How red tape keeps parents from accessing programs designed to help
Difficulty of securing vouchers has been made worse by COVID
Kahandie Elliot does not give up easily. A mother of four children, she spent the past year studying to be a medical assistant. Last month, she qualified, completing her internship and passing a state exam.
But she could not conquer the maddening bureaucracy of New York’s subsidized child care system, a set of programs that are supposed to help low-income working families with affordable care for infants and toddlers but have struggled during the pandemic. Long waits, a confusing application process, pandemicrelated closures and funding cuts have stranded parents and threaten to close day care centers, operators and advocates say.
On paper, any families whose earnings fall below a low-income threshold set at the state and federal level are eligible for subsidized child care, either by using vouchers to enroll in private centers or home-based day care or by sending their children to a citycontracted day care center. In practice, many parents struggle to access help, a problem that has been exacerbated by the pandemic, just when people are poised to try to get back to work and the city is reeling from the economic blows of the COVID-19 crisis.
“The system has never worked. It marginalizes a specific class of people and sets a tone for the child’s educational journey. But the pandemic has magnified the problem,” said Lillian Rodriguez-Magliaro, a senior program director at the Child Center of NY, a center in Queens that serves low-income families.
Even before the pandemic, parents found the application process so befuddling that many visited public assistance offices for help. But during the shutdown, the city’s welfare agency, the Human Resources Administration, has closed the majority of its offices dedicated to voucher applications. The agency has directed people to apply online.
“If you want to speak to someone on the phone, you wait for hours,” said Elliot, 27, who enlisted her family to babysit while she trained. “I have two kids with medical needs and an infant who requires most of my time. I don’t have two hours to spend on hold.”
For years, underfunding of the system has meant that only a minority of eligible families could get vouchers. But this year, the budget for vouchers has shrunk even more to $477 million, down from about $513 million in 2020. Special funding for a program that uses city money to get children off voucher waitlists was slashed to about $31 million from $47 million. Unless they are receiving public assistance or child welfare services or are homeless, eligible families are directed to a waitlist.
At the same time, the pandemic has worsened a Catch-22 built into the system: With very few exceptions, only parents who are already working at least 20 hours a week or are actively job searching are eligible for subsidized care. But many low-income parents lost their jobs at the start of the pandemic or had to quit or reduce their hours when the Health Department closed most day care centers last April. That makes it hard for them to get back into the system, especially given funding cutbacks and a backlogged process to assess eligibility.
Between December 2019 and December 2020, the number of vouchers in use dropped to about 49,000 from nearly 66,000. Some parents have been reluctant to send their children back to day care because of COVID-19, but many more just cannot get vouchers.
The program’s financial and logistical troubles have affected not only parents but the child care centers that serve them.
Beanstalk Academy, a network of 15 day care centers, has hired a full-time employee to help parents navigate the system to get vouchers when they are available. “Enrollments were so low that we just couldn’t see a way to stay in business,” said David Handler, the director of enrollment at Beanstalk Academy. “I have a list of hundreds of parents waiting to get their children enrolled.”