It was a rough week for CYFD. Already in the hot seat before exasperated legislators, the Children, Youth and Families Department was in the public eye again.
Two experts on child welfare reform blasted the department for crushing caseloads and a backlog of more than 2,000 investigations of abuse and neglect. In a letter to agency officials, obtained by The New Mexican, they demanded that the state take immediate action to remedy turnover and severe understaffing.
“(T)he agency must begin acting like there is in fact a crisis that threatens children’s safety and compels new, urgent, barrier-breaking activity,” wrote Judith Meltzer and Kevin Ryan after meeting with the governor, two cabinet secretaries, and agency personnel.
Meltzer and Ryan oversee the settlement agreement of a 2018 class-action lawsuit known as Kevin S. intended to improve New Mexico’s child welfare system. Recent site visits convince them that conditions are worse since last year and unsafe for both children and staff. The department secretary’s reorganization has made things worse.
Also this week, a committee heard that payouts to settle lawsuits against the agency will reach nearly $17 million; the General Services Department has asked for more money.
And attorneys who have sued CYFD repeatedly spoke to the Senate Judiciary Committee during a special presentation, “Children, Youth and Families — The Cost of Inaction and Silence.” Michael Hart and Andrew Schultz also advocated for the reforms mandated by Kevin S. CYFD has complained the mandates are time-consuming and onerous, but the lawyers said they’re necessary to transform the system. They also said the difference between New Mexico and states that have successfully overhauled their child welfare systems is “the lack of buy-in from the top levels of leadership.”
In this session a half dozen CYFD bills have been introduced, but if they’re not on the governor’s call for this short session, they won’t survive.
One measure that doesn’t need the governor’s blessing is Senate Joint Resolution 6, by Sen. Jerry Ortiz y Pino, D-Albuquerque. It calls for a constitutional amendment to remove CYFD from the executive branch and place it under an independent commission.
The administration opposes it because it would slow decision making and isolate CYFD from other agencies. Attorneys Hart and Schultz didn’t think the move would necessarily lead to improvements.
I don’t either. It’s another layer of bureaucracy that would replace or second guess management. Why not just hire competent managers?
Another bill is HB 121, by Rep. Gail Armstrong, R-Magdalena. It would require CYFD to conduct assessments, provide services and investigate if parents or guardians fail to comply with their plan of care.
Of course, all the reforms in the world won’t accomplish anything if CYFD doesn’t have enough case workers.
Watchdog Maralyn Beck, founder of the New Mexico Child First Network, tweeted, “It’s really frustrating to continue to hear CYFD as an agency blame the media, the public and now the legislators in Santa Fe for ‘poor employee morale.’ She told The New Mexican: “I am so disappointed that all we proved is that these children and this crisis really are not a priority. The governor won’t add CYFD to her call. The agency refuses to follow the Kevin S settlement agreements…”
If anybody is benefiting from this bureaucratic black hole it’s the lawyers successfully suing CYFD, and yet Schultz invited legislators to put him and his colleagues out of business.
“I would love nothing more for the rest of my career than to never see a plaintiff’s foster abuse case again,” he said. “But the truly sad part is that we have discovered that no matter how many lawsuits we file, no matter how many injured and deceased children we have represented, no matter how much money we are able to recover… those lawsuits… have not been able to adjust the system that we have been suing.”
