REFORM STARTS WITH CHILDREN

True to their show-me heritage, Missourians greet each new program promising widespread reform with a deserved degree of skepticism. When a state official or party politician promises discernible changes and improvements in a variety of governmental activities, most citizens quickly remind themselves they have heard it all before. And they generally have.

In the past couple of decades, Missourians have been promised improvements in just about every service provided by state government. Our officials have promised better schools, new welfare assistance programs, improved corrections and prison facilities, more mental health care and additional services for children and the indigent. Those doing the promising have usually fallen victim to the sin of over-promising, and seldom have they been able to deliver all they proposed.

At the moment it is difficult to identify a single promised reform that has met the single most important criteria: does it work? Whether the alleged improvements are made in social services or health delivery systems, the results never seem to match the initial promises. It seems wise to examine why, and an answer is not too difficult to find.

State program reforms fail to reach their goals not because the original intentions were not honest nor even because the methodology was flawed. Most state reforms fail because the needs of the largest number of recipients for these changes -- our children -- keep increasing. The plight of our children has increased, even as state services have improved, because of the declining level of well-being of these children.

To put it another way, reforms made to improve services for a certain number of children cannot work if the number to be served continually increases.

The constituents of the state's most important services -- education, public assistance, health, mental health and public safety -- are largely children, 21 years and younger. If the needs of this constituency continue to escalate, whatever solutions have been formulated will naturally fall short of the mark. One-fourth of Missouri's 5.1 million population is composed of children, whose needs are the greatest and whose unmet needs generate the most significant demands in the future.

For example, if Missouri shortchanges its local school systems, as it has done for years, the victims will be those whose educations were slighted and whose opportunities for learning how to cope in an ever-changing world are significantly lessened. If the state shortchanges its basic assistance payments to meet the immediate demands of budget shortfalls, those who are undernourished will bear this neglect for the rest of their lives. If Missouri fails to provide the kind of health and mental health services required only for children, the consequences of this neglect will continue for decades.

Just a decade ago, the poorest category of Missouri citizens was the elderly, despite numerous federal and state programs designed to provide them with a minimum level of economic security. In less than 10 years, Missouri's children have displaced our senior citizens as the most economically deprived group of citizens. This is a disturbing statistic made all the more so by the sheer numbers: despite a declining population in the state, 30,000 more children slid into poverty in the past decade. Almost one out of every five children lives in poverty, and one in eight is poor enough to qualify for our state's extremely low welfare benefits.

One of every four children in Missouri receives food stamps today -- and that figure continues to increase with each passing year. If all of the 224,532 children in our state living in poverty were gathered in one location, they would create a city larger than Greene County, which includes Missouri's third largest urban area, Springfield.

It is time to recognize that this degree of childhood poverty, coupled with an increasing number of illegitimate births and disappearing two-parent families, is a destructive force that puts one-quarter of a million children at still greater risk for poor birth outcomes, school dropouts, developmental difficulties and crime. As long as these indices remain at such alarmingly high levels, Missourians should recognize that attempted reforms will fail, simply from the demands created by an increasing constituency.

Children who receive inadequate prenatal care will have health problems for the rest of their lives; children who receive inadequate educations will be doomed to a lifetime of repetitive failures; children who are most often the victims of uncontrolled crime will never achieve emotional maturity.

Gov. Carnahan has targeted an unusually large number of services and programs in the state as requiring reform measures and has called on the General Assembly to work with the executive branch in making major changes. This is a welcome start, and the first attempt at changing the status quo occurred last year with passage of S.B. 38O, the state's new Outstanding Schools Act. But even as this new law begins to erase some of the long-standing inequities in the school foundation formula, it cannot meet its high expectations unless it also addresses the problem of needy children who attend classes every day.

The governor has also targeted for reform the state's welfare system, which just about everyone acknowledges needs some serious repair work. But virtually every component of welfare rests, correctly so, on the well-being of the children of disadvantaged families. The basic ingredient of Carnahan's recommendations must be increased attention to the welfare of one-fourth of the state's population.

In both the fields of public health and mental health, again the emphasis must be on the children, who will suffer for the remainder of their lives without adequate services in public health and needed care and treatment in the area of mental health and substance abuse.

In seeking to attack the problem of crime in the streets and neighborhoods of Missouri, any solution must once again be centered around the children and their well-being. Children living in poverty are not only major perpetrators of crime, they also are the greatest targets of violence.

Missourians must recognize that reforms that don't first address the needs of their children are doomed to fail.