Funding shift to wipe out kid care slots

More than 500 children could lose their spots in early child care programs due to a restructuring of how the city funds them, the Daily News has learned.

According to more than a dozen Manhattan elected officials, as many as 511 child care slots will be completely lost in the borough, leaving at least 364 kids and their families out of luck in Chinatown and the Lower East Side alone.

Hours for an additional 783 slots could be cut as a result as well.

“Cancellation of hundreds of child care slots in Manhattan — and cutting back hours on hundreds more — is a mistake that will reverberate,” said Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer. “Low-income working parents need full-day child care just as much in Manhattan as they do in the other boroughs.”

The cuts stem from redirecting funding to neighborhoods deemed to have higher needs, according to a letter Brewer and other officials sent to Mayor de Blasio last month.

The officials, who include Council Speaker Corey Johnson, state Sen. Brian Benjamin and Assemblyman Harvey Epstein, wrote that while they agree with the desire to help neighborhoods most in need, the city’s policy ignores the fact that low-income people living and working in wealthy parts of Manhattan also rely on child care.

“Pockets of poverty exist in higher-income neighborhoods,” they wrote in a letter, obtained Thursday by The News. “Even providers located in higher-income areas serve lower-income parents who work in those neighborhoods and drop off their children on the way to work.”

The change will mean the families of children enrolled in Birth to Five and Early Head Start programs in Manhattan could be forced to either pay for child care they may not be able to afford, or try to enroll in other government subsidized programs they may not qualify for.

But Education Department spokeswoman Sarah Casasnovas said that every borough is being awarded more spots than the number of currently enrolled kids.