Amid mounting pressures from a landmark child welfare case and lawmakers’ concerns, the New Mexico Children, Youth and Families Department pitched a $422.3 million spending plan for the coming fiscal year to the powerful Legislative Finance Committee on Tuesday.
The ask, which the agency said was an overall 4.7% increase over the current fiscal year’s budget, includes a total additional request of $43.1 million from the state’s general fund and several new appropriations through the state’s Government Results and Opportunity Program fund, which sets aside money for typically three-year pilots.
Those dollars would go toward filling all vacant caseworker positions and exceeding that capacity by 10%, expanding behavioral health services such as those designed to address adolescent substance use, and filling positions in the department’s juvenile justice division, which oversees secure facilities that hold children found guilty of crimes.
“The additional funding will help CYFD meet our mission to keep children safe and thriving, and also to comply with the legislative mandates and Kevin S. requirements such as reducing case loads and hiring and training additional staff,” acting Cabinet Secretary Valerie Sandoval said during the hearing at the state Capitol.
The agency has faced ongoing struggles to make progress on its perennial problems of not being able to recruit and retain enough frontline caseworkers or to bring in enough foster families to host children entering state care.
Both those issues are at the center of the Kevin S. settlement agreement, reached after more than a dozen foster children filed a class action lawsuit in 2018 calling on the state to improve its foster care system. Lawmakers have also expressed dismay at CYFD’s inability to make sufficient gains in bolstering its workforce or foster family pool.
This year, the agency hired 563 employees, though it was not clear during the meeting how many people left the agency during the same timeframe. During a hearing in the Kevin S. case last week, chief operations officer Brenda Donald said the agency expects to have a net total of 132 new caseworkers by the end of the year.
CYFD has also licensed just 94 nonrelative foster homes so far this year, Sandoval said Tuesday, short of its mandated target of 265.
The budget proposal contains a total of $61.3 million in Government Results and Opportunity Program funding, including $14.8 million for new protective services positions, $13.7 million to address unfunded, vacant jobs and $8.2 million to “ensure staff with experience, expertise and licenses are paid appropriately,” the agency wrote in a news release.
Rep. Rebecca Dow, R-Truth or Consequences, criticized the fact that CYFD’s budget proposal for the coming year appeared to omit requests for additional funding to boost the recruitment and support of nonrelative foster families. She argued current reimbursement rates for foster parents were lackluster — those rates start at about $630 per month for the youngest children — and said CYFD should dedicate more of its resources toward those types of homes.
“We want to see children there,” Dow said. “There’s nothing in the budget requesting us to address the retention of those … foster parents.”
Comparing CYFD’s total pool of 2,289 foster beds with the current 2,130 children in care, some lawmakers questioned why CYFD has continued the practice of keeping children in offices if there appear to be enough beds for kids. Sixteen children stayed in offices the night before the meeting.
“If you do the math, there shouldn’t be any office stays,” said Sen. Michael Padilla, D-Albuquerque. “… How are we still in that situation now?”
Sandoval replied that children who stay in offices often haven’t matched well with families or were not accepted at homes, leaving nowhere else for them to go. To address the issue, she noted the agency is ramping up services including its Foster Care+ program, which is designed to train and provide resources to families so they are better equipped to take in children with higher needs.
“The office is the absolute last option for us,” she said. “We do not want any child sleeping in an office, and so we will exhaust every effort before the child stays in an office.”
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