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Childcare providers across New York City say they’re drowning in unpaid bills and poor wages, even as Mayor Zohran Mamdani promises to dramatically expand the system they prop up.
Providers say money rarely arrives on time and that structural problems with 3-K and pre-K will only worsen if a new 2-K program — free, full-day childcare for all two-year-olds by 2030 — launches before they are addressed. The stakes are high for the Mamdani administration, which is betting that expanding childcare will ease costs for lower income families and keep more parents, particularly women, in the workforce.
New York City is also launching a free childcare pilot program for municipal workers, which offers year-round care for children aged six weeks to three years, with about 40 slots available starting April 30.
“How do you put out a new program when the existing 3-K [and] pre-K is completely broken?” asked Lori Cangiolose, an early childcare advocate based on Staten Island and the founder of the 5-Borough NYCEEC Coalition, a group of about 520 advocates in the childcare space. “We need to reform that and fix it before you can put out a new program.”
Research has shown that access to affordable early childcare produces better outcomes for children and families: parents work more, earn more and are less likely to leave jobs to take caregiving roles.
But the providers the city depends on to deliver that care say the system is already strained past its limits.
Much of New York City’s early childhood system runs not through public schools, but through community-based organizations (CBOs), which are neighborhood nonprofits that partner with the city to give free early childhood programs.
CBOs often offer longer hours and care during the summer that traditional public schools don’t, which makes them important for working families.
CBOs house about 74 percent of 3-K seats and roughly 55 percent of pre-K seats citywide, according to a New York City Public School (NYCPS) representative. The city contracts with over 1,000 of these organizations and 48 Family Child Care Networks to give services from birth-to-five.
Governor Kathy Hochul committed $1.2 billion in state funding to help this free childcare initiative, with $73 million dedicated specifically to the first year of 2-K.
In terms of how the Department of Education plans to expand capacity, a 2024-2025 analysis identified 535 under-used school buildings with at least 150 to 300 empty seats.
The city has established seat targets for Fall 2026 and Fall 2027 and will continue expanding as system capacity increases, the NYCPS representative said. But for CBOs, partnering with the DOE means agreeing to a payment model that Cangiolose and others describe as chronically late and very difficult to deal with.
Under a fixed annual contract rate, providers get roughly 30 percent upfront to cover the first few months of operation. After that, they pay all expenses out of pocket and submit monthly invoices and wait, sometimes 15 to 20 days to be reimbursed.
Olena Olson, educational director of Let’s Play and Learn in Brooklyn, said the very first year her center partnered with the DOE was difficult.
“We didn’t get our advance payment until the end of October or beginning of November,” she said. “The whole first year in terms of payment was… not consistent. You don’t know when the money is going to come through.”
The delays compound over time, she said.
“I’m getting the last month’s money at the end of the current month,” Olson added. “And that is a good case scenario.”
Payment delays have been a longstanding concern. The City Council held a hearing on the issue in 2022 and later secured an agreement with the former mayor's office to track payment progress. Council Member Jennifer Gutiérrez turned that effort into law earlier this year, requiring the DOE to report quarterly on invoices.
According to a spokesperson for Gutiérrez and Gutiérrez herself, the bulk of payment delays stem from incomplete paperwork, unregistered contracts or missing documents on the providers' end, rather than from the DOE.
“We see that there [are instances] where [providers] have maybe not submitted their invoices … the DOE can only reimburse when everything is all in,” she said.
When the money is late, providers don’t stop paying staff or turning on the lights. Olson said her private 2-K classroom, which families pay for, helps make up for the money gap.
“When DOE is late with their payments, at least that classroom covers expenses, but it can’t cover expenses for the whole place. We are flying through paper towels, box tissues,” she said. “You’re not allowed to be asking your families to be bringing anything.”
These concerns were raised ahead of an oversight hearing on early childhood workers, held Wednesday, before the City Council’s Subcommittee on Early Childhood Education and the Committee on Higher Education and Workforce Development.
Members debated a bill to create a teacher pipeline through a CUNY apprenticeship program. A DOE official could not say exactly how many teachers the city needs, but a CUNY representative who testified asked the council for $3 million over three years to fund 200 apprentices.
“Early childhood educators are the cornerstone of New York City and without them, families cannot continue to justify raising their children in the city,” said Council Member Julie Won.
Gutiérrez said she was pleased with how Wednesday's hearing went and that although provider conditions aren’t perfect, they had significantly improved since the Council first took up the issue three years ago.
“We cannot expect people to do this work without getting paid, there's no way,” she said.
In March, Mayor Mamdani met with providers on Staten Island in March to listen and discuss the longstanding challenges they've faced.
“For too long, child care providers have carried this city on their backs while facing deep, structural inequities in how they're compensated and supported. That has to change,” City Hall deputy press secretary Jenna Lyle said in a statement.
Maria Mavrides, a professor of early childhood education at Hunter College and former director of an early childhood center, said that with its current childcare expansion, the city risks repeating a mistake it made a decade ago.
When New York expanded universal pre-K in 2014, she said, CBOs received roughly 60 percent of the new seats, but the city did not offer their teachers equal pay, even as it raised certification requirements across the board.
“They neglected to provide equal salary for those teachers working in [CBOs] and public school centers with exactly the same qualifications,” said Mavrides, whose research focuses on pay disparities at CBOs.
These concerns surfaced at a virtual town hall on March 31 hosted by the Family Child Care Providers chapter of the United Federation of Teachers union. Over 440 providers attended, where they questioned Simone Hawkins of the DOE and Emmy Liss of the Mayor’s Office of Child Care about the expansion.
Cangiolose and Olson both attended.
There, another issue emerged: to apply for universal 2-K seats, providers have to be affiliated with a network, but many independent providers say they cannot find networks willing to accept them. Frustrated attendees began dropping their contact information directly into the meeting chat, asking Liss to connect them to networks.
Neither Hawkins nor Liss answered questions about the 2-K rate structure in the meeting, leaving providers unsure whether their participation would be financially beneficial.
In addition to payment delays, CBO teachers expressed frustration with the lack of pay parity
Olson said one of her teachers, who is licensed with work experience, receives a salary of $68,900. If that teacher crosses over to a DOE school building, her starting salary would be about $70,000 with a Bachelor’s Degree and $80,000 with a Master’s Degree plus benefits.
Teachers in DOE buildings must be fully NYS-certified to start working, whereas teachers in CBOs can be hired without certification and work towards it over time.
Olson does not know if all of her four teachers will return in September.
“I have teachers who finished their master’s degree and are going through exams, and once they take the state exam and get licensed, there’s a big fat chance they’re going to say goodbye to me,” Olson said.
A teacher who stays at a CBO instead of moving to a DOE school forfeits over $2.2 million in salary and benefits over the course of a career, a 2023 analysis found.
“There’s no guarantee. There’s nothing I can promise them or give them,” she said. “At this point it’s just goodwill, faith and loyalty that’s keeping them there.”
Cangiolose’s daughter left her center for a DOE position.
“I don’t blame her,” Cangiolose said. “What’s very sad is this is a family business, and I can’t even offer her a job that the DOE does. She’s 27 years old, needs a pension, she needs medical [care], she needs a bigger salary. I can’t compete with that.”
Cangiolose’s coalition has been in contact with Liss, pressing for a cost of living adjustment. She has also written to President Trump about the coalition’s struggles.
Olson is also grappling with getting seat approvals. Her program was originally funded for 26 spots, then allowed to expand to 36, but the funding never increased to match. She said she’s been operating the larger program underfunded for two to three years.
“Financially, it’s a killer,” she said.
This year, she updated her license to accommodate more students and spent months asking the DEO to formally approve the additional seats.
The application period has since closed, and she still has no answer.
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