Nora Moran testifies on 2K expansion and provider needs

Hi, my name is Nora Moran.

I'm the Director of Policy and Advocacy at United Neighborhood Houses.

Our members are New York City settlement houses who serve over 8,000 children in early childhood programs each year and have been providing child care services for almost a century in this city.

Our written testimony is a lot more detailed, but wanted to say a couple things.

Overall, I think the 2K expansion has been desperately needed.

We hear time and time again just how crushing child care costs are for families.

Aging down to two-year-olds is also really positive for settlement houses who strive to create that continuity of care.

They want to make sure that if they're serving a child at three, they can work with them at age four, age five.

And so 2K is going to let them do that.

It's also, I just want to say, extremely positive that the default for this program is a full day, full year.

We hear time and time again about how parents at six hours and 20 minutes, our members can sometimes struggle to fill those seats because that's not the hours of care that families need.

And it's not in our members'mission to charge families for care.

They're nonprofits.

That's not what they do.

And we also know that we can't waste this moment as an opportunity to reform the system for 2K, but also for 3K and pre-K.

That infrastructure is really closely linked.

And when we're fixing things for 2K, we're going to improve the whole system, and that's good for everybody.

So some specifics about what that reform looks like.

We all know these things.

It's not surprising, right?

Pay parity, specifically for those center-based providers.

with their DOE, New York City Public School counterparts, as well as significantly increased wages for family child care providers, taking into account their longevity and work experience.

CUNY PDI is a great pay scale to start getting us toward that.

We want the city and the state to start embracing and adopting and funding that.

Second is informing staffing at New York City Public Schools.

We know that the contracting and payment delays happen because there's not enough staff on the city's end to process that.

That's going to make or break this program's success.

Reimbursing for the true cost of care.

UNH recently released a report that showed that there's about a $12,000 gap between what we think a program should be funded, what it actually is.

The next RFP is going to be a key chance to reform that.

And finally, making sure we're striving toward quality.

It was great to hear about how professional development is being taken into account.

Two-year-olds different than a three-year-old is different than a four-year-old and making sure that we're providing the coaching and training for staff to serve two-year-olds in the most developmentally appropriate way.

Thank you.

Thank you, Nora.