New York wants universal child care, and this fall it plans to push to put every kid in a seat. To staff that, the city would have to roughly double an early childhood workforce that already runs between 33,000 and 40,000 people. The bill that Williamsburg and Bushwick Council Member Jennifer Gutiérrez actually moved to ease the crunch does several things. Raising the pay of the people already doing the job is not one of them.
On April 16, Gutiérrez, who chairs the Council’s Subcommittee on Early Childhood Education, introduced Int 0820-2026, a bill to set up a child care workforce grant and services program. The design is narrow. It funds loans and grants for people who have no child care experience to complete the schooling the job requires, in exchange for a pledge to work in city child care for at least five years. It is a recruitment pipeline, pointed at people who are not in the field yet.
The people who are in the field are the problem the city keeps naming and not solving. At Gutiérrez’s own April hearing, the Council’s summary called pay parity “the largest unresolved issue” and a key factor affecting retention. The median wage for a New York City child care worker is $38,147, according to the Citizens’ Committee for Children, against an average of $64,747 for other jobs. By the group’s count that workforce is about 96 percent women and roughly four in five women of color. Int 0820 leaves that $38,147 exactly where it found it.
The math is unforgiving. By turnover alone the city needs to recruit at least 5,000 new educators a year, and 52 percent of centers report new teachers leaving within five years. A CUNY apprenticeship pilot drew 400 applicants for 30 slots. So the front of the pipeline is already jammed with people who want in, and the leak is at the back, where the pay pushes them out. Recruiting harder into a job that pays $38,147 is bailing a boat without plugging the hole.
This lands on the exact blocks Gutiérrez represents. Council District 34 runs through Williamsburg, East Williamsburg, Bushwick and Ridgewood, where community providers staff DOE-contracted classrooms with the women earning that median. Double the enrollment without touching the wage and the local programs are the ones that hit the staffing shortages, the longer infant-care waitlists, and the pressure to raise private tuition on North Brooklyn parents.
Int 0820 is laid over in committee, which means it has not passed and the wage question is still open. The bill text, its sponsors, and the date of the next Subcommittee on Early Childhood Education hearing are public on the Council’s Legistar page, which is where a parent or a provider who wants pay parity written into the bill, not just a recruiting program bolted beside it, can say so on the record.
Featured image: Harrison Keely / CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
