30,000 spots to open Sept. 21 for child care

The city’s free child-care program for youngsters who need supervision during remote learning will open with 30,000 slots Sept. 21, officials said Tuesday.

The program will scale up to 100,000 slots by December, Mayor de Blasio announced.

“Parents have been stretched so thin trying to be teachers and breadwinners simultaneously. They need relief,” de Blasio said at a press conference.

The 30,000 capacity to start the school year is lower than officials initially projected. Hizzoner attributed the gap to the difficulty of “starting something from scratch.”

“It just did not exist before. It had to be created and all those agencies … have been hard at work making it happen,” he said.

The child-care sites will be in community centers and cultural institutions, and include outdoor spaces where possible. Kids of essential workers and families living in homeless shelters or public housing will get first crack at signing up.

The 30,000 initial slots will serve about 70% of the families who fall into one of the priority categories, de Blasio said.

Officials said they’ll do their best to assign kids from the same school or class to the same child-care site to cut down on the number of new people to which each child will be exposed.

If a COVID-19 case is confirmed at a “Learning Bridge” site, the program will follow the same testing and tracing guidelines as the city schools.

The programs are available to kids from preschool to eighth grade. The city initially pledged to offer 70,000 seats by October, and expand to the full 100,000 by December.

Any family that already expressed interest in the Education Department’s initial survey will be sent enrollment information, and new families can sign up on the agency’s website.