Chair Gutiérrez asks about additional 2K seats and budget

Okay, during the initial round of offers, just offers, not enrollment to families for 2K, I believe DOE sent out a little over 2,100 offers to families.

Can...

Oh, is there, it is the council's understanding that beyond the 2000 and somewhat offers that were sent out in the first round, there are additional 2K seats for the current school year.

Can you all speak to those additional 2K seats?

So there were 2018 offers made on offer day, and we have continued to add 2K seats, particularly among family child care providers who were still in the process of affiliating with a network and so had not yet

come in by the time the application launched.

We will have those final seat count numbers as part of the enrollment reporting later this fall.

Okay.

And so those additional seats, because I think for the longest time we've been hearing, when the application process started, we were hearing 2K seats for 2K, right?

These are additional seats.

The $73 million that we discussed at the top, those cover those additional seats.

There were no additional dollars needed for these additional seats?

So there were no additional dollars needed, but the slight nuance is that we, in addition to the seats that we added for 2K, we had previously existing capacity for toddlers in some of these communities, seats that had been means tested, that had been paid for

by the child care block grant, or that seats that had been previously funded by our Head Start grant and had been converted to the city transitional dollars.

As part of expanding 2K, we looked at the existing two-year-old capacity that the city already had contracted in these districts and converted those from having been means tested to now being fully free as well.

And so that is how we have ended up with just above 2,000 seats.

The 2,000 that we had committed to is what we were able to create newly with the $73 million.

Okay, so the budget was still?

Yeah, no budget change.

Okay.