In recent years, New York State has made historic strides in expanding access to child care assistance and increasing the market rate to pay early childhood educators more. In New York City, these efforts have significantly boosted child care assistance uptake in high-poverty neighborhoods. However, without additional funding, impending cuts could force families to pay an extra $1,500 or more per month for care — an unmanageable cost for many.
Child care providers and educators will scramble to fill seats and keep their doors open, while parents who rely on child care to maintain employment, education, health care, and financial stability could face devastating consequences. Although NYC will be the first to experience this shortfall, other counties across the state are already starting to face similar challenges.
Without immediate action, NYC requires a public investment of between $823M (Center for NYC Affairs’ low estimate) and $987M (Administration for Children and Families’ estimate), to prevent denying care to as many as 4,000 to 7,000 families per month during recertification.
State leaders are calling on parents to share how losing child care would impact their families. Personal stories are essential in helping them understand the harm that any interruption in care could cause.
Parents whose children are not currently in child care can still weigh in on how funding cuts would undermine recent investments in child care access and educator wages.
Here are the stories from some of our incredible parent leaders from across the state — current members and alumni of EdTrust–New York and Raising New York’s Early Childhood Policy & Advocacy Lab.
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“New York has made gains in the past few years in the area of child care including expanding access to child care and raising the market rate for providers. However, despite these changes, I will likely not be able to return to work from maternity leave full-time due to a lack of providers in my area. If additional funding for child care is not provided, many more families will be in a similar position to me. We need to continue to make forward, not backward, progress.” -Julia Day
“It has been brought to our attention that NYC is in jeopardy of limiting child care assistance. It is frightening to imagine the multitude of children and parents negatively affected by this. As a parent with a significantly lower income, I heavily rely on child care assistance. If it were not for the support given to families like mine, many parents would not be able to afford child care, meaning it could make it impossible to maintain employment. There are so many benefits to families receiving assistance with child care. Children benefit from supervision, in both their social and academic development. I sure hope the necessary implementations will be made to ensure New York State’s continued commitment to children and their families.”-Merowe Nubyhan
“As a foster parent, I operate under strict regulations regarding who can supervise our foster child. Unlike typical families, we cannot simply rely on friends or relatives for child care unless they too are licensed foster parents. Even short-term child care disruptions (less than one week) create significant hardships, forcing me to either work from home while simultaneously caring for a high-needs child whose routine is disrupted, or request that already-overwhelmed caseworkers provide supervision in their offices. These child care gaps place additional strain on an already burdened system. In the case of long-term childcare disruptions, we would be forced to surrender our foster child. This would require caseworkers to secure another suitable placement—either in a different community or with a family that has a stay-at-home parent—resulting in yet another traumatic disruption for an already vulnerable child.”–Erica Thompson, Ed.D
“As a mother who relied on child care during the early stages of my son’s life, child care is needed. Without this, parents are unable to work to provide the things that our children need. I have a child who is on the spectrum and outside of needing child care for me to work, him being in daycare/ preschool assisted with his growth and development.” -Krystal Hardy