Early this week, police waited in front of the Children, Youth and Families Department offices in Albuquerque, a teenage girl peering out from the back window of their squad car — a regular sight at the building, where police are frequently called to respond to runaways or mental health crises. Inside, foster youths sleeping in CYFD offices passed another day with nowhere to go. But in one room on the other side of the complex, a small group of employees celebrated something unusual: One of its former foster teens was ending his time under the department’s care with success, optimistic about his future and eager to start his life as an independent young man.

Jaidryon Platero, whose story was featured in an investigation by Searchlight and ProPublica, turns 21 next week, and staff from CYFD’s Fostering Connections program were throwing a party to honor his hard-won achievements.

“This is rare, so it’s really a beautiful thing,” said children’s attorney Alexis DeLaCruz, who has represented Platero since he was 16 and was among the celebrants. “I’ve never met a person with such a positive outlook in spite of so much difficulty.”

In March, Platero earned his GED, scoring A’s in history and B’s in science. He recently got a job in the kitchen of a popular New Mexican food restaurant in Rio Rancho. He’s been in a transitional living home for much of the past year and is in the process of getting a permanent apartment.

“There were some ups and downs, but now it’s just blessings,” Platero said, as his caseworkers and attorney handed him cards, gifts of new clothes and a frame for his GED diploma. “I have the ability to accomplish anything now.”

In his teenage years, it was far from clear that Platero would reach his 21st birthday safely. In 2019, he made a suicide attempt in Farmington, not far from his childhood home on the Navajo Nation. Afterward, his foster care case worker picked him up from a psychiatric hospital and drove him directly to a youth homeless shelter, where he spent months living without adequate mental health care. 

It was a time of turmoil for CYFD. A series of residential treatment centers had closed amid accusations of abuse. Without inpatient treatment options, the state agency increasingly began placing high-risk teens in homeless shelters, which lacked the psychiatric services the kids needed. Some foster youth spent their entire adolescence bouncing between shelters, psychiatric hospitals and the streets. Often the kids would sleep in CYFD offices when no other placement was available, the Searchlight and ProPublica investigation found. 

Almost daily, the shelters housing foster teens would call 911 for mental health crises or to report runaways, the investigation revealed. Teens who turned 18 and aged out of New Mexico’s foster system were suddenly left without a safety net, lacking the tools they needed to navigate adulthood.

Aiming to address that problem, CYFD launched Fostering Connections in 2020. A three-year program offered to foster kids at age 18, it gives extended help with things like housing, food and behavioral health care. Such support can be critical. But by the time teens age out of foster care and become eligible, many have been so traumatized by their treatment in the system that they don’t sign up for the program or need more intensive help than it provides. 

Platero joined Fostering Connections when he turned 18. He said he had some scary periods — his housing situation was tenuous in the years after being featured in the news stories, and he spent four months homeless, sometimes crashing at a friend’s house and sometimes sleeping on the streets. 

But he was resilient. He had support from people like DelaCruz. And he also had the good fortune of being assigned to a strong team of CYFD support workers after he aged out. His Fostering Connections worker, Geri Tolino, grew up near Platero’s childhood home on the Navajo Nation and provided a cultural connection that he found grounding. Richard Hill, a CYFD housing navigator, had kept in touch with Platero since he was 18. While Platero was homeless, Hill managed to find him stable housing at Casa North, a transitional living program in Rio Rancho.

‘State of chaos’ for CYFD

Platero’s progress over the years comes in stark contrast to the increasingly dire straits at CYFD. “The system was stressed several years ago, and now things are worse,” said Brooke Tafoya, CEO of New Day, a shelter in Albuquerque that housed foster teens until pausing operations in December because of staffing shortages. (Tafoya hopes it will reopen in June.) “There isn’t anything” for the kids who used to live in the shelters, she said.

Almost all of the shelters that CYFD formerly relied on to house high-needs foster teens have stopped accepting admissions in the past two years. 

With very few shelter beds and an ongoing shortage of foster homes, attorneys and advocates say CYFD has been placing more teenagers in its offices than ever before, where they sleep for days, weeks or longer — a practice CYFD has repeatedly vowed to end. Recently, 15 kids crowded into the Albuquerque office to spend the night, according to interviews with an attorney and an employee with direct knowledge of the situation. 

“We aren’t giving these kids a reason to wake up in the morning, and that is very concerning,” said the employee, who asked not to be identified because they are not authorized to speak to the media. 

According to independent monitors, CYFD has devolved into a “state of chaos” and made little progress on the sweeping reforms it agreed to implement four years ago under the Kevin S. settlement, a landmark agreement in a civil rights suit brought on behalf of foster children. 

“Things are worse now than at any time since I’ve been working in this system since 2001,” said attorney Sara Crecca, who was co-counsel for the Kevin S. plaintiffs. “It’s a failure of leadership at the highest level in this state.”

Those failures make Platero’s accomplishments all the more impressive. “Most people in his position wouldn’t have made it this far. He’s been an inspiration to all of us,” attorney DeLaCruz said.

He has continued to focus on his artwork, a passion that he says has helped him stay centered over the years. Casa North managers have asked him to paint a mural on their building, and he’s currently drawing up the sketches. Next, he hopes to go to art school.

“I’m glad that my story has been put out there because now people know a lot of details about my life, where I came from,” Platero said during his farewell party. After the Searchlight/ProPublica series appeared on newsstands, “Even my homies were like ‘Yo, I read your story, dog!’” he recalled. “Even CYFD” staffers came up to him and said, “Hey we read your story!’ 

“There’s a lot more headlines yet to make,” he said.