actually do the jobs that they deeply want to do because we're so understaffed.”
Staffing shortages were especially acute in the Children’s Division St. Louis office, which accumulated a massive backlog of unfinished cases. Children’s Division Director Darrell Missey said that staffing in St. Louis has stabilized and allowed for that backlog to be significantly reduced.
But both Republicans and Democratic lawmakers have questioned whether those higher staffing levels are sustainable without significant salary increases.
Under Gov. Mike Parson’s administration, salaries for state employees, including in the Children's Division, went up substantially. But Kehoe said governments and private companies are struggling to keep up with demands for increasing employee salaries.
He said he’s committed to continuing to try to make state government salaries more competitive.
“When you live and work in Jefferson City, you get to know a lot of state employees. And when you stand behind them in the grocery store line and see that they can't afford this, or they can't afford that, you know that this is a real problem,” Kehoe said. “But the state government faces the same problem a lot of industry does. Wages in the last several years since COVID have risen at an exponential pace. And trying to keep up with that has been everybody's challenge.”
Parson generally supported across-the-board salary increases, contending that they’re a more sustainable way of financially helping the state workforce. He vetoed an effort to specifically provide more money to the Children’s Division several years ago.
House Democrats sought to increase Children’s Division funding earlier this year during the budgetary process, but Republicans, who control the Missouri House, voted it down.
When the session ended this year, Quade criticized the failure to increase Children’s Division salaries.
"I feel like that lack of getting that done falls into this larger narrative of these guys just simply not caring about government working," Quade said.
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