June 7 – New Mexico’s Child Welfare Agency will return to arbitration over a landmark settlement stemming from a lawsuit filed years ago alleging the state failed to adequately care for young people in custody.
The Kevin S. settlement — which followed the class action lawsuit filed in 2018 by 14 foster children against the state’s Children, Youth and Families and Human Services Department — established a number of goals for reform, including developing a ‘trauma-responsive system’. “system of care, building a strong network of behavioral health care services and meeting the needs of Indigenous children in foster care.
Sara Crecca, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said Friday that her team has been working in recent years on feasible ways for the state to meet the settlement’s standards — and in some cases even agreed to scale back those goals to make incremental progress make possible.
“None of this has been accomplished,” Crecca said Friday, addressing state lawmakers on the Legislative Health and Human Services Committee at a meeting in Albuquerque. “We encourage you to hold this agency accountable for what it has already promised.”
CYFD Secretary Teresa Casados told lawmakers that “structural changes are not happening quickly.”
State leaders are in some cases rebuilding structures that were “improperly structured” to begin with, she added.
“If we were to do it so quickly and just worry about hitting those numbers, we wouldn’t be doing all the work that we do to make sure we build that strong foundation,” Casados said. “…We do it methodically, we do it slowly and we do it so it can be sustained.”
The update on the Kevin S. case came as the legislative committee began a three-day dive into all things child welfare. Lawmakers heard about the increasing number of children hospitalized due to drug exposure, concerns about CYFD’s investigative approach to former foster children, and an update on the agency’s efforts to end the practice of admitting children are sleeping in CYFD offices.
Casados said she feels “very comfortable” heading to arbitration to demonstrate the progress her department has made in recent months and said the state government remains committed to the Kevin S. settlement.
“There is nothing in those agreements that we as a department don’t agree with,” she said. “We really feel that these are all measures that need to be met.”
The department is trying to provide a more bite-sized approach to achieving its goals, she said.
“I think over the last year we tried to do everything at once, and it felt like we accomplished nothing at all,” said Casados, who took over the department on an interim basis in April 2023 before resigning earlier this year was confirmed. . “We took a different approach to… try to achieve these results on a smaller scale.”
Casados said she plans to point to progress, not completion, in conversations with the arbitrator.
“I feel like we can demonstrate that Kevin S.’s requirements are not that we would meet that standard, but that we would make good faith efforts to achieve that,” Casados said. “If you look at where we were a year ago versus where we are now, I think it’s fair to say we’ve put in a lot of effort and made a lot of progress.”
Work pressure and turnover
The twin problems of heavy workloads and high employee turnover pose major hurdles for the agency, leaders and advocates agree, and the arrangement needs improvement.
Casados said the “ideal caseload” for a CYFD investigator is 12 cases.
“Some cases are much more difficult than others,” she acknowledged.
The department initially set a goal of reducing investigator caseloads to 200% of the overall goal, or 24 cases — a goal it said is being met in some parts of the state.
Part of the challenge in easing the workload is hiring and retaining staff. About 1 in 5 fieldwork positions are unfilled, Casados said. The agency will need to hire approximately 58 investigators, based on the number of open investigations.
The agency has been hiring over the past year, she said, but it takes about six months for a new staff member to take on a full caseload.
Rep. Liz Thomson, a Democrat from Albuquerque, said she doesn’t see reaching a 200% caseload as a reason to celebrate.
“I think it’s better than 1,000% or 500%,” she said. “We’re not even there for the entire state. So of course we have turnover.”
The level of vacancy and turnover take their toll further down the chain.
Bette Fleishman, executive director of Pegasus Legal Services for Children, said foster cases in court have sometimes been delayed for years due to CYFD’s high turnover. Sometimes a brand new employee shows up in court on the day of the hearing and asks for an extension to be informed. Other times — including twice this week, she said — no one shows up in court at all.
“You can’t have a hearing if the employee who is the legal guardian of this child is not there,” Fleishman said. “It then causes delays in the sustainability of the children, and it is harmful if these children remain unnecessarily in care, often for years.”
Sen. Jerry Ortiz y Pino, an Albuquerque Democrat who chairs the committee, said turnover at the leadership level has made it difficult for lawmakers to obtain information. Casados is the CYFD’s third Cabinet Secretary under Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham’s administration.
“Every six months it’s a completely new group of people,” Ortiz y Pino said. “…I hate to say this, but I’m not sure I want to learn their names because the last group we learned the names of is all gone.”
Gary Housepian, CEO of Disability Rights New Mexico and a member of the Kevin S. plaintiffs team, agreed that this is a concern.
“When we talk about implementing reforms, one of the things that has prevented this or been an obstacle is that this change requires stable and sustainable leadership,” he said. “That’s been a problem.”
Shortage of foster families
Maintaining enough foster homes – including those who can handle the more challenging youth and children – is a challenge, as is finding providers to complete home studies. The agency hosts a series of recruitment events across the state.
Casados said CYFD is also looking for ways to better support foster families with training and resources.
Dr. George Davis, a child psychiatrist and consultant for Kevin S.’s plaintiffs, said he has not seen any numbers indicating growth in the number of foster homes and that he has not seen “a systematic plan for how that recruitment or retention should be done.” . .”
“By virtually any metric, CYFD has a major shortage of adequate foster parents,” he said.
It’s a critical problem to solve, Davis said, especially when the alternative is a group home.
Casados told lawmakers Thursday that the state has opened a new home for boys 12 and older to reduce the number of children sleeping in offices — a development she called a win for the agency.
“Residential care is not a good place to raise a child,” Davis said. “It’s great for an emergency and it’s terrible for the actual conditions that promote normal development.”
Insufficient medical network
Access to medical care also remains a problem.
The Kevin S. settlement stipulates that any child placed under state custody must receive a “good child” check within 30 days. Casados said that when her team started looking at that number a year ago, it met that requirement in less than 30% of children.
“Right now we’re at about 50%, maybe 55% of those kids getting visits within 30 days,” she said. “That’s incredibly difficult to do right now with the lack of providers that we have, especially in some rural areas.”
Housepian agreed that the medical network, especially providers that accept Medicaid, is inadequate. He said the plaintiffs are looking to the Human Services Department (the agency that oversees the state’s Medicaid program and another defendant in the original Kevin S. case) to hold accountable insurance companies contracted to provide Medicaid – manage care.
Cabinet Secretary for Human Services Kari Armijo has spoken publicly in recent months about wanting to pressure these companies to do more to solve New Mexico’s supplier shortage.
Housepian said that needs to happen.
“I looked at those contracts,” he said. “It has great provisions in it, but they are meaningless unless they are enforced.”
