Joseph asks about CUNY partnership and apprenticeships

What role is CUNY's early childhood and teacher education program playing in the workforce?

Are there credential pathways, tuition support, apprenticeship for current assistants who want to become lead teacher?

You talked about that briefly.

But what does that partnership really look like?

As I'm the chair of the Higher Education Committee, I have not seen none of you come before me and ask, how can we partner with the council to make this happen?

Yeah, we are in very active conversation with many parts of CUNY, with the CUNY Professional Development Institute, with individual campuses who have early childhood programs, and looking at different models they already offer,

looking at how we can make those more affordable.

We know that fees can often be an issue for prospective students.

We are looking at ways we can offer coursework at different times of day, in different languages, in ways that better meet the needs of the prospective and current early childhood workforce.

We have already made a commitment to expand apprenticeships, and we will continue to look at that.

So I think this is something where in the next coming months, over the course of this next budget season, you will hear more from us.

But we did put $2.5 million into that pot to make sure that this is happening.

So we'd love to further do that.

Our CUNY students, student parents outreach in the 2K, because sometimes child care is a barrier why some moms don't go back to college or higher education.

Yes, and the city does partner with many of the CUNY child care programs to offer 3K, pre-K, and now 2K.

So that is a population that we absolutely work with.

When we were doing outreach in the month of June when applications were open, we did work with CUNY to get the word out to their students about the availability of 2K.

And the community.

Thank you.