Efforts to improve New Mexico’s child welfare system are underway but lawmakers this week expressed frustration over a lack of progress in several areas.
Secretary of the Children, Youth and Families Department, Teresa Casados, provided an update to the Legislative Finance Committee and asked for a funding increase to address problems.
The agency's main challenges, according to an LFC report, are high rates of child maltreatment, high staff turnover, and not enough foster homes.
While a larger budget and higher salaries will help with staff vacancies and turnover, Casados said it’s not just about the paycheck.
"I believe that the money part of it is a large part of our retention issues. I don't believe it's the largest part," Casados said.
"I believe that the people that do this work truly do it because they care about the families that they serve. I think that the workload is incredibly demanding and challenging, and I think that there's a lot of burnout.”
Casados said that when caseworkers leave, their cases have to be immediately distributed to others, increasing workload for up to six months.
Another way that staff exhaustion increases, she said, is due to office stays. Most nights, due to a shortage of foster homes, some children have to sleep in CYFD offices under the supervision of staff.
In response to a question from LFC vice chair and state representative Nathan Small, Casados said that 17 children had slept in CYFD offices the night before the Tuesday meeting.
Small’s response:
“ As we all acknowledge it is unacceptable. It's dangerous," Small said.
"As you pointed out, it's creating and causing some of the challenges that are affecting kids and affecting staff."
On the other hand, state senator George Muñoz, chair of the committee, said that children in office stays are safe even though they’re not in foster homes.
But he and other legislators kept returning to a lack of improvement in maltreatment data.
The CYFD presentation included a chart comparing 12-month differences in maltreatment rates between September 2023 and September 2024. About half of the counties or groupings of counties showed improvements, while 12 reported higher rates of maltreatment.
The counties in the latter group include Santa Fe, Bernalillo, Rio Arriba, and Los Alamos.
Casados, after serving as the governor’s chief operating officer, took over the beleaguered agency in April 2023.
While Munoz acknowledged the challenges and Casados’s work to turn things around, he didn’t seem convinced that a 6 percent budget increase was the answer.
“You're not destroying this agency. But the cost to fix an agency — you're asking for almost 400 and some million here to fix this agency, right? When we could have tried to fix some other things before, instead of just throwing money at it and never really getting any of it fixed," Muñoz said.
Casados is also working on securing federal funding that is being used in most other parts of the country.
New Mexico is one of only a few states that still does not have an approved plan for the national Family First Prevention Services Act.
The secretary said the department resubmitted its plan for the program earlier this month. If approved, it’ll provide financing to implement evidence based prevention programs.
