Child Care and the New York State of the State Address 2024
No one seems to be talking about how criminally underpaid child care professionals are in New York State. A coalition of child care providers, advocates, and parents, the Empire State Campaign for Child Care, has announced that child care workforce compensation and development are the top policy priority for the industry. There is consensus about this priority among providers, advocates, and parents outside of the statewide coalition as well. Child care professionals rank among the lowest paid professions in New York State.
As the workforce behind the workforce, child care professionals facilitate the working lives of millions. If they remain underpaid and abandon the industry, which they have been over the last few years, the collapse of the child care industry would create unimaginable social ruptures. The child care community wants better pay and government support to achieve it. Will Governor Hochul say anything about child care? Will she invest in workforce compensation for child care professionals?
On Tuesday, January 9, 2024, at 1:00 PM in the Assembly Hall of the New York State (NYS) Capitol Building in Albany, New York, Governor Kathy Hochul will deliver her State of the State Address, which will outline the policy and budgetary priorities for New York in 2024 and beyond.
Building the “executive budget”
The State of the State Address may seem like a launchpad for the future, but it is actually the second-to-last step of a political process that began in June 2023. Governor Hochul’s address will announce how she intends to allocate New York State resources, a financial account, so to speak, which has approximately $230 billion deposited into it.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul speaks at an event in June 2022. (Photo: Marc A. Hermann/MTA under Creative Commons CC BY 2.0 Deed.)
Back in June 2023, negotiations began for the NYS fiscal year (FY) 2025 Budget, when Budget Division Director Blake Washington called for requests for budget items from all government agencies and programs, due back to the Budget Division by September. The Budget Division, in November, held hearings to discuss the budget proposals submitted by agencies and programs, after which they translated the proposals they received into budget and staff recommendations. This became the “executive budget” that Governor Hochul will talk about on Tuesday, January 9th.
One primary purpose of the State of the State Address is for the governor to discuss highlights from the executive budget before it is released later in January. The final step in the budget process is legislative action, where both houses of the New York State legislature review the budget in committee then, by March 1st in theory, pass the budget. The governor gets a head start on the legislative process because the public should respond favorably to the highlights she emphasizes at least in theory. During her address, Governor Hochul will frame the discussion of the FY 2025 Budget, making a case for its merits.
Concerns about a shifting child care model
For students of NYS child care policy, the anticipation is harrowing because the governor has not drawn a clear course in child care during 2022 and 2023. In 2022, she pledged $7 billion to stabilize the industry. This combination of federal and state money would be distributed through grants to providers and entrepreneurs and subsidies to parents and caregivers. This is following a cost-of-care model, which targets what child care costs to parents, providers, and workers, then seeks government support to maintain (and expand) facilities, staffing, and care services in collaboration with child professionals.
Ostensibly as part of her pledge, Governor Hochul allocated close to $1 billion in a variety of grant programs for current and prospective providers to sturdy, expand, or create child care businesses. Included among grant opportunities were workforce retention and child care desert funding, which have provided additional bonuses to workers and created new child care businesses in barren markets, respectively.
Furthermore, in a monumental achievement of her administration, Governor Hochul expanded the child care assistance program so that households who earned north of $50,000 per year for example, would still qualify for financial aid. Quality child care became more affordable for more New Yorkers.
“If the governor speaks about child care plans for FY 2025, which model she prioritizes may be instructive of the direction New York State child care policy will take in the coming year. If she does not talk about child care at all – well, that will be instructive too. ”
Since August 2023, however, Governor Hochul has been following a child care enterprise model, which incentivizes businesses to build new on-site child care facilities or to contract with and help expand the services of existing child care providers in the jurisdiction where the business breaks ground. Whereas the cost-of-care model invested in providers and parents, the enterprise model invested New York State child care resources in developers from within and without the industry. The fruit of this labor is a $100 million deal with Micron Technology, who bought land adjacent to their factory to build an onsite child care facility.
An underpaid profession
Both models appear necessary in an industry that has an expanding demand. The new child care assistance program requirements offer financial support to more households who stimulate business for providers. The problem, however, is that the child care industry suffers from staff shortages. In a profession notoriously underpaid, the child care industry has been losing workers consistently since the start of the pandemic.
It is unclear how the cost of care or the enterprise model will be applied to workforce compensation, or whether they would be effective, but it does seem that child care wages have remained low over the last two years and that the child care labor force is not growing at pace with demand.
Coda: what’s at stake
In 2022, Buffalo Co-Lab researchers surveyed licensed child care providers in Erie County, New York, as part of their “True Cost of Child Care: Erie County, New York” study and found that staff shortages were harming local child care businesses. Child care providers cited staff shortages as the biggest problem they face. Plagued by low wages, the child care workforce had shrunk three consecutive years since the start of the global pandemic in 2019. Providers could not raise prices without risking clients, so they kept pay at or just above minimum wage, which drove away potential workers.
Providers warned that this shortage was creating an industrial crisis, and in 2024, it is a crisis.
The State of the State address is a weather vane reading the political winds for issues like child care. The child care enterprise model has received the bulk of attention over the last couple of months. The Decoupling Bill seemed like a slam dunk, having received bipartisan support when passing both houses of the legislature. It would have expanded access to child care, which has been a touchstone of the governor’s policy efforts in this industry. Together, the enterprise and cost-of-care models can strengthen the industry. The governor’s veto seemed to put more eggs in the enterprise basket.
If the governor speaks about child care plans for FY 2025, which model she prioritizes may be instructive of the direction New York State child care policy will take in the coming year. If she does not talk about child care at all – well, that will be instructive too.
