Thousands more New York families will have access to free prekindergarten this school year, as the state begins a multi-year push to make the program universal.
Gov. Kathy Hochul announced Wednesday that new seats are being added in more than 400 public school districts — more than half of all public school districts statewide — with universal access for 4-year-olds planned by fall 2028.
Hochul announced the expansion as the new school year gets underway. The governor marked the rollout at a pre-K center on Long Island.
“I’ll never stop fighting to lower costs for families — and our historic investment has already delivered thousands more free Pre-K seats statewide, with tens of thousands more in the coming years,” Hochul said in a statement. “As New York’s first mom Governor, putting us on the path to statewide universal Pre-K was personal for me — and I’m ensuring that we will deliver on that promise.”
This year’s state budget includes a $563 million annual funding increase for universal pre-K during the 2026-27 school year.
The Hochul administration claimed annual funding available for the program has risen more than 70% since 2021.
In upstate New York, that translates to new seats in hundreds of school districts, with 45 districts adding seats in the Capital Region, 28 in Central New York, 42 in the Finger Lakes. 53 in the Mid-Hudson valley, 29 in the Mohawk Valley, 27 in the North Country, 35 in the Southern Tier, and 58 in Western New York.
Child Care advocates like Marina Marcou-O’Malley, co-executive director of the Alliance for Quality Education, stress the expansion of free seats will make a real difference for NewYork families.
“This money is going to allow school districts that have gotten pre-K funding that was stuck at a rate that was very low to increase their rate,” she said. “It does mean that more four year olds will have access, either in a school building or a community-based organization,” she said.
Dede Hill, vice president of Policy at Schuyler Center for Analysis and Advocacy, told Spectrum News 1 the funding is a step toward addressing the child care crisis upstate— where solutions have lagged behind the city and sat in the shadow of the enthusiasm created around the push for universal child care by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani during last year’s Mayoral election and beyond.
A lot of that frustration has hinged on upstate’s comparatively minor progress on universal pre-K specifically.
“There’s a sense of inequity and disappointment in the rest of the state, so excited that’s going to change I would say there is still a lot of catch-up outside of New York City,” she said.
But as the political campaign machine continues to drum up energy around universal childcare, Marcou-O’Malley stressed that the state risks hindering its own progress by continuing to resist long-term investments in the childcare workforce. Such an increase came up in budget negotiations, but left out of this year’s high profile package.
“It’s a better sound bite to say ‘we cover more children’ rather than ‘we’re paying people, but without paying people you can’t give more access to families,” she said.
Now, a year after Mamdani, it’s Hochul’s turn to campaign on universal childcare and the steps she’s mad toward it as governor in her race against Republican Bruce Blakeman. The push has become closely associated with calls from within her own party to hike taxes on the state’s high earners to expand programming, and Hochul’s subsequent resistance to doing so. Marcou-O’Malley said that resistance could impact the Hochul’s ability to deliver on additional child care expansion beyond what has been promised in future years.
“I continue to think that she stumbles on this struggle that she has with revenue raisers. Whether or not that is going to continue to be the case in the next legislative session and her next executive budget, that remains to be seen,” she said.