Officials with the New Mexico Children, Youth and Families Department said this week they are making improvements in some areas of foster care following a landmark settlement agreement. But experts have yet to validate those numbers.
The Kevin S. lawsuit was filed by 14 children in foster care seeking essential care, stability and treatment for all foster children in the state.
The suit was settled in 2018 and the settlement agreement targets four areas for improvement: creating a trauma-responsive system of care; ensuring foster children are placed in the least restrictive and appropriate placements; creating policy that aligns with the Indian Child Welfare Act; and expanding behavioral health services.
The state worked with plaintiffs to create a Corrective Action Plan or CAP in 2023 to get both CYFD and the Health and Human Services Department back on track with the agreement. (HSD is now the Healthcare Authority or HCA.)
However, inaction led to an arbitration process last year and arbitrator Charles Peifer, found the state failed to meet the performance standards set out in Kevin S. These included reducing high caseloads for frontline CYFD workers, and recruiting more foster families, as well as ensuring well-child checks take place, and that data submissions are timely and accurate.
At the latest status conference on Monday, CYFD Chief Operating Officer Brenda Donald reported there has been improvement on several fronts since the last conference in July. She leads the “Workforce Strikeforce” initiative to address workforce shortages and high caseloads. Donald said the department has shortened the hiring process from 81 days to 45-50 days.
“This is really important because we all know that as quickly as we can get people hired, we still have to get them trained and it’s still a period of 4 to 6 months before they really fully taking cases,” said Donald.
She also reported CYFD will have hired 132 caseworkers by the end of the year. The state has hired 173 workers since January, but it has also lost 104 people.
Donald attributed the departures to the amount of work rather than dissatisfaction with supervisors.
Donald reported that more than 1,300 cases have been closed over the last few months. Another 1,100 cases have been identified and will be closed by year end, erasing all outstanding cases needing to be closed.
Attorney Tara Ford on the Kevin S. plaintiffs team said the numbers Donald reported are new information and her team did not receive data on hiring ahead of the hearing.
“The evidence available to us causes us to still be very concerned in terms of caseload compliance,” said Ford.
The numbers reported by CYFD in Monday’s status conference have yet to be validated. The co-neutrals, child welfare experts who are in charge of overseeing implementation of the settlement, recently published their 2024 Annual Report. They found the state system was in an “unyielding crisis” and lost significant ground in many areas resulting in worsening performance and deteriorating experiences and outcomes for children.”
There has been a systemic issue of foster children sleeping in state office buildings when there were not enough placements for them. Donald said that 57 new non-relative foster care homes have been added, resulting in 93 total for the year, with 83 active applications in the pipeline. But CYFD Acting Secretary Valerie Sandoval did confirm there are still continuous office stays that fluctuate.
CYFD officials said they are hoping to start recruiting 10 each month starting in January.
The issue of Treatment Foster Care, or care for those children who need more intensive care, sparked some contention at the hearing. The Health Care Authority’s Medicaid Director, Dana Flannery, reported that providers under the program may deny care if a child is not a “clinical match.”
“We continue to see the same reasons for lack of ability to place, so mostly diagnostically driven,” said Flannery.
Fifty-two kids were denied care from this program this year, but HCA did not have data to show outcomes for those children.
Ford said she hopes that the plaintiff’s team will receive more data about treatment foster care contracts, how many children are receiving this type of care, and the numbers of children denied.
“We're very concerned that there still is not a clear line of authority and accountability between HCA and CYFD about the responsibilities related to treatment foster care, we are concerned that without clear lines of authority, children will be hurt, both because it's not clear who's responsible for tracking what's happening happening to children,” said Ford. “It was very disheartening to see that no one knew the answers to your questions about what happened to the 52 children who were denied treatment foster care…from the plaintiffs’ perspective, it's quite clear that we need to increase our number of providers, and that is how we will increase the number of matches”
The Kevin S. Corrective Action Plan called for state officials to improve well-child checks and the arbitrator emphasized this as well. Alanna Dancis, medical director at New Mexico Medicaid, said September data shows that 74% of children within 30 days of coming into CYFD custody are now receiving those checks.
Ford said she is hopeful the state’s numbers will be validated and there is actual progress towards the requirement that all children get well-child checks within 30 days of entering CYFD care.
“I am a little bit confused, because actually, the reporting requirements are not new. It's always been clear that children were supposed to get well-child checks within 30 days of the date that they entered custody,” Ford said. With that said, we support the focus that has been reported here about daily looking at these numbers and making sure that the numbers of kids that come into care get to the doctor, so that we can find out what they need in a timely way”.
One of the co-neutrals, Judy Meltzer said a lot of the data presented Monday has yet to be verified and she will review those numbers ahead of the next status meeting in January.
Support for this coverage comes from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.
