New Mexico will soon have to pass the baton to a new set of leaders to make progress on a landmark child welfare settlement requiring a near-complete overhaul of the state’s foster care system.
But after years of stalled progress, state officials say they still hope to make it a photo finish.
The New Mexico Children, Youth and Families Department has made gains in recruiting new foster families and in expanding a program designed to place children with higher levels of need in foster homes better equipped to serve them. The improvements, reported during an hourslong virtual status conference hearing Tuesday, were required under a remedial order signed earlier this year in the arbitration of the Kevin S. lawsuit.
“We have been completely, 100% focused on all … things Kevin S.,” acting Cabinet Secretary Valerie Sandoval said during the hearing.
However, the state is still falling short in some key areas, like in reducing the heavy caseloads carried by frontline child protective services. The progress CYFD has made in making the agency a better place to work also has not been felt by scores of employees interviewed by field experts tasked with monitoring New Mexico’s progress in the lawsuit.
Tara Ford, attorney for the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, acknowledged the state’s progress in certain areas, but expressed concern about whether the improvements were adequate enough and over the state’s failure to make gains in other areas.
“Progress in isolated pockets is not the same as a functioning system,” she said.
Background
For years, New Mexico has struggled to make gains on reforms it agreed to in an agreement settling the Kevin S. class-action lawsuit, which was filed in 2018 by more than a dozen foster children.
After years of stagnation, plaintiffs in 2024 argued the state was failing to make good its reform commitments, and started a lengthy arbitration process aimed at bringing it into compliance. That has resulted in two orders handed down by arbitrator Charles Peifer last year largely siding with plaintiffs and requiring New Mexico to make progress on targets in several key areas.
Earlier this year, both sides reached a deal finding the state had largely satisfied those orders and laying out requirements to reach new and outstanding targets, and Peifer inked the deal by handing down a third remedial order. Tuesday’s hearing served as a status check on the state’s progress on satisfying the new order.
Front of mind for most at the hearing was the nearing expiration date of CYFD’s current administration, at the end of Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s tenure as New Mexico’s top executive early next year.
Sandoval praised the agency’s recent gains, arguing CYFD has “made more progress in the last nine or 10 months than we have in several years.” She said the department will leave behind a strong structure for incoming leaders to build upon.
“We still have our foot on the gas,” Sandoval said.
Some progress made
The state presented Peifer and plaintiffs in the lawsuit with some positive data points. Chief among them was the recruitment of 73 nonrelative foster families, satisfying an obligation under this year’s remedial order for CYFD, by July 1, to recruit 40% — or 72 — of its annual target of a total 180 such homes.
CYFD has also served 50 new children in its expanding Foster Care+ program, which is designed to equip families with training and resources they need to care for children who need greater care and supervision. That number satisfied a mid-year target for the agency, which is required to serve 100 children in the program over the course of 2026.
Vacancies among frontline child protective services workers have also trended down in recent months, gradually dropping from roughly 33% in October to about 19% in May, according to a presentation by Chief Operations Officer Brenda Donald.
She also noted that new employees appear to be staying with CYFD for longer. A year ago, many recent hires were leaving the agency just six months into the job. Now, they typically stay until past the first- or second-year marks, Donald said.
Heavy caseloads persist
Despite progress on some of the problems facing CYFD’s beleaguered workforce, the agency still fell short of a target laid out in the remedial order that half of all its caseworkers will have caseloads within the standards of their field. Just over 30% of all caseworkers had compliant workloads, the state reported.
Ford expressed concerns over the state’s failure to meet that mark, and argued that CYFD is tasked with caring for more children since Lujan Grisham’s announcement of a new strategy to take more children exposed to substances prenatally into state custody last year.
She said the state’s recent practices with regard to bringing more children into foster care amounts to “opening the front door wider, while the back door has not kept pace.”
Donald said part of the reason for CYFD’s struggles to stabilize caseloads was that many of its workers are new, and do not yet carry the same number of cases as more experienced employees.
She said CYFD plans to implement a number of new strategies to lighten heavy caseloads. Those include hiring more people than are technically needed in high-needs counties, a strategy Donald said was signed off on by the Governor’s Office using existing funding.
Another strategy the state plans to implement will be to train “floater” staff who can temporarily cover vacancies — whether they be in investigative or foster care caseworker positions — to maintain balance at offices suddenly struggling to take over the cases of an employee who has recently quit.
Though CYFD recently redoubled its efforts to improve the work culture of its employees, they have not felt the effects yet.
Kevin Ryan and Judith Meltzer, the independent field experts tasked with monitoring the state’s progress on its obligations under the lawsuit, said they interviewed 150 leaders, managers and staff members across the state earlier this year.
The biggest takeaway, Ryan said, was that mountainous caseloads have a large impact on employees, and that they must be stabilized.
Meltzer added that workers “still don’t really believe that things are going to get better.”
Though Donald acknowledged the need for swift action to improve the workloads of frontline employees, she also said cultural shifts often take years to be felt.
“Organizational culture changes, in my 25 years of experience, don’t happen quickly. It’s a process,” she said. “So it’s one to two years before people really see that things are different.”
