Chair Gutiérrez asks about district seat allocation and Staten Island expansion
Gutiérrez asks how seats were allocated among districts and about Staten Island expansion. Liss explains allocation based on demand and capacity, and Staten Island will be included in 2027 expansion.
My next series of questions.
Sorry.
Can you, I think you shared at the top the kind of the consideration for the five districts.
I'm clear on the Staten Island, although I may re-ask the question, but can you give us a little bit more on how you all calculated need or priority in these five school districts?
We looked at economic need based on the Economic Need Index, which is the measure that New York City Public Schools uses to look at a kind of composite measure of child poverty in each area.
We also looked at where communities did and did not already have access to free or subsidized care for toddlers, recognizing that in some communities families did already have some access and in others the gap was much more significant.
Those were the only...
That was how we looked at economic need as a factor.
And then we also looked closely at provider readiness because, again, given the short timeline for expansion, we wanted to go to communities where we felt there would be sufficient already licensed child care capacity to meet demand.
It was not a perfect science.
I think there are, you know, there were many ways we could have gone about this, but...
We need to start somewhere with the goal of then obviously expanding as quickly as we can to more and more communities.
And can you share, would you be able to share how many seats were offered in each district?
I'm just trying to figure out how you all made that difficult decision considering there were 5,700 applicants of how many seats would be allotted to these particular school districts.
Yeah.
The seat allotment by...
By district was based on our anticipation of demand in each of those districts, looking at the number of two-year-olds, just how many kids were born in 2024, and other data we have on the number of two-year-olds.
We also looked at historic application and enrollment patterns in 3K and pre-K in each of the communities, and then again looked at provider capacity.
So it was not an even split between the five districts.
These districts are of a very different sort of physical and population scale from each other.
District 23 is significantly smaller, for example, than the other four districts that we expanded to just physically.
So the number of seats by district was based on that assessment of the anticipations.
demand and capacity.