Testimony of Karen Alford, UFT Vice President for Elementary Schools, submitted before the New York City Council Committee on Education

My name is Karen Alford, and I am the Vice President for Elementary Schools at the United Federation of Teachers (UFT). On behalf of the union’s more than 200,000 members, I would like to thank the Education Committee and Chair Eric Dinowitz for holding this hearing. I would also like to thank Council Members Jennifer Gutierrez, Lincoln Restler and Rita Joseph for sponsoring this important bill about reporting on payments to early childhood care and education providers.

The UFT represents around 8,000 home-based child care providers who have been members of our union since 2007. We have won countless victories for these providers, including grants for professional development and education supplies, and the protections afforded by an established grievance procedure. However, this has not been enough to combat the mass attrition of providers that we’ve seen over the past few years. Prior to the pandemic, the UFT represented over 25,000 home-based child care providers; now we represent under 10,000. This extreme reduction in our workforce has been caused by myriad factors — most notably delayed payments to providers from the Department of Education and low payment rates overall.

The UFT has been advocating for an improved payment process for early childhood care and education providers for years because we have seen many of our members wait months to receive payment. In October of 2024, we stood on the steps of City Hall to demand that 47 of our union child care providers be paid over $500,000 owed to them for services they had provided the prior May and June. Despite not receiving pay for months, these educators continued to provide care because their communities relied on them, even though it meant many of them ultimately had to close their doors. This is untenable and wrong. We cannot ask providers to work without pay, nor can providers care for children without the financial means to operate their businesses.

Our child care providers deserve reliable, timely compensation for the important work that they do. These individuals are our children’s first educators who do the work of preparing them for school and beyond. We cannot afford to lose any more of these early child care providers, especially as we work to fulfill the promise of truly universal 3-K and to ensure the successful rollout of 2-Care for families across New York City. With this in mind, we welcome the reporting requirements in the bill we’re discussing today, with the hope that it is the first step toward holding the city accountable for appropriately paying its child care providers.

We must continue to recruit new child care providers and retain the ones we currently have in the profession. Doing this will require the implementation of the following policy changes and proposals at both the city and state levels:

• Increase salaries for providers by recognizing their role as our children's first educators.
• Phase in the replacement of the market rate methodology with a model that captures the true cost of providing quality care.
• Increase the special needs rate by moving to a higher base rate and removing the 15% market rate cap.
• Ensure automatic rate adjustments for all care types and ensure annual automatic renewal for special needs rates.
• Increase and automatically apply differential payment rates for families experiencing homelessness. Increase rates for nontraditional hours of care (S4079/A1734 of 2024).
• Continue funding the Child Care Facilitated Enrollment Project.
• Allow home-based providers to own and operate multiple child care businesses.

Thank you for the opportunity to discuss how we can ensure our early childhood care and education providers are paid in a timely manner, as well as how we can support the early childhood workforce. I look forward to our continued collaboration on this topic.