Foster parents: State’s repayment system flawed

Welfare agency says improvements coming, denies problem widespread

They provide care for some of the state’s most vulnerable children — those who have been removed from their homes because of abuse or neglect.

But foster parents in New Mexico often struggle to navigate a faulty reimbursement system that is supposed to help cover their costs to provide care for children in state custody, according to at least a dozen families in counties across the state.

They describe similar experiences: They received no formal instructions on how to submit requests for reimbursements from the state Children, Youth and Families Department; there is no liaison to help with payment issues; emails to the agency with questions about the process go unanswered.

The child welfare agency acknowledged the reimbursement system for foster families is in need of improvements — and said some are coming — but denied the problem is widespread.

It affects just a handful of the more than 900 foster homes in New Mexico, said Annamarie Luna, acting director of the department’s Protective Services Division.

“There are 2,500 kids in state care,”

Luna said. “I don’t believe that every one of those kids has a problem with reimbursements.”

Foster families are paid monthly stipends for each child in their care, Luna said, and reimbursements for incidental expenses — such as education, activities and clothing — are paid weekly. Foster parents are required to submit receipts for reimbursement before 5 p.m. Tuesdays to receive payment the following Tuesday.

Luna, who has been at the Children,

Youth and Families Department for 18 years, said the agency will install a new online system in the spring that will bundle payments and allow foster parents and caseworkers to upload documents. The agency also will adjust the monthly stipend for each child, she said, and it hopes to hire two new liaisons in the next month to assist with reimbursements.

“One of the biggest challenges we

have is an information system that was a case management system that we’re using for a payment system — something it was never designed for,” Luna said.

The New Mexican spoke with several foster families in five counties: Los Alamos, Valencia, Bernalillo, Doña Ana and Santa Fe. Some declined to speak on the record about their experiences, saying they feared the department would retaliate against them by removing foster children from their homes or halting adoption proceedings.

Most of the parents said they were owed less than $2,500.

Noelle Bowyer, a former Pojoaque teacher who fostered more than 20 children at her home in White Rock before moving recently to Colorado, is still caring for two foster children in New Mexico’s custody. She said the state’s reimbursement system for foster parents “felt really broken to me as a system and broken as a family.”

She had to provide each foster child’s caseworker a separate receipt for purchases, Bowyer said, which meant she had to separate her foster children’s clothing from those of her three biological children; she worried this would make them feel unwelcome in her family. So, she decided to stop seeking reimbursements.

“It just wasn’t worth it for us,” Bowyer said, “but I know for a lot of families, that’s not an option.”

The system is unfair to both parents and caseworkers, who have to spend valuable time tracking down paperwork and expenses, she said.

Bowyer is trying to start her own nonprofit in Colorado to help foster parents navigate what she described as a much more efficient system there, in which all expenses for child care are rolled into a bundled payment.

“I think Colorado’s just figured out a way to streamline it,” Bowyer said.

Kym Thurman, a studio painter from Bernalillo who’s been fostering children for nearly three years, said New Mexico’s system is nearly impossible to navigate.

She was told she had to use payment vouchers to buy clothing for foster children rather than seek reimbursements, she said.

She described the challenges of trying to spend an entire $130 voucher at one time in one store — trying to calculate purchases while shopping.

Sometimes caseworkers would forget to sign vouchers, foster parents said.

Her worst experience came in late 2018 or early 2019, she said, when she learned after spending an hour shopping at a local store that it wouldn’t accept her voucher from the Children, Youth and Families Department because the agency had stopped paying bills from the retailer.

Jill Michel, a foster parent for nearly a decade who is running as a Republican for a northeast Albuquerque seat in the state House of Representatives, said she is owed a little under $1,000 in reimbursements for respite care and other costs dating back to 2015.

Respite care is an initiative that allows foster parents to ask another foster family to take over the children’s care for up to three days a month at a cost of $25 per day per child.

“A lot of times respite will be entered incorrectly or won’t be entered at all, and you have to follow up on it,” Michel said.

“I thought they were isolated incidents,” she added. “For three or four years, I thought I was the only one.” Then she began talking with others about foster payments and hearing the same story.

One parent, who asked that her name not be published because she was concerned it might affect her chances of adopting her foster kids, said the problems with reimbursements are hurting children, who aren’t getting what they deserve from the state.

She questioned whether child welfare officials care about the problems foster children face. “If they cared, they would listen to the people on the front lines,” she said.

Children, Youth and Families Secretary Brian Blalock said concerns about foster parent reimbursements and vouchers are taken seriously.

“Absolutely, mistakes do happen, and we apologize and want to assure people we are making changes to streamline the process and make it simpler,” Blalock said in a text message.

“Honestly,” he added, “what this Administration inherited doesn’t make a lot of sense to us, and we’re fixing it as quickly as possible. We’ve been working on it for months and are very close to having some of these changes go into effect.”