Testimony Before the New York State Senate and Assembly

Issues Regarding the Impact of the ACS Plan to Move Five-year-old Children from ACS Child Care Centers to NYC Department of Education Kindergarten Classes as of September, 2009

Good morning. My name is James Langford, Quality Improvement Director for the Children’s Aid Society. On behalf of our CEO, C. Warren Moses, and our Board of Trustees, I want to thank the Senate and Assembly Standing Committees on Children and Families and Standing Committees on Education for holding these hearings. The healthy development of disadvantaged children has been central to our mission for 156 years. Children’s Aid provides services to over 100,000 children and families in New York City each year through neighborhood community centers, camps, community schools, medical and mental health clinics, foster care, adoption and preventive services, day care, Head Start and early childhood programs (both privately and publicly funded), housing for homeless families, juvenile justice, and legal advocacy programs.

Our ACS and other contracted early childhood Child Care and Head Start programs serve 590 children at nine sites. We also operate Community School extended day and Center-based after-school programs with funding from both the NYS Advantage After-School grant program, the federal 21st Century Community Learning Center programs, and the NYC Department of Youth and Community Development’s (DYCD) Out-of-School Time (OST) program - serving 4,500 school-age children every day. In partnership with the NYC Department of Education (DOE), three of the elementary Community Schools that we operate in Washington Heights and the South Bronx offer extended day programs to 5 year-olds through funding from the DYCD OST program. Two of these schools - P.S. 5 and P.S. 8 - offer a continuum of on-site 0-5 early childhood programming, with funding from Early Head Start and Head Start.

I will address several interrelated issues with regard to the topics that have been selected for these hearings: 1) The transition of 5 year-olds from ACS child care programs to DOE Kindergartens with OST after-school programs; 2) Sustaining high quality, affordable, and accessible child care for working families – and the question of how the 5-year-old child care slots that will be eliminated will be converted to slots for younger children; 3) On-going issues that the ACS child care eligibility process presents for families, and that lead to underutilization of existing programs, and that ultimately impact upon parental choice - leading to the selection of informal child care arrangements instead of high quality licensed child care programs.

Keep high quality, affordable, and accessible child care for working families by sustaining ACS center-based funding and through conversion of classrooms vacated by 5 year-olds for use by younger children.

1. The transition of 5 year-olds from ACS child care programs to DOE Kindergartens with OST after-school programs should not adversely impact access to high-quality child care for working families. While we support the plan to move 5 year-olds in ACS child care centers into public school Kindergartens with licensed after-school programs, it is important to make sure that families have access to such programs in September, 2009. If they do not, ACS should allow existing child care programs to present transition plans, which would allow their programs to serve 5 year-olds for at least one more school-year, while the local public school and OST funded programs are realigned with respect to community need. We were pleased to learn that DYCD is working closely with ACS on this transition, and that a joint ACS/DYCD letter will be going out soon outlining plans. DYCD officials anticipate that of the existing 37,000 OST slots, more that 6,000 will be Kindergarten slots. On this issue, we offer the following recommendations:
   • ACS should propose a “one year grace period” transition plan, mainly for families that may not be able to find or obtain a Kindergarten slot with an after-school program in their neighborhood. This would allow centers to retain staff that may otherwise be layed off - since many centers are already under-enrolled - and may not be able to readily offset the loss of 5 year-old classrooms through the recruitment of sufficient numbers of three and four year-olds by September, 2009. On a related point, if NYC DOE must resort to busing 5-year-olds out of their neighborhoods to other schools in order to secure a Kindergarten seat with an after-school program, this is not what most parents would want, and it may be detrimental to the children themselves. Such situations also break-down parent involvement in these schools - especially when older siblings may be in the local neighborhood school. A one year “grace period would allow more time for restructuring, and could prevent more busing of 5-year-olds to other neighborhoods.
   • To make space for more Kindergarten classrooms in public schools that don’t have additional space, NYC DOE and ACS should consider a plan that would transfer Universal Pre-K classrooms out of those public schools and into nearby community-based ACS child care centers.
   • It is important that as we move 5 year-olds out of child care centers, we do not threaten the stock and viability of ACS funded child care facilities. One strategy will be to utilize more classrooms for two year-olds, and through conversion (where licensing permits) of more of these sites to allow for the care for younger infants and toddlers. The expansion of UPK has allowed more parents to enroll their children, 4 and 5 years of age, into public schools, leaving space in day care centers for vitally-needed services to toddler-age children. However, the viability of these ACS direct lease and sponsor-leased centers is threatened due to these new program options and changing enrollment patterns. Since the cost of infant and toddler care is higher, (due to smaller class sizes and higher child/teacher ratios), more funds will be needed for such an expansion.
   • The ACS plan that seeks to reduce child care budgets for programs that have a contract to provide UPK in their child care and/or Head Start program will have a devastating impact. For 4 year-old children, the State DOE Pre-K programs have been the only major new early childhood expansion initiative - and to implement the program in accordance with its purpose, each child care UPK program must have three teachers in each classroom. We urge New York City and New York State to leverage new funding - which is now available under the expansion of Title I - to create a blended UPK-child care and Head start full-day program funding model that will continue to support and strengthen the staffing and curricula of 4 year-old UPK classrooms within existing child care and Head Start centers operated by community-based organizations (CBOs). The ACS cost allocation plan as it stands will threaten the viability of these blended funding programs.
   • A comprehensive state plan to revamp early childhood blended funding streams is needed. New York City currently serves only 27 percent of the low-income children eligible for ACS child care and Head Start programs, and the number of children in regulated, subsidized center-based child care programs has not significantly increased in the past nine years. There has been no ACS contracted center-based expansion since 2000 (ACS Expansion VII). During this same period, both state and city matches to the Child Care Block Grant federal funds were drastically reduced - the city’s budget was decreased by 31% and the state’s by 94%.
   • We urge state officials to work towards the development of legislation that will help to create more 0-5 programs in Community School settings (serving parents with children from birth to age 5). The new federal funding for Early Head Start and Head Start could also be effectively utilized in elementary school settings with available space in underserved areas – helping to fund the creation more of these model programs.
2. On-going obstacles that the ACS child care eligibility process presents for families, and that leads to the underutilization of existing programs, ultimately impact upon parental choice, and result in the selection of informal child care arrangements instead of high quality licensed child care programs.
   • Rescind the state regulation that requires that single parents must pursue court ordered child support as a condition for receiving subsidized ACS child care. This rule has become a deterrent for the enrollment of eligible children in regulated child care programs. Programs in New York City estimate that the percentage of applicants that have been lost over the past several years range from 38% to 75%. While we strongly support helping single parents to obtain child care support orders – failure to do so should not mean punishment by exclusion from quality child care programs. Publicly funded Head Start and Pre-K programs do not have to comply with this enrollment requirement. The unintended consequence of this regulation hurts families, as well as the high quality licensed child care programs their children very much need.
   • Reconsider the ACS plan to retrench the child care eligibility staff that certify families for child care. While many centers have staff that can do this enrollment, there still needs to be an ACS staff member who gives final approval. Let’s make sure we do not create any more barriers with respect to the enrollment of eligible families in our subsidized child care system.
   • As our child care infrastructure gets increasingly destabilized, informal child care arrangements have continued to mushroom - in 2007 there were 32,439 children in license exempt settings. We should acknowledge a fact: that the inability of low-income families to access subsidized child care should not be mistaken for an absence of need. The number of children enrolled in care that is supported by TANF funding has been steadily growing for the past decade, yet children in care supported by TANF are three times more likely to be in “license exempt” care.1 License exempt providers must meet only minimal standards.
   • More support, training and monitoring are needed. In NYC, where over 32,000 children are in “license exempt” care situations funded by child care subsidies, a marshalling of resources is needed to improve the quality of care, and to require on-going monitoring to assure the basic health and safety of children. A pilot project that has been launched by the state – and that is being developed in the Bronx, will begin to set the stage for the improvement of this growing “unlicensed” underground child care system. We also support the OCFS plan to institute the “Quality Stars Rating System” for all child care centers in New York State.

We look forward to hearing about the recommendations you make as a result of these hearings and to the changes in policy and practice that you will help initiate. Thank you for extending an invitation to the child care provider community for input and for your leadership on this issue. The Children’s Aid Society is ready to help with planning as the process moves forward.

1 2008 Primer - Key Facts About Early Care and Education in New York City, published by Child Care Inc., 2008, page 14.