Day Care Advocates Beg State for Relief from EarlyLearnNYC
by Anne Silverstein
Early Childhood Education advocates, one after the other, urged a state Senate committee on children and families, to force the city to rethink EarlyLearnNYC, the city’s ill-conceived effort to redraw how city-subsidized day care is handled.
CSA First Vice President Randi Herman was among the speakers who said EarlyLearn’s goals were laudable – better education for young children – but that many questions remained unanswered about the RFP. For example, she said, “CSA understands that only 93 percent of a center’s cost would be covered under this model. How will a center bridge a 7 percent gap in funding?” Presently, most centers have no means of raising money.
All the other speakers, with the exception of Sara Vecchiotti, the ACS Acting Deputy Commissioner of Child Care and Head Start, railed against the new funding method, which provides for fewer children to be served as well as creates an impossible task for most day care centers – raising 7 percent of the operating costs themselves. And all the speakers, including Ms. Vecchiotti, urged the state to increase funding for the care and education of young children especially in the face of cuts in federal spending.
A few speakers called for a more radical approach. James Matison, Executive Director of the Brooklyn Kindergarten Society said, “It is time to stop rearranging the chairs of the Titanic … Someone should step up to establish free [or affordable] early childhood education for everyone. This should be a goal of our society.” He pointed out that when President John F. Kennedy said, “Let’s put a man on the moon,” it may have sounded ridiculous, but it was accomplished. “We can do this,” he said.
The number of children who received city-subsidized care varies depending upon whether one is discussing centerbased seats, voucher programs or other arrangements. The Administration for Children’s Services serves approximately 120,000 children annually, according to Ms. Vecchiotti’s testimony. About 94,000 are in the city’s subsidized child care system with the remaining children served through Head Start. About 50,000 are in
center-based slots, said Ms. Vecchiotti, but since federal funding has not kept pace with rising costs, “We had no choice but to reduce the number of child care subsidies we could fund by approximately 16,500 children.”
