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

My name is Karen Alford, and I’m the Vice President for Elementary Schools of the United Federation of Teachers (UFT). On behalf of the union’s more than 190,000 members, I would like to thank Committee on Women and Gender Equity Chair Tiffany Cabán for holding today’s public hearing on establishing an office of child care to oversee free child care for all city residents.

As we noted in our testimony on prekindergarten services last year, our union has long been a strong supporter of efforts to establish high-quality universal early childhood services for our city’s families, and the UFT is eager to be a partner with the Council, the DOE and the state in improving the state of child care in our city. Providing families with access to high quality early childhood learning experiences is among the most important things we can do to help prepare young children for school and beyond. As President Mulgrew said during the launch of the city’s universal pre-K (UPK) program in 2014, in order for early childhood education, including child care, to fully serve the needs of New York City families, it must have three essential components:

1. High-quality staff with the training to provide children with the right mix of activities for their developmental levels.
2. A substantive curriculum and child care guidelines written expressly to provide what the best research and experience tells us young children need.
3. Long-term financial support, since the unfortunate history is that for too many programs, funding is provided, then political priorities change and the money dries up. Providers and districts cannot create quality programs if next year's funding is always in doubt.

The UFT looks forward to working in partnership with the City Council, the DOE and the state to resolve these issues in the area of child care. The range of professional development and credentialing services that the union has provided to thousands of family child care providers is one example of our ongoing commitment. We’ve partnered with curriculum development teams from public television, our parent union the American Federation of Teachers and the UFT Teacher Center to deliver age- appropriate instructional support for our members in home-based child care settings.

Most notably, the UFT Teacher Center created curriculum for two- to three-year-old children centered around social-emotional learning with an additional component on autism. Additionally, we’ve introduced the Successful Beginnings for Early Literacy Development (SBELD) — a Teacher Center-developed curriculum geared to preparing three-year-olds for kindergarten with supports and resources for our child care providers. Further, we are particularly proud of our embedded coaching program. Teacher Center instructional coaches demonstrate how to use the curricula and show providers how to adopt and sustain evidence-based best practices in their homes.

The UFT’s annual Early Childhood Conference held each March also offers workshops for early childhood education providers. Examples include using building blocks to solve problems, employing storytelling as an instructional technique, engaging English language learners with new strategies and demonstrating how geometry can be used to aid language development. Plus, we have assisted members in their pursuit of national accreditation with the National Association for Family Child Care. Supporting ongoing professional learning is not just a feel-good notion. It gets results. Our providers are on the front line for identifying children with developmental delays. We train our providers to observe development benchmarks and notice when children are not thriving.

We believe the proposed bill being considered at this hearing provides a number of strong benefits that would continue to bring the city closer to providing high-quality child care for our local families. The provisions for training programs for child care providers and the creation of a workforce development program to enhance the quality of care provided are well-aligned with our long-standing efforts to improve access to quality professional learning opportunities for our child care providers, and we look forward to collaborating with you to build capacity in this area. In addition, the promotion and expansion of child care services that operate during nights and weekends would significantly benefit working parents or those with nontraditional working hours. The proposal for increased guidance and support for child care providers on opening and operating a service would be particularly beneficial for home-based providers who might lack previous experience or knowledge of the regulatory landscape. We also agree with the bill’s goals to provide wages and benefits that lead to greater financial stability and overall well-being of child care providers.

In terms of concerns about the bill, the recommendation to establish an office of child care to collaborate with relevant agencies and stakeholders has promise. However, as we have noted before, we generally oppose creating additional duplicative layers of city bureaucracy and administrative positions rather than focusing funding on the provision of direct services to families. For this reason, it might be more efficient to create a new individual role to serve this purpose of coordinating multi-agency efforts rather than staffing a full new office. It is also essential to ensure that we and other unions which represent child care providers are included in these stakeholder discussions.

The Council should also consider the unintended consequences of the bill's age limit on funding to only programs serving children under five. This provision could leave many families without access to affordable care for children aged 6 to 12, as programs may elect to eliminate open seats for these older children. Families may then need to seek private and potentially more expensive programs, and those with children of diverse ages could be forced to utilize multiple care settings and care options. Providers who shift to providing services only for younger children may also need funding to cover the costs of new equipment and materials and retraining of staff to effectively transition to their new model.

In addition, while we continue to support efforts to make high-quality child care available and affordable for New York City parents, we believe it should not be presented as an alternative to the equally needed expansion of citywide programs for our 3K students or the continued support of universal pre-kindergarten programs, and funding for these programs should not be cut in order to fund universal child care. In particular, it is especially urgent that we direct more funding and effort toward ensuring that preschool-age children with disabilities and English language learners receive the services they need to be prepared for kindergarten. With the recent increase in multilingual children in our communities due to increased migration to our city from around the world, bilingual and dual-language opportunities for pre-K students must be expanded to meet the needs of our families.

Given this range of needs, we believe there must be both a substantial increase in city funding for its early childhood programs and improvements to its payment process to providers before a mandate for universal child care can be implemented. The lack of a consistent funding stream for UPK and existing child care programs, which we have highlighted in union testimony since 2014, has still not been addressed. The COVID-19 pandemic had a devastating impact on many of our providers’ financial stability. One recent study estimated that between 2019 and 2021, New York City lost 22% of its family day care programs, and multiple reports have noted the challenges of community-based child care and pre-K providers in retaining qualified staff and directors in a context where multiple other jobs now offer better pay and benefits. As we noted in union testimony in December 2020 and again in 2022, another factor is the pay-for-enrollment model used in the city, which creates a disincentive to allocate adequate resources to successfully operate these programs. When enrollment drops due to external factors such as COVID-19, the payment model’s flaws are even more glaring. Lack of consistent and reliable funding makes it impossible for child care providers to provide the high-quality support and services needed to properly run these programs.

The impact of these broader trends has been intensified by the city’s inexcusable delays in payments to child care agencies for services they have already provided. In September 2022, the heads of these agencies warned that they might have to close their centers if the city does not pay them the millions of dollars they are owed. In a joint letter, they warned that the “fiscal stability of the entire sector is at grave risk” and that “without immediate action, the city’s child care plan will not only be left unrealized but more importantly, the early care and education sector, its work force and the children and families that depend upon it will be irreparably harmed.” While we welcome the efforts in this bill to address these concerns through changes to the invoicing process, more work is needed to ensure that these improvements are effective.

Early childhood programs, including quality child care, can play a pivotal role in laying the foundation for a child’s social, emotional and intellectual development. We look forward to working with the City Council to ensure that all our city’s children have access to high quality care throughout their lives and come to our sch