Many New Mexico counties lack funding, volunteers for foster child advocate program

Sep. 29—Ryan Biszick entered New Mexico's foster care system when she was about 15.

During her three years in state custody, Biszick said she was placed in around 60 homes, most of the time for temporary stays. She said she often found herself at odds with her family and the New Mexico Children, Youth and Families Department, clashing over special education accommodations Biszick said she needed in school.

But one of the only people who stuck with her the entire time was her court-appointed special advocate, or CASA, a volunteer who helped her speak up for herself, especially when it came to making sure schools followed Biszick's Individualized Education Program.

"They did a lot of the stuff that my parent would do," said Biszick, who is now 21. "... They were always there."

A CASA is commonly the most consistent person in the life of a child in state custody. But young people in New Mexico face significant gaps in coverage from the volunteer CASA programs, which struggle to find volunteers and funding, especially in small communities, and don't exist at all in at least seven of the state's mostly smaller, rural counties.

Across New Mexico, there are 2,064 children in state custody, according to the most recent data on a CYFD dashboard. The New Mexico CASA Association's data shows only 824 children had volunteer advocates assigned to them.

In at least seven of New Mexico's 33 counties — McKinley, Cibola, De Baca, Harding, Quay, Curry and Roosevelt — there is no local program to assign CASAs to children in state custody. And no one travels from outside those counties to pick up the slack, said New Mexico CASA Association Executive Director Veronica Montaño-Pilch.

"Everybody wants a CASA," she said. "There's just not enough."

The gap in CASA programs, court officials and others say, can leave children without a person specifically in their corner who can speak to the nuances of what a child is going through at that moment. In many cases, CASAs were the only voice in the courtroom dedicated only to speaking up for the child in the case, said 9th Judicial District Judge Donna Mowrer.

Mowrer's district, which covers Roosevelt and Curry counties, once had a CASA program, but that went away years ago, she said. The absence of CASAs has left her without an important source of information about the children in the cases she hears.

For questions about what subjects a kid was doing well in at school, Mowrer said she turned to the CASA. For questions about a child's IEP, a federal plan required for special education students in public schools, Mowrer said the CASA was often the one who knew the most.

"I don't have that neutral voice, somebody that's looking out for the child on their own terms, not somebody who is trying to balance the child's needs with something else or somebody that's not trying to present the department side of things," Mowrer said.

"It's just that extra detail of information that is essential to how myself as a judge can help that child," she added.

In the absence of CASAs, Mowrer said getting those details often falls to her. And because the child only sees Mowrer in a courtroom and doesn't have a relationship with her, that can be an awkward and inefficient conversation.

"It's hard for the child to advocate for what they need," Mowrer said. "They can tell me that they like taking pictures, but they're not going to tell me that they really need a new camera to achieve their goal."

In the 2nd Judicial District, which encompasses Bernalillo County, retired Children's Court Judge John Romero said CASAs were the "eyes and ears" for a child and provided the court reports that were the best source of information he had as a judge.

"The child welfare department's report sometimes was fairly redundant," he said. "Sometimes it was a cut-and-paste from the prior report and didn't always have current information in it, especially when the former worker had been reassigned or had left the department and someone new was on the case who didn't have a full picture of what had been going on."

Another contributor to the sparsity of CASAs is the challenge of the job.

By and large, CASAs are volunteers. But Chris Boortz, a CASA who lives in Santa Fe, said it can be as demanding as a full-time job, particularly when a young person is in crisis.

One week, she recalled, one of her youths was suddenly discharged from placement just as Boortz went on vacation. Boortz said she spent the first week of that vacation constantly on the phone and in meetings. Producing a report to get the child emergency foster placement in a home fell to her.

"Because things change so quickly in CYFD and staff comes and goes so often, nobody on the team knew enough about the youth to be able to write an accurate report as to what his needs were ... his strengths, his challenges, etc.," she said. "So I ended up writing this rather lengthy report for that."

Being a CASA takes a certain type of motivation, said Linda Griego, executive director of the CASA program in Valencia and Sandoval counties in the 13th Judicial District.

"It's almost like being a social worker, except that you don't get paid monetarily," Griego said. "... So I think the biggest thing is that they have to be compassionate because if you don't have that compassion, you can't do it."

Griego said her program has been approached to take on CASA duties for Cibola County, also in the 13th Judicial District, which lost its CASA program. But at the time, she said, her own program had a "shortage of volunteers that we wanted to ... bring up to 100%" before taking on more responsibilities.

She said her program is now in a better place to take on Cibola County and may reconsider doing so — though she acknowledges stories from past CASAs in that county who said finding volunteers there was difficult because the community was so small.

The CASA program in the 13th Judicial District is not the only one that's been asked to take on more responsibilities but lacked the resources to, Montaño-Pilch said. To cover the gaps between counties, she said, local CASA providers need more funding.

"We get $1.3 million overall for the CASA programs," she said. "And if you look at the amount of kids in care, and it costs $1,300 to serve one kid, we should be getting [over] $3 million."

To that end, the state CASA association is drafting a new funding formula, which she plans to pitch to the state Administrative Office of the Courts, that would allow existing CASA programs to take on cases in neighboring counties or even allow new CASA programs to get off the ground.

More dollars from the state, Montaño-Pilch said, would allow CASAs to do the job it asks of them.

"The state's just not giving us enough money to do what we do," she said. "... CASAs are in [the] children's code to do the function of advocating for a child. But they're not funded."