Gutiérrez asks about family child care multilingual educators
Gutiérrez asks how the Mayor's Office will tap family child care providers, many of whom speak Spanish, to expand multilingual education. Liss and Phillips say family child care is central to 2K expansion and outreach is conducted in providers' languages.
Thank you.
I think we're almost done with the questions, and so I'm excited to hear from the public.
Just maybe I think just two more questions, and I think you touched on it on some of the family child care networks that the majority of them speak another language.
In some of these surveys, I see that Spanish, the majority of them are speaking Spanish, for example.
How will the mayor's office tap into this resource to provide 2K, 3K, and pre-K multilingual education in Spanish?
So as we expand.
And are we going to compensate these people for this extra?
Gift of exposure and immersion to other languages.
Yes.
So as we expand access to early care and education,
in the city, we see our family child care educators as absolutely essential to that expansion because we know it is a setting that families often choose and prefer, especially for their youngest children.
We know families often prefer family child care for a range of reasons, whether that's the intimacy of the program, the mixed age, the flexibility, and often it is for cultural and linguistic reasons.
We know many parents feel comfortable knowing their child is in an environment that looks and feels like their home, whether that's the language exposure.
The meals they're eating, or just the cultures and customs that are practiced in that program.
And so as we continue to expand access to 2K, family child care educators are an absolutely critical part of that.
We were thrilled this year with our first 2,000 2K seats to include a large number of family child care homes in that expansion.
And I'll turn to my colleagues, but we'll say that as we do that expansion work and as we do outreach to family child care educators to make sure they know about the opportunity to participate, it is critical.
And we have been doing this outreach always with translation services directly in the languages that we know family child care educators are speaking and by partnering with networks who
do themselves have staff who speak the languages of the family child care providers in their communities.
I agree.
I would just add on to that.
It is incredibly important to our strategy to make sure that family child care providers are a part of.
our early childhood system.
We know that that is their, you know, one of their many superpowers is being able to reflect the children in the communities around them.
It was a very large part of our 2K plans.
They are also offering 3K from their family child care homes.
So that will continue to be.
A significant part of our strategy as we move forward.
Thank you.
I think, I mean, I know folks in my community who intentionally will enroll their child in a family child care network because they want to expose their children to Spanish, for example.
And so I think we're all saying the words that say we value them, and I just hope that we can make tangible efforts to really
show them that and to include them in the further expansion process because I think they deserve to really feel that value.