A step toward universal child care?

New York has taken another step toward creating a universal child care system, with Monroe County at the forefront.

Gov. Kathy Hochul has directed $20 million in state funding for the Monroe County Child Care Pilot Program, a three-year program that has a target of expanding coverage for an additional 1,000 children, age 0 to 3, regardless of income level or geographic location in the county. The state State Office of Children and Family Services announced some details for the program earlier this month at a presentation in Irondequoit.

While universal child care is well established in Nordic countries, movement toward it has been slower in the United States. Last year, New Mexico instituted a no-cost, no-barrier child care system.

Hochul has invested over $8 billion in child care since taking office five years ago. This year’s state budget increased funding for the Child Care Assistance Program by 40% to $3 billion. CCAP is the primary state program that helps low- and middle-income families pay part or all of their child care; subsidies are available to families with gross income up to and including 85% of the state median income for their household size. 

Hochul has set the 2028-2029 school year as her target for universal Pre-K for all four-year-olds, but the next step of free or low-cost early childhood education from infancy to three years old still remains on the horizon.

“It can be hard to imagine how we get there,” says DaMia Harris-Madden, commissioner of the state Office of Children and Family Services. “This is what keeps me up at night, trying to figure out what financial tools we need and what we have to do. But I will say that we are on a path.”

While additional details are yet to be shared, the Monroe County pilot program will deal with the provider side of the child care equation. The county will contract with OCFS-licensed child care providers who then file with the state agency for reimbursement. Plans call for applicants to be accepted in late fall or early winter and then start to provide services in 2027. 

The pilot also requires a $2 million funding match from the local county government.

Harris-Madden says Monroe County was selected for the pilot program, along with Broome and Dutchess counties, based on what she describes as an already proactive and robust approach toward child care.

“This investment continues that momentum. And this investment is not just about creating more child care, but about giving families the support they need to build stable, healthy, and successful lives,” Rochester Mayor Malik Evans says.

“It’s an incredible opportunity. We are excited for it and we have our eyes on the prize,” adds Thalia Wright, commissioner of the county Department of Human Services.

Pete Nabozny, policy director at the Children’s Agenda, says the investment is significant. However, he adds, the program rollout must be done correctly or it risks further emphasizing structural issues that have plagued the child care system for years.

“They need to put an emphasis on the selection of providers and have some equity considerations so that this is a program that lower-income families will be able to participate in,” he says. “I think there are ways you can maintain the universal design of the program but also have equity considerations built in.”

Rolling out the program

To achieve the universal part of universal child care, plans call for the pilot program to remove traditional barriers, typically related to income. Everyone would be eligible.

“There will be no means testing, no income requirement for the program; it will be truly universal,” Harris-Madden says.

While this is a positive step, Nabozny says, pitfalls in implementation could occur. Geographical location is one aspect that he believes needs to be carefully considered.

According to OFCS, 58% of census tracts within Monroe were categorized as child care deserts, with the most serious coverage gaps apparent in the western rural suburbs. (In comparison, Erie and Onondaga counties both had 64% of census tracts labeled child care deserts.)

“If (the pilot) is structured in such a way that providers who get selected are in the more affluent suburbs, the families that receive care through this program will probably likely be residents of those communities,” he says. 

In addition, Monroe County has a diverse mixture of child care options, which can be appropriate based on a family’s situation. These range from home-based family and group family child care options, with six to 12 slots, to larger day care centers, which can take as many as 100 children.

However, the infrastructure and resources for each of these provider types are not always equal. Smaller operations typically have capacity for grant writing, for example.

“One of the challenges would be if they make it a very cumbersome (request for proposal) process,” says Nabozny. “Intentional or not, a complicated process to get into the pilot will steer things toward the larger, more sophisticated providers.”

Adds Nabozny: “1,000 slots is a lot, but there’s about 4,500 or so infant/toddler seats in child care centers in Monroe County right now. So, it’s not like every program is going to be included. There’s amazing family child care providers, there’s amazing center-based programs; so there’s a need to make sure they’re all able to be included.”

Finally, the stability offered by this pilot program should also be studied, Nabozny says, including if it helps stabilize families who are at danger of losing child care due to being laid off or having a medical issue preventing them from working.

Children do best when they have consistency with child care, so he also supports those already enrolled with a provider to be included in the pilot. In addition, maintaining coverage even after three years is important. If the pilot allows for more coverage or workers, disruption could occur if it suddenly goes away.

“From the Children’s Agenda’s perspective, this would be a tragedy if it existed for three years and then disappeared,” says Nabozny. “Our goal is to make sure that it is so successful that it makes it impossible for it to end.”

“We are going to be looking at these programs very closely,” says Harris-Madden. “We are very curious to see how this is going to work, but we are very confident that this is the right place to carry this pilot out.”

Performance track record

As a specific example of Monroe County’s strong performance with child care, Harris-Madden cites its administration of CCAP.

When New York expanded eligibility for the program in 2022 and 2023, skyrocketing demand forced more than half of all counties to institute wait lists or shut down admissions as funding from regional block grants dried up. As of July, 12 counties have waiting lists, while 14 more are not open and without a waiting list.

Monroe County is not one of them. In fact, its 16.9% coverage rate of eligible children is in the top five. Last year, Monroe County had the most CCAP recipients (7,530 children) outside of New York City and had comparable numbers to Nassau County (7,327 children). 

“I think it is a huge, comprehensive testament to the work of Monroe County that you did not create wait lists,” Harris-Madden says. “Over the last four years, over 3,300 more children in Monroe County received child care subsidies. That’s about an 83% increase from 4,000 monthly to almost 7,500 children. So, again, we see Monroe as a great partner.”

In addition, she commends the county for its creativity in providing certain services, such as a 2024 program that made Electronic Benefit Transfer cards usable on public transit.

“These counties (Monroe, Broome, and Dutchess) have put forth the work. They have been the ones that have been building the ship even before it was supposed to be made available,” Harris-Madden says.

Wright herself credits a combination of factors for her department’s success including a knowledgeable staff, a wide range of experiences across communities in New York, and strong relationships between the city and county governments as well as at the state level.

While Nabozny praises much of the work done by Monroe County, he also observes that there is a reason for the county’s strong performance. He says the funding structure for CCAP is determined by a county’s spending on the program in the previous year. The intention of this system, which was created in the 1990s, was to incentivize local governments to put money toward the program.

“Monroe County, to its credit, in a sort of a bipartisan way, has always maintained a pretty high spending level in the program,” Nabozny says. “They never decided, ‘Oh, we’re going to save the county money this year by cutting the budget in such a way that we’re going to end up losing state funding.’ Whereas other counties have done that over various periods of time. They closed enrollment too long and spending dropped to a certain level, and then it took a while to recover.”

As a result, state funding to counties varies widely. Monroe County’s $108.6 million in CCAP funding this year is second only to Nassau County’s $163.4 million. By contrast, Erie County received $83.6 million. Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz announced earlier this year that the country had a projected deficit in the state’s child care program of $23 million, which resulted in instituting a CCAP waitlist.

“The cost of care is lower here than in Nassau County. So, we can support more families in the program than other communities can,” says Nabozny. “I mean, we’re very thankful we’re getting an increase as enrollment continues to rise, but there were unspent dollars here in Monroe and (in) Nassau County, while Erie and Suffolk County had a wait list. So, you could serve more children overall.”

He noted that state Assemblymember Sarah Clark supports a centralized funding model instead of the current regional block grant system and has sponsored a bill that instead would have the Office of Children and Family Services administer such funds.

A variety of other bills she has sponsored, including one that passed last month standardizing age classifications at child care providers, seek to address the issue from both the family and provider perspective.

“I’ll steal a line from (Clark) here, but when people ask her, ‘What’s the one thing we need to do with child care to make the system work better?’ She’ll answer, ‘There’s not.’ That’s part of the problem, we need to balance a bunch of competing things,” Nabozny says.

Capacity gap

New York’s first focus was on expanding eligibility, an effort that has expanded CCAP’s reach by 150%.

“There’s 170,000 children right now that are benefiting from that program, up from about 60,000 at the height of the pandemic. So, there’s real success there,” Nabozny says.

System capacity still remains an issue, however. For example, while New Mexico’s universal child care system has been heralded for the progress it has made with eligibility and access, actually finding care can be difficult.

“Parents are going through and getting approved, but then the only place they can find for their child is an hour and a half away,” he says.

This is true for Monroe County too. While CCAP does not have a wait list here, a sizable capacity gap exists. As of January, there were 24,981 available child care slots in the county while there were 45,750 children under age 6.

The Monroe County Child Care Pilot Program is designed to be a supply-side solution. However, Nabozny believes underlying causes of the gap must be addressed.

One is workforce shortages and turnover. The Children’s Agenda has pointed to low wages as the key part of this problem. In the Finger Lakes region, the average child care worker earnings are $16.94 an hour or $34,503 annually. The organization says 97.4% of jobs in the region pay more, with Nabozny citing an anecdote of running into a former child care worker at Chipotle, where she says she takes home more income. 

Early intervention workers, which include speech-language pathologists, physical therapists, and occupational therapists, are similarly facing shortages. This has delayed delivery of therapies, which can help children with developmental delays and disabilities to meet proficiency standards and compound savings in the K-12 system.

Keeping in line with statewide trends, from 2019 to 2024, the number of EI workers in Monroe County has dropped by 25% for speech language and 15% for physical therapy. Reimbursement rates for EI workers have not kept pace with inflation, with the Children’s Agenda saying that most providers earn less than when the program began in 1994.

Older universal child care systems have dealt with the problem in creative ways. Denmark has relatively low capacity for infant (0 to 1 year old) providers, instead offering much more in family leave.

“Infant care is the most expensive type of care. It’s incredibly expensive for providers to offer because of the necessarily low child to adult ratios,” says Nabozny. “If you go and talk to any child care provider, they will most likely tell you that they’d lose money on infant care, but they’re providing it because maybe of a commitment to it or they see it as a loss leader.

“The difference in approaching that is in a place like Denmark, as they said, ‘Well, we’re not going to try to cover the cost of that. We’re going to support a year-long paid family leave program.’ Whereas in New York it is 12 weeks.”

Jacob Schermerhorn is a Rochester Beacon contributing writer and data journalist.

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