Mamdani and Hochul had delivered a political victory. The people delivering the actual service would be New York\u2019s child-care workers, who number some forty thousand, seventy-five per cent of whom identify as nonwhite women. They earn less than workers in ninety-six per cent of other occupations in the city, often placing them just above the federal poverty line. The patchwork system in which they operate, a mix of public funding and private payment, can be confusing and frustrating to parents, and to the providers themselves. Many caregivers are hoping that the newfound attention to their field will be channelled into making it more stable and equitable.<\/p>\n
To some degree, this will be a matter of revising previous efforts to expand access to early-childhood education. The widely lauded universal pre-K program that was Bill de Blasio\u2019s signature achievement as mayor began rolling out in 2014; 3K (free preschool for three-year-olds) started in 2017. Both programs used a centralized enrollment system to allocate children among a wide variety of providers, ranging from small home-based facilities and large nonprofit networks to campuses run by the city\u2019s public-school system. The locations that weren\u2019t city-run received contracts with the Department of Education. But this created a pointed disparity: teachers directly employed by public schools received better pay and benefits than their peers elsewhere, even when they had the same duties and qualifications. This was bad for the caregivers, but also bad for the programs where they worked, which have faced destabilizing turnover as employees left in pursuit of better pay.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are directly competing with the D.O.E., and they fund us\u2014which is a very odd place to be,\u201d Tiffany Roberson, who oversees early-childhood education at Hudson Guild, a settlement house that runs several centers in Manhattan, told me. Community-based organizations like Roberson\u2019s account for sixty per cent of the city\u2019s pre-K seats, according to the Day Care Council of New York.<\/p>\n
After de Blasio left office, Eric Adams pulled back on support for 3K, cutting outreach and funding. City payments were extremely slow to arrive; a number of day-care centers struggled to cover rent and payroll. \u201cWe had some providers who went an entire fiscal year without getting paid at all,\u201d Nora Moran, of United Neighborhood Houses, which represents many settlement houses, told me. Some took out loans to meet operating expenses. \u201cThe city doesn\u2019t pay interest,\u201d Tara Gardner, the executive director of the Day Care Council, noted dryly. (Adams eventually reversed course, in the lead-up to last year\u2019s mayoral election.) Understandably, providers remain wary. \u201cThey don\u2019t have a very good taste in their mouths for how the city runs these programs,\u201d Guti\u00e9rrez, the city councillor, said.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s not to say that caregivers aren\u2019t wishing for the best. \u201cParents are going to be happy\u2014because I would have been happy,\u201d Stacy Byrd, a pre-K teacher at the University Settlement Children\u2019s Corner in East New York, told me. On a recent Wednesday morning, her students were learning about wheels and transportation. Outside, trains rattled by on the elevated tracks above Livonia Avenue; inside, Byrd was reading \u201cBear on a Bike<\/a>.\u201d The kids were in the \u201cFox\u201d classroom, and, when the titular bear came across foxes in the forest, the students practiced little fox howls. The natural world had made an unwelcome incursion on their habitat the previous fall: a storm in October had flooded the building, and downstairs, months later, repairs were ongoing. Upstairs, though, the Foxes were snug.<\/p>\n Seventeen years ago, before Byrd got her start in early-childhood education, she was a mom flummoxed by child care. \u201cI even wrote to the City Council to try to find out, Why is it that I can\u2019t find affordable child care?\u201d she said. At a loss, she sent her children out of state to live with their grandparents for a year. With help from her church, she was eventually able to piece together care back in the city. Her daughter, who is now twenty-four, has followed her into the field\u2014she teaches two-year-olds at the Children\u2019s Corner. Byrd said that she is \u201chopeful\u201d about the new mayor\u2019s plans. \u201cI\u2019m happy and proud that child care is one of the considerations he\u2019s fighting for,\u201d she told me. \u201cBecause I do feel like that is overlooked.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mamdani and Hochul had delivered a political victory. The people delivering the actual service would be New York\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":123643,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[1586,5287,1092,9,24,11,10,9460],"class_list":{"0":"post-123642","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-affordability","9":"tag-child-care","10":"tag-mayor","11":"tag-new-york","12":"tag-new-york-city","13":"tag-new-york-headlines","14":"tag-new-york-news","15":"tag-parents"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123642","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=123642"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123642\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/123643"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=123642"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=123642"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=123642"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}