LOS LUNAS — Howling winds flattened small bunches of balloons clutched by dozens of people gathered outside a Los Lunas office one Saturday afternoon in mid-January.
The somber crowd was there to share memories of Monterra “Monty” Wolf, a former investigator with the New Mexico Children, Youth and Families Department who had died by suicide about a month earlier. Workplace bullying had taken a toll on her mental health, close colleagues said.
They described Wolf as an outspoken employee, raising concerns about housing foster youth in CYFD offices, being overworked and other workplace problems, which prompted numerous internal investigations and reprimands over issues her colleagues described as minor.
“She felt like she was losing her mind with the way they were treating her. She said she’s never been treated so cruelly and belittled and dehumanized,” said one colleague, who asked not to be identified due to fear of retaliation.
Esteban Candelaria/The New Mexican
The child welfare agency, where a high turnover rate for years has left employees with crushing caseloads, also has been plagued by allegations of threats, retaliation and bullying behavior — which has accelerated the turnover crisis for front-line caseworkers and has led to an increasingly demoralized workforce, current and former employees say.
More than half of the departing workers who completed exit surveys late last year cited overwhelming workloads as their primary reason for leaving, despite numerous reform efforts over the years aimed at curbing the constant turnover. The agency has begun developing a new strategy to bolster its beleaguered workforce and stem the loss of employees — implementing training programs for supervisors, support services for workers facing trauma from difficult child welfare cases and other initiatives designed to foster an improved work environment.
However, some say the plan does little to reinstate confidence in a system that long has failed to provide adequate support, supervision and workload relief to its employees.
“It’s like a haunted house coming to CYFD. Workers are terrified of their bosses and terrified of communicating anything,” said a worker who asked not to be identified, also due to fear of retaliation.
The New Mexican conducted interviews with 11 current and former workers in several CYFD county offices who expressed concerns about mountainous workloads and toxic management practices. All of them asked to remain anonymous.
CYFD leaders have acknowledged problems with the workplace culture in some of its county offices.
But the agency is optimistic about new coaching and training programs, part of which will begin in April.
“They leave because they don’t feel supported, they don’t feel that they’re well trained to do their jobs. They don’t feel that they really fully understand the work, and/or the caseloads are too high,” CYFD Chief Operations Officer Brenda Donald said in an interview earlier this year. “… And so that’s the basis for the retention plan.”
‘I do not feel safe’
Wolf faced multiple disciplinary actions in the months leading to her departure from CYFD.
Colleagues close to the situation alleged the discipline and what they described as harassment was often over small infractions, such as Wolf taking long lunches or bringing her dog into the office, which others in the workplace had done without reprimand.
They argued the behavior from supervisors escalated after Wolf had disagreements with them or expressed worry about the handling of children and their cases — for example, when she raised concerns in February 2025 about a child staying in the Valencia County office since the preceding November.
Esteban Candelaria/The New Mexican
The issues took a toll on her mental health.
“I do not feel safe at my job. I am tired, I literally have worked all weekend,” she wrote in a mid-February 2025 email to colleagues and others that was provided to The New Mexican. “… I feel so unappreciated and on edge that I have to stand up for myself all the time.”
She added, “I am starting to lose hope that anybody really cares.”
CYFD spokesperson Jake Thompson said in a statement Wolf resigned from the agency in May 2025, but he declined to comment on the concerns about problems in her work evironment.
“The department expresses deepest condolences to her family and loved ones,” he said.
CYFD employees have complained about workplace conditions throughout the state.
The agency’s Hobbs office has for years faced allegations its longtime manager, Patricia Garza, has retaliated against employees over disagreements and contributed to situations in which children have been seriously injured or killed. Garza has been involved in at least four lawsuits since 2020.
Overwhelming workloads and a lack of support have been leading reasons behind workers leaving CYFD in droves over the past decade.
Hundreds of workers have left in each of the past 10 years, a trend that reached a high point in 2025, according to data provided by the agency. Meanwhile, recruiting efforts have struggled to keep up.
A total of 402 people left CYFD in 2016. The data shows 284 were either fired by CYFD or left the agency by choice, while the remaining 118 either retired, transferred out of the department or left for other reasons; though, the data doesn’t provide a specific breakdown. Departure numbers generally rose until 2020, when the total number dropped to 316.
From there, the losses increased steadily through 2025, when CYFD saw 485 total employees leave the agency, 364 of whom were fired or quit. Over the past 10 years, hiring outpaced departures six times, meaning CYFD saw four years in which it recruited fewer workers than it lost.
Reasons people quit their jobs at CYFD included dissatisfaction with working conditions, family issues and decisions to pursue continuing education. Reasons CYFD fired employees included misconduct, “medical separation” and layoffs.
Recent exit survey results indicate most employees left in large part due to excessive workloads.
According to exit surveys from 26 former workers, out of 135 who left from September to December, 58% cited high workloads and tedious expectations for after-hours work. About 54% cited a need for work-life balance and flexibility. During the month of August, 60% of the people who left cited burdensome workloads and shifts among their reasons for leaving.
Nineteen percent of people who completed exit surveys in 2023 attributed their departure to a lack of support from leaders. Eight percent said they were overworked, while 7% said they had too many cases and 7% cited mental health reasons. Four percent were burned out, underpaid or undervalued, and 4% cited the work environment and department structure.
Current and former caseworkers interviewed by The New Mexican largely cited the same problems.
For many of them, the greatest area of concern was lack of support from managers, with any transgression — including a disagreement with supervisors or a mistake on a report — potentially leading to an investigation, suspension or even dismissal.
“There’s a general feeling … of fear in the office, fear of making mistakes,” the worker said.
The fear comes amid an onslaught of foster care cases, with most workers experiencing workloads far beyond than the standards for their fields.
Workloads fuel turnover
Fifty-one percent of front-line employees — a total of 189 — had caseloads beyond appropriate levels Sept. 8, 2025, according to data released by field experts in a yearslong lawsuit aimed at reforming the state’s child welfare system, known as the Kevin S. case. Notably, 28% of all employees assigned to child welfare cases were not eligible manage such cases, either because they held jobs that were not designated to directly handle foster care cases, they were new hires, or they were employees who had not received CYFD’s new employee training.
Of those with workloads beyond acceptable levels, over half had more than double the standard level of caseloads in their fields. Some had more than four times the caseloads they should have.
The maximum number of investigations one person should be assigned to as the primary investigator is 12, while permanency coordinators, who work to find foster homes for children in state custody, should only be assigned a maximum of 15 children, according to a workforce development plan created by CYFD.
Workers say the caseload problem is perpetuated by the near-constant turnover among workers in county offices. When one caseworker leaves, or does an insufficient job on a particular case, employees interviewed by The New Mexican said, their workload is often handed to another, already burdened employee.
Field experts in the Kevin S. case wrote in an annual report in November that as of mid-August 2024, there was just one caseworker in CYFD’s Santa Fe office after a colleague had departed. The remaining employee learned they would face 30 additional cases, piled on top of their already-overflowing workload.
Instead, the worker resigned.
In recent years, mandatory overtime assignments to care for children staying in CYFD offices could also be piled onto overburdened employees’ workloads, further exacerbating the problem. Child office stays were recently abolished through an executive order from Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham.
When employees raised concerns about personal safety and the excessive workload, they said their complaints were shut down by supervisors.
“You’re basically told, ‘This is what you get paid for: Just do it, and don’t complain about it,’ ” one worker said in an interview.
‘Seen, heard and valued’
Earlier this year, CYFD unveiled a new workforce retention plan designed to help stem the flow of departing employees.
That plan, scheduled to roll out over the course of this year, would implement coaching for employees dealing with difficult cases or complicated workplace situations, a training program for supervisors in part aimed at improving workplace culture problems in county offices, and enhanced peer support and educational opportunities.
The core goal, CYFD leaders said, is to foster an improved work environment by expanding direct support for employees and by providing them with better training and educational opportunities to increase their preparation for their jobs.
“We’re trying to build this whole program of support, training, feedback, interaction, engagement, so that people will feel seen, heard, and valued for their contributions at CYFD,” Thompson said. “And that will help them feel like they’re building a career that means something to them here.”
Workforce Development Director Pilar Brooks said in a mid-January interview improving training for supervisors would help ensure workers are adequately prepared for the role before they step into it.
Every worker promoted to a supervisory role will have to go through the training, she added.
The first phase of that plan’s implementation is set to begin in mid-April, and rollout of the final phase is set to conclude in early November.
CYFD also plans to make other training and educational opportunities more available to workers, including lunch-and-learn programs and peer support programs designed to help employees acclimate to the job.
Brooks also said a key component of the new retention plan is to expand the reach of a new coaching program, ensuring coaches are available in every corner of New Mexico to help front-line employees through trauma and other workplace issues.
The coaches will “allow for the staff members [who have] fear of retaliation, or maybe not having a safe space, or maybe experiencing secondary trauma, to do so in a safe space where they’re not having to try to navigate that power dynamic that they will see with their supervisor,” she said.
CYFD is set to begin implementing the coaching plan in early May and finalize the rollout by early August, according to the agency’s plan.
Additionally, though CYFD saw a 10-year high in departures in 2025, it also saw a high of total hires with 583.
Connie Derr, executive director of the local chapter of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, doubted coaching would be truly safe for workers, or that they would even feel comfortable expressing their concerns to anyone within the department.
Derr also said she was cautious about CYFD’s plan to overhaul its training for new supervisors, noting the union has not seen the pedagogy behind it, nor has the organization seen it in action.
“We hope it’s successful, but we have not seen any evidence of that yet,” she said.
Donald, CYFD’s chief operations officer, said it will be some time before the agency knows if its efforts are paying off, though she added the retention plan includes a significant amount of data gathering designed to track outcomes.
“It’ll be a while before we’ll know … how they pay off,” she said, “but we are confident that building this into the organizational culture and part of our normal operating way of doing business will really change the outcomes in positive ways for our employees.”