New York (Maybe) Dodges A Child Care Crisis, But Still Needs to Do Better
New York State and City leaders seemed last week to have broken a weeks-long budget stalemate that had threatened child care for tens of thousands of low-income residents. If their deal holds – which is a big “if” – that’s largely welcome news. What would make it even better? Starting work now on a long-overdue redesign of New York’s crazy-quilt childcare system.
At a May 19th hearing, Jess Dannhauser, commissioner of the City’s Administration for Children’s Services (ACS), told members of the City Council of a City-State agreement on eligibility requirements that would extend child care vouchers to most – but not quite all – of the more than 75,000 New York City families who’ve previously been receiving them. State officials had initially balked at providing funding to meet demand for Child Care Assistance Program (CCAP) vouchers in the city, which has burgeoned in recent years as a result of the State expanding eligibility for the program, allowing families earning up to 85 percent of State Median Income to access it.
In the end, the State budget adopted earlier this month includes nearly $1.45 billion for the City’s CCAP vouchers – $350 million more than was originally budgeted. But this commitment requires the City to contribute an extra $625 million of its own revenue, including a dollar-for-dollar match of the extra $350 million. That was, initially, a non-starter with the administration of Mayor Eric Adams, which responded with a near-total freeze on CCAP enrollments.
At last week’s Council hearing, however, Dannhauser said that based on assurances from City budget officials, his “expectation” was that those matching funds would after all be included in the City budget to be finalized in June. Barring any last-minute course reversals – and bear in mind, the $350 million in question definitely wasn’t in the budget plan the mayor sent to the Council on May 1st – a looming child care crisis that had sown confusion and anxiety among parents and child care providers may have been averted.
But, as the saying goes, we shouldn’t let a good crisis go to waste. Because the fact is that child care – or more appropriately, early childhood education (ECE) – in New York is a crisis perpetually waiting to happen. Currently, families submit applications for free 3-K or Pre-K or for subsidized CCAP vouchers and wait with bated breath to find out if they’ll get the help that enables them to go to work or afford to live in the city. Currently, child care providers enrolling children from these programs interact with up to three separate City agencies (ACS, NYC Schools, and the Human Resources Administration), all with their own parent engagement and payment processes.
It’s a hodge-podge of programs built on top of an economic system that also fundamentally depends on women’s unpaid child care work in their homes. It cries out for better coordination and systemization.
Consider, for example, the wildly popular expansion of the City’s Pre-K and 3-K programs over the past 10 years. It has taken a huge financial burden off the budgets of working families whose incomes make them ineligible for CCAP vouchers. The City works hard and well to promote and fill Pre-K and 3-K programs, and match demand for slots with under-utilized supply.
But all that has gone on as if the parallel universe of CCAP simply doesn’t exist – despite common, if slightly bizarre, arrangements where child care centers and family child care providers simultaneously serve kids in 3-K and CCAP as well as those whose parents pay for care completely out of their own pockets.
What parent, providers, and policymakers need is an integrated system. Parents should be able to find out in one place about various child care modalities (center-based, family-based, school-based) as well as programmatic specialties (like programs providing care in different languages or serving children with special needs). Based on their needs, they should be offered fully subsidized care or an affordable co-pay option. Moreover, child care programs should work with one agency to enroll children whose families want access to this public system and manage payments from various funding streams.
Under such a system, City policymakers would benefit from more complete and accessible data on ECE supply and demand throughout the five boroughs. Case in point: Even as the funding crisis regarding CCAP vouchers emerged, thethe January Mayor’s Management Report found that there were over 12,000 unfilled seats in NYC Schools programs that would have provided ECE for children five years old and younger for a parent’s full workday. These seats have already been paid for and could have been utilized instead of tapping into CCAP voucher funding. But was there any coordination between City agencies to offer families applying for CCAP vouchers these seats?
Creating such a seamless, integrated system will require a multi-year effort. It would be a “heavy lift,” in City Hall parlance. But it’s one the City Council could begin immediately by requiring, as a condition of budget approval, that City agencies involved in ECE regularly report in the year ahead on coordination, data-sharing, and joint marketing of their services to young families.
Finally, there’s also a good-sense administrative step the City could take now that would pay off right away, financially and also social-emotionally.
It has to do with a renewed work requirement – one that was suspended during the Covid-19 pandemic and its long aftermath – for new parents receiving cash assistance. They will once again be required to work after their child is three months old, or lose their cash assistance benefits. These parents will be offered CCAP vouchers so that they can fulfill this work requirement.
The City could easily, however, exempt these new parents from the work requirement until their infants are 12 months old. While that would (although only slightly) reduce CCAP demand and costs it also would (almost certainly) improve family wellbeing for the affected infants and parents. It’s not every day that what’s smart for the bottom line also chimes with what’s best for so many hearts. When – like a good crisis – something like that happens, we shouldn’t pass it up. We should go for it.
Lauren Melodia is director of economic and fiscal policy at the Center for New York City Affairs at The New School. This Urban Matters is based, in part, on May 19th testimony she gave to the New York City Council Committee on Children and Youth.
Photo by: Pedro Reyna