Richard Wexler is executive director of the Alexandria, Va.-based National Coalition for Child Protection Reform (www.nccpr.org).

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Within a month, parents have been arrested in connection with the deaths of three Tucson-area children, all of them previously known to the state's Child Protective Services agency. That alone doesn't prove that Gov. Janet Napolitano's approach to fixing CPS is a failure, but the data behind those horrors do.

Responding to a series of child-abuse fatalities, Napolitano came storming into her first term with a pledge to place child safety ahead of family preservation, based on the false premise that the two are opposites that needed to be balanced. As a result, she gave Arizona's children neither safety nor family preservation.

Her marching orders to caseworkers boiled down to "take the child and run."

In the spring of 2003, former State Rep. Laura Knaperek invited me to Arizona. I met with lawmakers, Department of Economic Security officials, local advocates and journalists. I warned that the governor's approach would backfire. Not only would thousands of families be destroyed needlessly; all those new cases would only overload workers, so they would miss more children in real danger.

Unfortunately, that's exactly what's happened.

Between October 2002 and October 2004, the number of children torn from their parents over the course of a year soared by 40 percent. Removals have stayed at the same high level ever since — a state of perennial "foster-care panic."

But rather than curbing child-abuse fatalities, in 2005, the most recent year for which data are available, both total fatalities and deaths of children "known to the system" set records. If the headlines from Tucson lately are any indication, things have gotten no better.

Meanwhile, the Legislature postures about reform. Every year conservative lawmakers pretend that you can stop needless removal of children by starving DES to death. That doesn't work for two reasons: First, taking away children always will be the last item to be cut. Second, the Legislature always caves in and gives the governor more money anyway.

The governor knows it. She also knows that all she has to do is whisper the words "child abuse" into the ears of fellow liberals and they'll embrace infringements on civil liberties that would make John Ashcroft blush.

The result is the perennial foster-care panic, with just enough money to tear about 7,500 children from their parents every year, and almost no money to do anything else.

Here's how to break the stalemate.

The governor reportedly wants another $20 million for foster care and only $7 million more to help families.

The Legislature should make a counteroffer. Give the governor every dime she's asking for, but set a condition: Not one penny of the new money goes to foster care — all $27 million goes to safe, proven programs to keep families together and into bolstering due process protections for families.

The disaster for Arizona's children won't end until the Legislature admits the need to spend more, and the governor admits the need to spend smarter.