Day-Care Unions, Council Protest Planned Closings; ACS Denies Cutbacks Will Hurt

Members of District Council 1707, City Council Members and a horde of chanting children gathered at City Hall Dec. 9 to protest the possible closing of 14 day-care centers in the city after the Administration for Children's Services announced plans to reduce their funding dramatically.

The Chief-Leader/Adrienne Haywood James SAYS CUTS WILL HARM CITY: District Council 1707 President Kim Medina tells crowd outside City Hall that plans to discontinue funding to day-care centers that are well below full enrollment will be counterproductive because they offer a lifeline to working parents.

Squeezed Out of Existence?

"This would literally threaten dozens of child-care centers in this city, in the communities that need them most," said Council Member Bill de Blasio of Brooklyn, who organized the protest with DC 1707. "They're low-income community centers, helping struggling families who need child-care so they can maintain self-sufficiency."

ACS announced the cuts in November as part of its effort to close a $62-million budget gap. Beginning in January, it will stop payment to child-care classrooms at 14 contracted centers with 15 or more vacancies. Although this does not mean for certain that they will close, the loss of funding could be crippling.

"The Mayor wants to slash day-care centers and replace them with nothing more than inadequate words," said DC 1707 President Kim Medina. "I'm the parent of two children of my own. I know what day care and after-school does for me, and I'm out there fighting for them, and I need to fight for parents who need a voice also. Working parents and children need public day care."

DC 1707 is proposing an alternative plan that will keep the centers open, saying that ACS's "Project Full Enrollment," which awards funds on the basis of enrollment and attendance, is flawed. The union's model says that fixed costs of centers, such as rent, salary, benefits and pensions, should be fully funded no matter what, and that non-fixed costs such as supplies and materials should be based on enrollment alone, not attendance.

"These are programs that we need to keep our communities alive," said Ms. Medina. "We will die without the day-care centers and their after-school programs, where our children are taken care of ... If it wasn't for these day-care centers, this city wouldn't be able to run, because parents wouldn't be able to work."

Denies Kids Will Be Deprived

ACS Director of Communications Sharman Stein said that under its plan, "no children will lose services," and that the cuts being made were "leveraging all available city resources and eliminating waste." She estimated that 7,500 city child-care slots would have to be cut to close the budget gap, and that the Project Full Enrollment method was a far better solution.

She also stressed that 14 centers were losing funds, rather than the 21 that DC 1707 and Mr. De Blasio claimed at the rally. "Though 21 programs were originally identified as having chronic and severe under-enrollment ... Children's Services continued to work with the programs to verify enrollment and eligibility information. This effort brought the number back of programs down," she said.

Ms. Stein said that although ACS funds would be withdrawn, the centers could still stay open. "These programs have several options," she said. "Scale back operations, recruit private-pay families, or to merge with another program. If a center does decide to close, ACS will ensure that children at those sites will continue to receive child care at another ACS-funded facility, or through a voucher. No child currently being served will lose care."

'Invest in the Children'

Council of School Supervisors and Administrators First Vice President Randi Herman, who represents the directors and assistant directors of the centers, also spoke at the rally. "We cannot allow budget cuts to reduce us to trading children for dollars," she said. "We understand budget cuts, we understand the need to spend wisely. But spending wisely also means making investments that are going to pay off later. Right now the best investment the city can make in the future of its economy is the investment in the children you see here today."

Ms. Herman proposed that the DOE help keep the centers open, rather than taking on the burden of an influx of children from closed centers. "Leave the children where they are; the DOE can fund them where they are," she said. "The Teachers can come from the DOE and at 3:00 they're still at the center. They don't need to be taken anywhere else, they don't need to be picked up and brought anywhere else and they're safe in a positive program."

District Council 37 Assistant Director of Research Moira Dolan also pledged her union's support at the rally. "Our members work at John St. processing the papers and the payments that make these centers run; we know that ACS is trying to starve off the centers," she said. "So we stand with you in trying to make this work. And our members use these centers. If our members don't have day care, they can't go to work."

Questions ACS Methods

Mr. De Blasio, who chairs the Council's General Welfare Committee, said he distrusted ACS's methods of deciding which centers get cut. "ACS has a record of moving to reduce capacity in individual day-care centers because of low enrollment, although its system for tracking enrollment and attendance is insufficient, and there are long wait lists of families in need of child-care who are unaware of vacancies," he explained in a statement.

A day-care worker at the rally said she didn't think that DOE employees, who will receive up to 3,500 kindergarten-age children from ACS under its budget proposal, could handle the job that she does. "I went to work today, I cleaned up vomit because a child was sick, I cleaned that up," said Nebraska Campbell, an Assistant Teacher at a center in Brownsville, Brooklyn. "I had to wash out underwear because a little girl didn't have a change of clothes, so I washed them out, put them on the radiator to dry so later she'd have clean clothes to put on. Tell me what public school Teacher's going to do that?"