New Mexico selected for Harvard program to keep kids out of welfare system

Aug. 18—New Mexico's rate of newborns hospitalized with neonatal abstinence syndrome, which occurs when a baby is exposed to certain drugs in the womb, is more than twice the national average.

That falls in line with a high rate of drug use statewide, said Milissa Soto, chief of the state Children, Youth and Families' Department's Federal Reporting Bureau. She hopes New Mexico's participation in a new initiative launched by the Harvard Kennedy School in Massachusetts will help find solutions.

The program, known as the Child and Family Wellbeing Accelerator, is designed to develop preventive measures to keep children out of child welfare systems.

Child welfare workers in New Mexico and New Hampshire as well as Pueblo County, Colo., and counties in Florida and Ohio, will have access to resources such as technical support and workshops for the next 12 to 18 months through the program. It has a goal of reducing the number of government interventions considered punitive to families, such as child protective services investigations and removal of children from their homes.

In New Mexico, the effort will focus on pregnant women who are dealing with substance-use issues.

"When a mother experiences substance abuse, that's a trauma on its own," Soto said. "We want to make sure we're not adding any more stressors on that home."

In 2018, 13.9 out of 1,000 New Mexico newborns were hospitalized with neonatal abstinence syndrome. That compares to a national rate of 6.8 babies per 1,000, according to data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

While Soto wasn't able to speak about the data directly, she said the child well-being accelerator will help CYFD and the New Mexico Department of Health gather more data on the problem.

New Mexico was selected for the program out of 26 applicants, Meggie Quackenbush, a spokeswoman for the Kennedy School's Government Performance Lab, wrote in an email, in part because CYFD's application had a strong focus on building better referral pathways for pregnant women who use drugs.

"Substance-using pregnant people often go without support until the child protection agency intervenes after the child's birth, too often resulting in punitive consequences instead of timely, effective treatment services," the accelerator program says on its website.

Other state and county initiatives will focus on building "community resource hubs" for families and connecting out-of-home children with relative caregivers.

New Mexico lawmakers passed a bill in 2019 in response to the federal Comprehensive Addiction Recovery Act, which allows health care workers to alert CYFD when an infant tests positive for an addictive drug without the agency opening a formal abuse or neglect case.

Instead, hospitals are tasked with developing a care plan for the mother and infant after they are discharged.

Those plans are voluntary and can include referrals to 12-step programs, child care resources, domestic violence services and housing assistance. Both CYFD and the Department of Health are notified when a plan is established.

The Plan of Safe Care law led to 1,105 such plans in its first full year, according to a legislative report released in November 2020. Thirty-four percent were for babies exposed to methamphetamine, while 19 percent were for babies exposed to opioids.

Through the accelerator program, the state can receive support from the Kennedy School's Government Performance Lab to assess what kinds of services, such as housing and behavioral health treatment, are available for newborn parents with substance-use issues and how to make them more accessible.

The Government Performance Lab is still designing specific performance measures to determine the success of the accelerator program. Previously, Quackenbush said it has tracked the progress of programs using factors like the number of calls to child protection hotlines and the rates of child removals due to substance abuse concerns.

Soto expects the program to help CYFD employees gather more feedback from New Mexico families regarding substance use issues.

She also hopes the agency will identify more wrap-around resources for parents, in part by connecting with agencies like the Department of Health and the Early Childhood Education and Care Department.

"I think we can make a lot of assumptions," Soto said. "My hope is that this is going to unify efforts around the state to do some prevention and intervention with substance-exposed newborns and their caretakers."