New CYFD team includes out of state child welfare expert

A new leadership team at the state Children, Youth and Families Department, including a child welfare expert from Washington, D.C., and a former New Mexico health department secretary, won praise for its candor Tuesday in tackling child protection deficiencies that have plagued the agency for decades.

The new team overseen by acting CYFD Secretary Valerie Sandoval took shape in the past three weeks after the sudden retirement of CYFD Secretary Teresa Casados on Sept. 5.

The new outside expertise was evident at an hourslong hearing involving the state and attorneys for 14 foster children and several child welfare organizations who sued CYFD in 2018 over conditions affecting abused and neglected children in state custody.

A 2020 settlement agreement in the case, referred to as Kevin S., who is one of the plaintiffs, set out standards to ensure safe, appropriate and stable placements in the state’s foster care system and behavioral health services.

Albuquerque attorney Charles Peifer is the arbitrator who, over the past year or more, has been holding hearings on the state’s alleged failure to meet reform measures, including lowering caseloads for protective service workers and increasing the number of foster care families.

One of the two monitors paid by the state to gauge state compliance over the past five years announced they had a first-time meeting with Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham last week and were “encouraged” at her commitment to make “fundamental change.”

But a confidential report presented to Peifer by the monitors overshadowed the presentations at Tuesday’s hearing.

Peifer said monitors reported issues with the care of children in state custody who need therapeutic foster home settings because of the severity of their trauma from abuse or neglect by their caretakers. Providers of such specialized care have been refusing to permit some children to stay in their therapeutic foster homes, Peifer told those at the meeting.

“TFC homes have capacity, yet they are reporting a mismatch and not accepting these kids, and the consequences are disastrous,” Peifer said.

State Health Care Authority Secretary Kari Armijo told Peifer that such providers “believe we are sending children who require a much higher level of care into a TFC.”

“We need to really find out what it will take for our TFC providers to take higher level of acuity children and that they will feel safe doing that, because they do feel like they’re incurring additional risk, but there’s risk to other children and potential TFC placements to the households because some of these kids really shouldn’t be placed with other children, so it is a complex issue,” Armijo said.

But Peifer responded, “The irony is if the TFC providers are thinking that these children referred to them need a higher level of acute care, and they rejected (them) based on the co-neutral’s report, what is happening is the children get a lower level of care than the TFC. Providers think they need a lower level than TFC, and so the kids are the ones suffering from the downgrade.

“There has to be a solution found, and I want the state to focus on that because it’s an emergent problem and it is a matter of life and death.”

Present at the hearing was new CYFD Chief Operating Officer Brenda Donald, who served twice as deputy mayor for the District of Columbia’s health and human services, three times as director of the district’s child and family services department, and served as Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley’s Cabinet secretary for human services. In 2021, she took the helm of D.C.’s troubled housing authority.

Donald, who spends half her time in New Mexico, was hired by CYFD as a senior management consultant in February under a $60,000 contract and took the newly created position of CYFD chief operating officer on Sept. 16, according to a CYFD spokesman.

“You asked for candor, you asked for strategies, and that’s what I’m going to give you,” she told Peifer on Tuesday. “We know where we are now in terms of our requirements regarding Kevin S. compliance on workforce and we are nowhere near where we need to be. We are about 25% of our workers are compliant with caseload requirements.”

Meanwhile, Donald said she has created a “workforce strike force” and wants to speed up hiring while ensuring adequate training of staff. About 190 people have been hired since July, according to CYFD officials.

“Turnover rates are extremely high and categorically, around 30% across the board. But what we’re doing with the strike force is really looking county by county,” Donald said. In trying to reduce workload, she said, staff is focusing in part on expediting permanency for children in foster care who have been here longer than they really should be and are ready for adoption, legal guardianships or returning home.

Former state Health Secretary Kathy Kunkel is now a deputy secretary at CYFD and has been serving as executive director of CYFD’s Kevin S. team. She also has worked on special projects for Lujan Grisham after announcing her departure from the health department in 2020. Kunkel holds a master’s degree in social work from Michigan State University and a law degree from the University of New Mexico.

The monitors, Judith Meltzer, from the Center for the Study of Social Policy, and Kevin Ryan, from the Washington, D.C.-based organization Public Catalyst, wrote Peifer a letter late last month noting that Donald, Kunkel and Sandoval “have been proactively communicating with (the monitors) and taking steps to address overdue information and data requests from us. They are also in the process of reviewing agencywide strategies, efforts and performance barriers to achieve Kevin S. commitments.”

Peifer told Sandoval he applauded her “for bringing onto the team folks with years of experience in dealing with other states and other jurisdictions. I think you have begun to ... add to the team, important resources that will help New Mexico.”

But he said what is important is compliance with the Kevin S. orders and settlement to ensure “measurable success for the kids,” including more foster homes, and a more stable workforce.