The state’s Children, Youth and Families Department has too many supervisors and not enough caseworkers, an audit conducted for state lawmakers says.
That’s according to The Santa Fe New Mexican, which reported on the audit today.
From the article:
“According to the report, the division has one supervisor for every 3.65 caseworkers, significantly below the 1-5 ratio recommended by the Child Welfare League of America. The state agency on Wednesday estimated its supervisor-to-caseworker ratio at 1-4.
“At the same time, the agency is losing workers. In 2010, the division’s turnover rate was 18 percent, which has dropped since then to 15 percent.
“Meanwhile, the backlog of pending investigations in the Protective Services Division grew from 38 in July 2010 to 108 in January 2011, the report says.”
There’s also this:
“The people who investigate child-abuse allegations for the Protective Services Division of the New Mexico Children, Youth and Families Department are carrying ‘dangerously high’ caseloads due to a combination of a state hiring freeze and high turnover, Legislative Finance Committee analyst David Weinberg told state lawmakers Wednesday.”
In a separate article, the newspaper reported that the department’s Protective Services Division conducts 10-12 “critical incident reviews” a year – reviews of cases in which a child is seriously injured or dies – to determine how the cases were handled.
CYFD won’t turn those reports over to lawmakers, invoking attorney-client privilege to keep them secret. Sharing the reports with lawmakers would be giving up that privilege, Cabinet Secretary Yolanda Berumen-Deines was quoted as saying.
Berumen-Deines told lawmakers the reports are used “to assess the liability of the agency.”