At the childcare center inside Dewitt Reformed Church, First Deputy Mayor Dean Fuleihan read to students Wednesday morning — after thanking the teachers, as part of what Mayor Zohran Mamdani has dubbed Child Care Educator Appreciation Month.

“They deserve our constant, daily appreciation. I mean, what’s happening here is the future of our city,” Fuleihan said.

What You Need To Know

City officials are thanking childcare workers as part of what the mayor has named Child Care Educator Appeciation Month

But many of the people working in child care centers are struggling to make ends meet; paid less than their DOE counterparts

First Deputy Mayor Dean Fuleihan says the city is working to fix that problem with investments in the budget 

Dewitt’s childcare program launched in 1967 as a pilot for the federal Head Start program, part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s war on poverty. Since then, it’s seen the creation of universal pre-K and 3-K, and now, Mamdani’s push for universal childcare for 2-year-olds.

Dewitt also offers integrated classrooms for students with special needs.

But running a program like this isn’t always easy. When Fuleihan walked in, he asked staff how it was going. They answered: “It’s going.”

“What would make it better?” he asked.

“More money,” one staffer replied.

The city depends on community-based organizations like this one to make its early childhood programs possible, paying them to provide preschool for free to parents. But margins are tight, and educators in these programs often earn less than they would if they worked at a Department of Education school.

“We’re like, barely making it. It’s like paycheck to paycheck, like most of us in the city. So the program is running kind of like that also,” the staffer told him.

“We know your stress and we’re going to be addressing it. We’ve already started,” Fuleihan told her.

This year was a particularly difficult one for Dewitt, which for decades had seats funded through the Head Start program — but had to transition them to a city program after the city lost its grant following an audit of the program’s lagging enrollment.

“There’s one purse for the money and everything comes out of that same purse,” Sharil Jones, the director at Dewitt, said in an interview. “So, in talking about retention, keeping your employees — but how do you keep them happy when there’s other options elsewhere? For example, New York City teachers work 180 days. We’re contracted to 261. So it’s that whole parity thing. It’s a struggle.”

Mamdani has promised to address pay parity — something prior mayors have also attempted — and officials point to $40 million in his proposed budget for early childhood educators.

“We actually, in the executive budget, started to address this very issue of the underfunding for our providers. And we’re committed, and the mayor’s committed to make sure that we fulfill that, and we’ll keep doing that. We understand how important this is,” Fuleihan said.

Jones, the program’s director, sent her own children to the program — and after filling in for an absent teacher, eventually got her degrees, became a teacher, and now is the school’s leader. It’s that history, and the passion staff has for this school, that keeps them here.

“Can you go somewhere else and probably get more, you know, compensated higher financially?” she asked. “Yes. But it still wouldn’t be Dewitt.”

But, she added, a little more money would certainly make it easier.