Testimony of Karen Alford before NYS Asssembly & Senate Committees on Children, Families and Education

Jun 3, 2009 10:48 AM

Good morning Chairpersons Montgomery, Scarborough, Oppenheimer, Nolan and distinguished members of the New York State Assembly and Senate. Greetings, too, to our friends from District Council 1707 who are present here today.

I am Karen Alford, Vice President for Elementary Schools at New York City’s largest labor union, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT). In addition to representing teachers at all levels in the public school system, our union also represents more than 28,000 home daycare providers – and prides itself on our advocacy on behalf of New York City children in a wide variety of educational and care settings.

Indeed, that is why I am here today – to speak to you on behalf not only of educators who work in our already-overcrowded public schools and dread the thought of even greater class sizes, but also on behalf of the children and parents who depend on public schools and daycare centers to deliver quality early education and care.

At present, the city Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) provides center-based child care to 22,000 children ages 2 through 5 in more than 300 fully-funded daycare facilities around the city – and this is an enormous boon to working New Yorkers.

These facilities, which provide a comprehensive educational program with certified teachers, often are the only center-based child care programs available to New York families in low-income communities.

However, as you well know, ACS is now contemplating shuttering several daycare centers around the city and shuffling more than 3,200 5-year-olds from community-based daycare into kindergarten classrooms in city schools in a bid to cut costs. In addition, ACS will no longer accept 5-year-olds into city daycare centers as of December 31, 2009.

I will not comment on the impact these changes will have on workers in daycare facilities as I am sure our friends from District Council 1707 will discuss that at length. However, I can say without any hesitation that the impact of these changes on children and parents reliant upon ACS daycare centers – as well as their impact on overcrowded schools – will be devastating.

In the midst of the greatest economic crisis since the 1930s, ACS proposes cutting funding for an essential public service on which thousands of working New York families depend. As a result, working parents, already anxious about precarious employment situations and their economic prospects in uncertain times, will no longer have the option to place their 5-year-olds in daycare centers for a full day of kindergarten services. 

Instead, ACS presents them with a new source of anxiety. Will they be able to obtain adequate care for their young children? What about those who need care during non-traditional work hours? Will school-based programs provide care during the summer? These are the concrete questions faced by working families that will be affected by ACS’ proposed changes.

The 3,200 low-income 5-year-olds in question also have reason for anxiety. They will be taken from a familiar care setting and their education will be interrupted. Many of them will need to be bussed to schools and programs outside their neighborhoods. These children already face great enough challenges. Do we really need to make their circumstances more difficult? The measures proposed by ACS are hardly conducive to high educational attainment for the children of New York’s working families.

More alarming still, the schools to which ACS intends to move these children are already overcrowded. They are so overcrowded, in fact, that in District 2 we have recently seen dozens of families with children eligible for kindergarten in September of this year advised by the city Department of Education (DOE) that their children do not have a place in their respectively zoned schools. How, then, do ACS and the DOE intend to fit an additional 3,200 low-income children into kindergarten classrooms?

Overcrowding is a pervasive problem in city schools. According to a recent report by the Campaign for Fiscal Equality, data from 2007-2008 reveal that there are already more than 391 school buildings with a total enrollment of 381,582 students that are overcrowded with utilization rates greater than 100%; approximately 37% of all students attend school in an overcrowded building. There are numerous severe cases of overcrowding: 85 school buildings have utilization rates between 125% and 150%, and 28 have utilization rates above 150%. 

As an educator, I am dedicated to eliminating overcrowding in our public schools. Parents, teachers, and officials at both DOE and ACS all know that school overcrowding makes it extremely difficult for New York’s children to get the education they deserve.             This is especially true of our youngest children, for whom research has shown the quality of early education and care they receive has an enormous and lasting impact on their well-being and ability to learn. We place New York City’s children at a severe disadvantage when their classes are too large and their schools are filled past capacity.

Yet in its proposed five-year capital plan, DOE has not adequately addressed the need for more space in city schools. Indicators show that enrollment in all but a select few districts in the city will rise. But the entire proposed five-year capital plan has only 25,000 new seats. The city needs more classrooms in many more schools. So what is their solution?

In District 2, they proposed eliminating pre-kindergarten at two schools in order to make room for more kindergarten students. Although DOE has since moved away from this approach, it demonstrates that they are unprepared to address our city schools’ overcrowding crisis. They are robbing Peter to pay Paul – or pre-kindergartens to pay kindergarteners, as the case may be.

And this approach of cutting one program in order to provide another is not restricted to District 2. On the contrary, it is repeated in ACS’ proposal to close daycare centers and shuffle students into kindergarten classrooms. Why does ACS need to move these children? It is time for the city to stop shuffling money and children – and to find real solutions to the real problems facing our public schools and daycare centers.