When she was Lieutenant Governor, Kathy Hochul repeatedly warned of a New York childcare crisis, where rising costs had bankrupted thousands of caregivers and left many families with few options for care.
Ms. Hochul, now the state’s first female governor, took swift action to address the issue. In her first executive budget proposal, she called on the state to increase its childcare spending to $1.4 billion, expand subsidies, establish daycare centers at public universities and provide additional support to health care providers.
But the Democrat-led New York legislature said that wasn’t nearly enough.
Lawmakers say the state needs to spend billions, but also quickly increase eligibility for subsidized childcare — a move they say lays the foundation for a much bolder vision.
“We are clearly on track to achieve a full, universal system where all people are eligible for subsidized childcare,” said Brooklyn Senator Jabari Brisport, who helped draft the Senate plan. It called for $2.2 billion to be committed to immediately make childcare free for all low-income families, and to increase the number of families that would receive benefits each year.
The current threshold is 200 percent of the federal poverty line of $27,750 for a family of four; the Senate plan would allow families earning up to five times the poverty line to qualify for subsidized care by 2024, raising the state’s pledge to more than $4 billion.
The Assembly’s proposal is only slightly less ambitious, calling on the state to spend $3 billion to subsidize care for families earning up to four times the federal limit — or $111,000 for a family of four — within three years. Ms. Hochul’s plan would reach families who would earn up to three times the federal cap during that time.
With both the governor and the legislature determined to take action on this issue, New York appears poised to make a significant increase in state aid for childcare in its upcoming budget, expected on April 1.
A handful of cities and states have advanced plans to expand access to childcare, but New York’s proposals are among the most ambitious. And with federal childcare funding bogged down in President Biden’s Build Back Better legislation, the resolutions have taken on national significance.
“These are historic proposals, there’s no other way to say it,” said Dede Hill, policy director at the Schuyler Center for Analysis and Advocacy, a nonprofit public policy institute. “New York would move into a new vision, a new way of thinking about childcare, and that would be really remarkable.”
The next steps will all depend on negotiations between the state’s top leaders, once called the “three men in a room,” who manage the budget. This is the first year in which two of them — Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins and Ms Hochul — are women. The third is the Speaker of the Assembly, Carl Heastie.
Under Mrs. Stewart-Cousins and Mr. Heastie, the legislature has shifted to the left, often to the left of Mrs. Hochul’s predecessor, Andrew M. Cuomo.
Ms. Hochul, a centrist from western New York, will have to balance the legislature’s political demands with her own politics and reality: She’s running for election for her first full term as governor in November and will also run for a president in June. contested primary.
Part of that balancing act will be aided by a surplus in state revenues from an infusion of federal pandemic aid and better-than-expected tax revenues — though that same surplus could make it difficult to keep up with the legislature, which has proposed significant budget hikes. .
Starved by decades of divestment, New York’s childcare system suffered before the pandemic, with long waiting lists and high fees making it inaccessible to many parents. Many daycare centers closed temporarily when the coronavirus hit and never reopened after that.
A December 2021 Office of Children and Families report found that 64 percent of New Yorkers live in “childcare deserts.” At the same time, nurses – the vast majority of whom are women – struggle to afford the basic necessities.
†The Covid-19 pandemic highlighted the fact that our childcare system is broken,” said Councilor Michaelle Solages, a mother of three and one of the architects of the Assembly’s childcare proposal. “It was broken before the pandemic and now it is in crisis.”
Danyelle Luchey, a Buffalo mother of three, said she knows that crisis all too well.
With two incomes and three children, Mrs. Luchey, 34, and her husband find themselves in a place many families know: not poor enough to qualify for state aid, but not rich enough to pay out of pocket.
One of her children was well placed with a provider that offered lower tuition fees, but it closed two years ago during the pandemic. After keeping her kids at home for several months, she found a new facility, but it too closed less than a year later.
The loss was a blow, said Ms. Luchey, forcing her to bring her children between grandparents and willing friends. She has since found childcare for her daughter, the youngest of her children, and has switched to a part-time job to minimize childcare costs. Still, she said, her daughter’s childcare bill exceeds her mortgage payment.
“How many women have to make changes and disappear from the workforce because childcare is so expensive?” said Mrs Luchey. “Do I have to work, do I stay at home? It’s a Catch-22.”
Under the Senate plan, Ms Luchey and her family would receive care at a reduced rate. “It would make a huge difference,” she says.
Part of the reason for the three-year phasing-in period, proponents say, is that there aren’t enough providers to meet the demand the new law would create.
Lawmakers hope that with training programs and dramatically increased payback rates, the industry will recover and attract new workers. They also have ideas for getting money straight to those in childcare — with the Senate offering $3,000 bonuses for childcare workers, and the Assembly giving providers $500 million in grants to keep them in business.
But even these lofty plans have limitations. While the Senate plan will end job requirements that make it difficult for unemployed and immigrant families to find care, those requirements remain in the Assembly version. And while the Assembly includes funding for after-school programs, the Senate’s plan will cut support at age 5.
Senator Brisport sees the Senate plan as a first step. As a former teacher, he envisions a system that resembles a public school – open to everyone from minimum wage workers to billionaires.
He finds it encouraging how far the proposals go and how they have been received. Already he says he can see the proposal shifting “from the realm of something fantastic, to something possible.”
In its budget, the Assembly is proposing to add $150 million in additional funding for pre-kindergarten programs, much of which would go to areas left out of previous funding rounds. The Senate pledged $250 million.
Past expansions of the pre-K system have pitted industries against each other in a competition for labor — wages are low in the childcare sector, while pre-K teachers earn more — but lawmakers hope this is the start of an integrated approach .
“Children are born learning. They learn every day,” said Westchester Congresswoman Amy Paulin, a pre-K advocate. “We’ve given pre-school education two different names. And maybe it’s time we call it that.”
Whatever plan emerges from the budget negotiations, lawmakers are hoping for support from Ms Hochul, who has a personal history with the issue: In 1988, when she was a young mother, she was forced to quit her own job as an office assistant. by US Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. She couldn’t find childcare.
