Today, the Legislature will convene in special session to fix Nebraska’s safe haven law.

When its work is done, some Nebraskans will heave a sigh of relief and think that the problem has gone away.

No, it won’t.

All that’s really going to happen once lawmakers set an age limit under which children can be abandoned is that the embarrassing national news coverage will come to an end.

And parents across the country no longer will look to Nebraska as an answer to their problems. One in every six children abandoned under our law came from out of state.

The problems faced by those despairing parents, and their children, will remain. They just won’t be as public as they became when the spotlight shone every time a child was dropped off at a hospital.

The stories of the parents and their children have provided a rare learning experience. Their problems were real, heart-wrenching and often seemingly insoluble.

One detail stands out in stark relief. Twenty-seven of the 31 children dropped off had a record of needing mental health care.

It’s all too convenient to chalk up the safe haven drop-offs to ‘bad parenting’ and to scorn the parents involved as escape artists bent on sidestepping their responsibilities. Consideration of the facts leads to a different conclusion.

The sad, hard reality is that the troubled families often had virtually run out of options. The services they need simply are inadequate, overcrowded or not available.

As the advocacy organization Voices for Children in Nebraska pointed out in a memo to state officials, “For years, we’ve seen Nebraska rank at the bottom compared to other states for general fund expenditures on behavioral health services.”

Failure of the state to invest in those programs, which offer prevention and early intervention, leads to predictable results.

Nebraska has one of the highest percentages in the nation of children who have been taken from their homes and placed in out-of-home care, such as a foster home, an institution, group home or with relatives.

State government currently has embarked on a program to reduce the number of children in foster care and has shown some success.

More action is needed. To truly solve the problem, to help keep children in their homes, the state needs to improve its services to children, from basic needs to creating new options to improve behavioral health.

There’s a wise saying that integrity is doing the right thing when no one is watching.

There’s little doubt that during the special session, state senators will be able switch off the spotlight that has been shining for the past few weeks. But state officials need to keep working to strengthen services to families and children once the glare of publicity has dimmed.