More than half the frontline staff working in the Children’s Division at the start of the last fiscal year left by the end of the year. Some who remain take second jobs or sell plasma to make ends meet. It’s a situation advocates warn puts Missouri’s most vulnerable children at risk.
Eighty open cases of child abuse and neglect sat on Matt Cordova s desk in 2017 during the height of the "hole I found myself buried in," he remembers.