Along Mississippi’s coast, where a growing number of children in need of care has overwhelmed available resources, social workers sometimes recommend leaving children in abusive situations to keep them from flooding the system, officials said. Officials also reported that in 2011, three years after the settlement was in effect, overwhelmed social workers destroyed evidence of abuse by shredding photographed documentation so they would not have to deal with more cases.

In Marion County, in southern Mississippi, three children monitored by the state but not put in custody have died since June 2014. In each instance, someone had reported problems in the household, but social workers did not look into them. In the first case, a social worker decided not to investigate the bruising of a 2-year-old girl who was “crying hysterically” in a hospital and “kicking, punching and screaming” to keep from being examined. Less than three weeks later, the toddler died from “severe head trauma.”

After the state’s acknowledgment of accountability for the system’s failures, the head of the Division of Family and Children’s Services resigned last summer. Gov. Phil Bryant, a Republican, made the directorship a cabinet-level position in December and brought in Justice Chandler to head it. Mississippi also hired an agency to analyze its system and make recommendations, which included increasing social workers’ salaries and restructuring the agency. Justice Chandler said he would seek an increase of $34.5 million in the agency’s budget. The Legislature, which would need to approve such an increase, went into session Jan. 5. “I would not waste my time asking them if I thought they were going to arbitrarily deny us,” he said.

In the last legislative session, the Bryant administration requested an increase of about $12 million in funding, explicitly citing the need for settlement compliance. The Legislature came up with about $3 million. According to a court-ordered report, Mississippi in 2012 spent less on child welfare per foster child than every state but Nevada. Salaries are so low — some family workers can earn as little as $23,643 a year — that they qualify for public assistance. Brehm Bell, a former youth court judge in Hancock County on the gulf coast, said he had stepped down after serving for more than three years because of the system’s inability to address failures.

“I was afraid a child would die on my watch,” he said.

State Representative Herb Frierson, the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, said that the Legislature wanted to satisfy the court, but that budgets were already tight and a steep revenue shortfall was expected this year.