The New Mexico Children, Youth, and Families Department has a new logo, a new website, and leadership is paying top dollar to spread the good word. So what does that say about the department’s priorities?

Could this finally be the answer to the department’s self-proclaimed perception problem?

In many ways, CYFD is better known for its failures. Over and over, we’ve shared the stories of children who have died of warning signs not just missed – but ignored.

“There have been failures on many accounts for many years,” Republican state Sen. Crystal Diamond Brantley said.

“I think, honestly, people just see the work we do in protective services and investigations and I think really, the word I’m trying to spread is that we’re so much more than that,” CYFD Secretary Teresa Casados said.

Casados has long called it a perception problem – something she said must change to recruit the right workers who can make meaningful improvements.

There are many longstanding problems, including worker turnover, child abuse case backlogs, children sleeping in CYFD office, and major gaps in the state’s Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act program.

But, intentional or not, the most obvious sign of change so far is a brand new logo and a work-in-progress website. The state spent close to $130,000 on it in 2022.

“It doesn’t really make any difference,” Democratic Sen. Jerry Ortiz y Pino, a retired social worker, said. “The people in the field won’t even notice.”

While it does look nice, most will agree the new logo should represent something more. Cliff Gilmore is a former public information officer for CYFD. He was fired and then later sued the department for retaliation.

“Rebranding can help. But it has to be part of a concrete change,” Gilmore said. “It has to be change that you can demonstrate and show.”

While the rebranding money is just a speck of the department’s nearly $400 million budget, Sen. Diamond Brantley thinks it’s a wasted effort.

“You know how you get public buy in? You know how you get support? You need to produce outcomes that we are protecting kids,” she said.

4 Investigates has been tracking CYFD’s Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act, or CARA. It’s an unfunded program designed to help families and newborns struggling with addiction. We’ve learned more than a dozen babies have died without proper oversight.

4 Investigates asked CYFD why it can spend money on new branding when, for the last five years, the department hasn’t had the money to properly fund CARA.

Before her time as secretary, Casados said funding was set aside for a new logo and marketing efforts. She said their new website should help spread the word of the work they are doing for CARA.

“I think that our new website will do some of that. We’re going to have banners running across the front page to really highlight the work we’re doing,” Casados said.

With the help of a highly-skilled team of public information officers, we discovered the head of that team was making almost $167,000 a year – the fourth highest-paid position in all of CYFD.

That pay has doubled since Gilmore’s time just four years ago. It caught our attention because often when something bad happens to a child, the department PIO says they can’t talk about it.

“There’s good reason to keep that information private, to protect names and not release details of an ongoing investigation,” Gilmore said. “What I found was that CYFD, very often, in my opinion, used that umbrella of privacy protection for the families to hide from it themselves.”

So what did we get for that eye-popping salary?  A temporary employee who was on staff for just three months.

“Going into a legislative session there a lot of requests for information, there’s a lot of media and what needs to be getting out to the public, and so it’s really a disservice if you don’t have someone in that role to provide that information,” Casados said.

Casados said that Caroline Sweeney, the woman in that role, was with the governor’s office. She wasn’t there a year before leaving and moving out of New Mexico. Casados said they had to up the way to move her back – for three months.

4 Investigates asked what information on the session she released to the public.

“I don’t know so much that she sent out email,” Casados said. “But just filtering the requests coming in, keeping track of the requests through the Roundhouse, tracking legislation that was pertinent to CYFD.”

That pay for CYFD’s PIO was nearly double the average Child Protective Services supervisor and almost three times the average Child Protective Services caseworker.

“Those are the jobs that bring meaningful change,” Sen. Brantley said. “We don’t need a spin doctor at the top trying to spin data and convince us that we’re any better.”

If outcomes were better, if meaningful change was easier to track, and if we could get answers when something goes wrong – perhaps we wouldn’t be questioning those expenses at all.

“I don’t think the department, they don’t go out and say, well, today we served this family, here’s what we did, and maybe we need to. Maybe that needs to be more of the story about how we work on prevention and intervention and the services that we provide,” Casados said.