New Mexico made strong progress in its goals to reform its troubled foster care system last year and is ready to start work on another set of goals, the state and plaintiffs in a landmark child welfare lawsuit said Monday.
The New Mexico Children, Youth and Families Department, Health Care Authority and plaintiffs of the Kevin S. lawsuit last week negotiated a new agreement in the case which acknowledges improvements in the state’s commitments under the lawsuit. Still, New Mexico still must improve on several key areas, including foster family recruitment and cutting workers’ caseloads.
The agreement, part of a lengthy arbitration process in the Kevin S. lawsuit, also lays out a number of new goals, including including making improvements to better support New Mexico’s foster families.
“We are at an important crossroads. The work is not finished,” said attorney Tara Ford during a virtual hearing Monday morning. “… We are really, really pleased that the state has come together to work with us to continue to move forward.”
The Kevin S. lawsuit was filed in 2018 by more than a dozen foster children. It was settled two years later when the state made an array of commitments designed to reform its foster care system. However, after years of stagnation, plaintiffs in 2024 argued the state was failing to make good on those commitments, and started a lengthy arbitration process aimed at bringing CYFD and HCA into compliance.
In the new pact, plaintiffs and the state agreed New Mexico had largely satisfied the remedial orders handed down by arbitrator Charles Peifer last year who largely sided with plaintiffs and required New Mexico to make progress on targets in several key areas. Among the areas the parties cited was the state’s improvements in its rate of providing timely wellness checks to children entering state custody, which shot past 75% during the second half of 2025.
However, the state and plaintiffs disagreed on whether New Mexico had complied with previous remedial orders in other areas.
Both sides agreed CYFD has not lowered the number of cases being carried by frontline workers to acceptable standards based on their field, did not meet a recruitment goal of approving and licensing 265 new non-relative resource homes last year, and failed to approve and license 244 new treatment foster care placements last year as well.
However, the parties did not agree in other areas. For example, they disputed over whether the state notified and provided safety plans on time to field experts in the case when there were child fatalities or other critical incidents involving children in offices, group homes or other similar settings.
The new agreement suspends enforcement of the previous orders. Still, the state will be held to similar targets under the new remedial order, such as being required to make incremental progress on its annual targets for nonrelative foster home recruitment and treatment foster care placements, and reach 100% of those targets by Dec. 1. CYFD will also be required to bring down caseloads to field standards for 90% of all its workers by Nov. 1.
It was not clear Monday what the state’s recruitment and placement targets for this year are — the state has a deadline of March 31 to agree on what those targets should be with the field experts.
“We have all agreed on a plan going forward to address those items that [were] not in dispute that the targets were not hit,” Eric Loman, who represents CYFD and the state Health Care Authority in the case, said in summarizing the agreement.
The new deal also came with new requirements for the state, including for CYFD to create a foster parent advisory board designed to better the experiences of families by improving training, licensing processes and other systems.
The new board will be designed to “improve business practices to ensure timely payment and reimbursement to foster parents,” Ford wrote in an emailed statement.