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This year’s legislative session has officially come to an end and when it comes to child welfare the session was uneventful. There were several pieces of legislation proposing many solutions, but little saw movement or were deemed not germane. On this week’s Let’s Talk New Mexico, we’ll discuss what’s next for child welfare in New Mexico.
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With the legislature opening next week, and record revenues coming to state coffers, lawmakers are setting priorities for the 30-day budget session. KUNM spoke with two of them about their biggest issues.
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On Thanksgiving, CYFD sent foster children to a facility for violent youth. At Christmas, kids ran away.
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New Mexico’s child welfare agency is supposed to safeguard children in its custody and report them immediately if they vanish. In this case, it didn’t.
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A month and a half after Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham signed a public health executive order regarding gun violence and illegal drug use, the outcome for young people who are arrested remains unclear.The order suspends a set of guidelines for helping keep young people out of detention that have been in place for about a quarter of a century. But officials are still using those guidelines in New Mexico, even as more young people are put in detention centers.
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The Children, Youth, and Families Department has faced scrutiny in the past for placing foster youth in their office to stay for periods of time. Interim Secretary Teresa Casados committed to ending these stays by working on restructuring the department. But she does not say there is a definite date for the stays to end.
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The Children, Youth, and Families Department has made a recent decision that will allow children in state custody to keep federal benefits owed to them, instead of using those payments to support foster care.
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A new agreement has been reached, designed to improve the performance of the Children, Youth and Families Department and the Human Services Department, especially with respect to foster care.
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The Children, Youth and Families Department has received consistent backlash concerning issues of transparency. The Department hosted a meeting Tuesday to announce the launch of a new dashboard that officials say promotes more transparency. The site has several data points to show progress with things like staffing and efforts to recruit foster parents.
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It is one of a number of measures proposed this session aimed at improving safety for New Mexican children, who have some of the country's very highest rates of trauma like abuse and neglect. The agency meant to protect them has come under severe criticism.