This article was originally published in New York Focus.
More than child care providers in all New York counties benefited from the billions of federal dollars that President Joe Biden’s pandemic relief package injected into the sector. Childcare providers reported using the money to cover rent or pay employee wages, supporting the care of about 676,000 children in the state.
“That’s helped us keep the doors open,” said Victor Vargas, a former teacher who operates a daycare center out of his home in the South Bronx. His daycare, which has eight staff members, benefited from stabilization grants from the federal government and from a staff retention grant the state set up with federal funds.
But federal money ran out last September, leaving providers struggling with increasingly thin margins between their spending and what parents can afford or what state child care subsidies can cover. Over the past year, 44 percent of New York child care providers have raised tuition and a third have lost staff, according to a new report from The Century Foundation, a liberal think tank, based on surveys and federal data.
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New York has increased its own investments in the child care sector in recent years, largely in the form of subsidies to parents and tax breaks to providers, but lawmakers and advocates have called for more funding — especially to boost wages for the sector’s poorly paid workforce. increase. .
This year, New York child care workers will see a pay cut after the state budget gave the sector lower wage increases than last year.
“The industry is completely reeling right now,” said Sen. Jabari Brisport, who chairs the chamber’s Committee on Children and Families and has proposed that the state fund universal child care.
Twelve percent of New York childcare workers live below the federal poverty line, compared to 5 percent of all workers in the state. The average wage in the industry is just over $32,900, making the workers some of the lowest-paid workers in the state.
‘You expect us to be able to hire staff, keep them here, and that they want to stay here – because they get what exactly as a reward? It’s not money,” Vargas said, “because we can’t compete with anyone else. It is difficult for us to stay in the market.”
The industry was already shedding workers when the federal funding cliff hit. According to The Century Foundation’s analysis of federal data, employment in New York’s childcare sector fell 32 percent from 2019 to 2023. (These data exclude kindergarten teachers and teaching assistants.)
“In other sectors, such as retail and food services, wages have increased,” said Julie Kashen, director of women’s economic justice at The Century Foundation and lead author of the report. “Even if they are educated and enjoy working with children, people can make more money selling coffee, so they leave the childcare sector to do that. That means programs will eventually be closed.”
The Century Foundation had previously warned that ending funding in September 2023 could result in 70,000 programs closing across the country. Some Democrats in Congress and the White House pushed for a new round of child care funding to avert the crisis, but this did not generate the votes to pass it.
A year after the closure, the most apocalyptic scenarios have not yet come true, the think tank acknowledges in the report published on Wednesday. But states are seeing a “downward spiral,” with providers raising prices to stay open and struggling to find or retain workers.
Governor Kathy Hochul, who calls herself the state’s “first mom governor,” has called affordable child care a top priority. In 2022, she committed the state to spending $7 billion on child care over the four years of her term.
“As a mother who has been forced to leave her job due to the lack of accessible child care, I am proud of the work we have done with Majority Leader Stewart-Cousins and Chairman Heastie to make this historic investment and the opportunities it presents will offer to working parents. Hochul said at the time.
That pledge was “significant and welcome,” said Dede Hill, policy director of the Schuyler Center for Analysis and Advocacy. Thanks to recent expansions of the program, more than half of New York’s children now qualify for child care subsidies — although only a small minority actually receive them.
“Unfortunately, there is a real danger that the state’s inability to invest in the workforce will jeopardize the success of all these other historic investments in child care,” Hill said. “You can expand access to tens of thousands of families, as the state has done, but that means nothing to a family if they can’t find a place for their child in a program because there aren’t enough workers.”
Statewide, the number of places childcare providers are allowed to offer is about the same as in 2021. Some parts of the state, especially poorer and rural areas, have lost capacity, while others have seen an increase. But many providers operate below capacity. In a March 2023 survey, 1,600 providers reported having nearly 30,000 licensed slots that they could not fill due to staffing shortages.
In 2023, Hochul and the state Legislature agreed to spend $500 million in discretionary federal pandemic relief funds to provide bonuses of up to $3,000 to 110,000 child care workers across the state. This spring, Hochul and lawmakers allocated the unspent remaining portion of that money to a smaller bonus.
According to the governor’s office, more than 80,000 child care workers have received a combined bonus of more than $5,000 over the past two years. “We are committed to strengthening child care programs, growing the workforce and continuing to expand access to affordable child care for New Yorkers,” the office said in a statement.
Advocates had called on the state to invest its own money in the workforce and create a $2 billion “Child Care Compensation Fund” in this year’s state budget.
The proposal was modeled after a similar program in Washington, DC, which provided a $12,000 supplement to child care worker salaries. An analysis from Cornell University found that it would cost nearly $800 million to bring child care workers to a minimum wage of $23.55 per hour — the average entry-level wage for preschool and kindergarten teachers in New York.
Both the Senate and Assembly budget proposals included a smaller version of the fund in the budget, but Hochul rejected this outright.
“She was completely unwilling to commit new state dollars to fund this proposal. She was solely focused on finding ways to recycle the federal money and leave it at that,” Brisport said.
This story was originally published on New York Focus.
