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With Child Care Centers in Crisis, New York Pledges to Speed Payments

New York|With Child Care Centers in Crisis, New York Pledges to Speed Payments

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/03/nyregion/child-care-funding-nyc.html

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Child care providers and parents have grown frustrated over millions of dollars in delayed payments, and one major center is closing.

Some New York City child care centers waited months to be paid by the city, adding strain to an already precarious industry and forcing at least one network of centers to close.Credit…Laylah Amatullah Barrayn for The New York Times

Nov. 3, 2022

Following complaints from New York City child care providers that delays in city payments nearly forced some to close down, school officials announced Thursday that organizations who work to properly file invoices will receive at least 75 percent of their contract for the fiscal year ending in June, even if enrollment was lower than expected.

The city and nation were already facing an acute child care crisis, after the pandemic decimated the child care business and as a competitive labor market drew away workers. For months, child care providers have complained that the city was compounding the strain on the industry by not paying them on time or at all for publicly funded prekindergarten and 3-K programs.

Now, the schools chancellor, David C. Banks, said in an interview and at a Thursday news conference that he would deploy a “rapid response team” to child care centers to sort out payment issues, and work with providers to get invoices in.

“I hear them, I see them, I feel them, and I’m doing everything I can to come to their aid,” Mr. Banks said in the interview. “We need them desperately. I don’t want to see any of these groups go out of business.”

Dan Weisberg, the first deputy schools chancellor, added on Thursday that officials would be “doing a sprint over the next several weeks” to resolve all payment issues from the last fiscal year.

Child care providers have been raising the alarm that they are not being paid by the city for prekindergarten and 3-K services for months. At least one major provider, Sheltering Arms, which serves roughly 400 children across six preschool sites in the Bronx, Queens and Manhattan, is shutting down next month.

As centers have alerted parents about their uncertain future, parents have worried about losing the free city preschool services that they rely on. Some City Council members have also criticized staffing changes at the city’s Division of Early Childhood Education, which has lost more than 100 workers this year.

Sasha Maslouski, the operator of Snapdragon Place, a home-based preschool in central Brooklyn that joined the city’s 3-K program this year, said “the whole experience has been very difficult, very nerve wracking, very unstable and a huge disappointment.”

She expected to receive a check before the school year began in September to help cover rent, food, payroll and supplies. It did not come until the end of October, and Ms. Maslouski had to spend $60,000 to keep the program running.

“I feel like we’ve been disregarded,” she added. “We should not have to scream, yell and protest to get paid.”

Mr. Banks blamed the payment problems on the administration of Bill de Blasio and said that schools officials had failed to create a simple payment system, instead focusing on quickly expanding 3-K spots, even though many of the current spots are not filled.

“That is the reality we inherited — a deeply flawed system that we have been working to uncover and fix,” Mr. Banks said.

One of Mr. de Blasio’s signature policy achievements was free universal prekindergarten for 4-year-olds. He followed this by expanding it to 3-year-olds and pledged to make 3-K universal by 2023, by offering 60,000 spots. But his successor, Mayor Eric Adams, is less committed to making 3-K universal by next school year.

Josh Wallack, a deputy schools chancellor under Mr. de Blasio who oversaw universal prekindergarten, has defended the previous administration’s approach. He said that the payment system had worked for years, and the Adams administration has had 10 months to address any problems.

“The workers in these centers carried our children through a pandemic — literally,” Mr. Wallack said on Twitter last month. “Until each one of them has been paid, this is an emergency — not only for them, but for all of us.”

The city owes child care providers about $140 million for the fiscal year that ended in June, school officials said. About $120 million of that money was delayed because invoices were not submitted by providers, and about 480 child care centers are having difficulty submitting invoices.

At the same time, some centers have fewer children enrolled than they anticipated. The city set aside funding for about 55,000 seats for 3-K, but centers filled only about 38,000 this year, school officials said. If a provider signs a contract to serve 50 students but only enrolls 15, it must adjust their budget, and will be paid less than expected.

Elizabeth McCarthy, chief executive officer at Sheltering Arms, said that the de Blasio administration told her that if her preschools struggled to fill classes during the pandemic they would not incur heavy penalties. But current school officials agreed only to reimburse roughly 75 percent of the spending from last year, about $2 million on the six contracts, which included fixed costs like rent.

“If we hadn’t been around during Covid, many of these families would have struggled even more,” she said. “Thinking about not being part of the neighborhood, and part of the support system for families who very much live on the margin, it’s really heartbreaking.”

More than 100 Sheltering Arms workers could lose their jobs, though some are expected to remain in the organization, which runs many other programs.

Mr. Weisberg said Thursday that the current administration had to weigh several concerns.

“We’re not saying that this is going to give everybody, every dollar they might want,” Mr. Weisberg said. “But we think that setting this 75 percent floor is going to stabilize the sector, and give most providers what they really need in order to make ends meet.”

The announcement on Thursday comes two weeks after Simone Hawkins, a top official in the agency’s early childhood division who managed payments to contracted preschools, left the Education Department. Ms. Hawkins did not return requests for comment, and Mr. Banks said that she left for “personal reasons.”

At a City Council hearing last month that focused heavily on late payments to providers, Ms. Hawkins and Kara Ahmed, the deputy chancellor of early childhood education, said that more than $930 million had been paid out in reimbursements to providers for last school year.

Mr. Weisberg said that the new rapid response team — which will also help providers get up-to-date on invoices for the current fiscal year — would include 20 to 25 current staffers from the Education Department and that City Hall would provide additional staffers.

Mr. Banks said that he had spoken to Mr. Adams about the payment delays, and they were both committed to fixing the problem.

“This is not an issue of do we have the dollars,” Mr. Banks said. “The dollars have been budgeted. We have the dollars.”

Some operators who have not received anticipated reimbursements have launched GoFundMe campaigns or applied for personal loans to help cover expenses.

Fela Barclift, the founder of Little Sun People, which has been in Brooklyn for more than four decades, said the payment system was “horrendous.” Ms. Barclift said her organization did not receive payments from the department between August 2021 and March 2022, because the building they operated had not received occupancy approval from the city. She said she had to borrow more than $55,000 from her mother and cut teachers’ hours last school year as a result.

“We don’t have endowments or huge dollar budgets that we can lean on while we wait for these issues to be resolved,” she said. “We’re literally struggling every single day to try to make sure we meet payroll.”

Emma G. Fitzsimmons is the City Hall bureau chief, covering politics in New York City. She previously covered the transit beat and breaking news. @emmagf

Troy Closson is a reporter on the Metro desk covering education in New York City. @troy_closson

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 24 of the New York edition with the headline: City Pledges to Get Delayed Payments to Child Care Centers. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

SDPD officers welcome low-cost, late-night daycare

NewsMaking It In San Diego

The police union has a plan for families.

By:
Jennifer Kastner

Posted at 11:23 AM, Jul 29, 2019

and last updated 2019-07-29 21:25:39-04

SAN DIEGO (KGTV) – San Diego could become the first local police department to provide a low-cost, late-night daycare facility for officers’ kids. The San Diego Police Officers Association (SDPOA) has a new plan to help struggling offers who are trying to make it in San Diego.

Kelly Stinnette has two full-time jobs. She’s a mother to her toddler, Landon, and she’s a detective with San Diego Police Department’s Sex Crimes Unit. At times, she can be on-call for 24-hour periods.

“It’s a lot of anxiety and stress because you’re thinking [that when] somebody’s called the police [it] could be the worst day of their life and I need to be there 100% for them but still taking care of my son,” she tells 10News.

To complicate matters, her husband is an SDPD SWAT officer.

“With his team, they basically need to be able to respond at anytime, anywhere in the City of San Diego,” says Det. Stinnette.

Parenting gets difficult when both she and her husband have to rush to work but need someone to watch Landon. “We basically have to have friends or family on backup,” she adds.

“There’s obviously an overwhelming need,” says Det. Jack Schaeffer with the San Diego Police Officers Association. He’s referring to the need for a special daycare for officers’ kids. He’s now working to make it a reality.

“Our goal is to basically cut the cost in half or better for our members while staying open for 20 hours a day,” he tells 10News.

According to a report from childcareaware.org, the cost of infant care in California averages more than $16,000 a year.

Det. Schaeffer adds, “Some of our members are spending around $3,000 a month to have their kids watched if they have two or three kids.”

The idea is that a low-cost daycare for officers’ kids would attract more applicants in a department that’s faced a shortage of officers.

“It not only does good things for recruiting, but for our mental wellness,” says Det. Stinnette.

Det. Schaeffer’s team is building the program from scratch. Initially, it’ll only be available to San Diego police officers who are members of the SDPOA. “This is going to be the first big city that I know of that’ll have something like this,” adds Det. Schaeffer.

A location for the daycare has not been finalized.