Report: NYC Daycare Centers Overburdened by Regulations

Rigid vocabulary lessons for children as young as six months old, and onerous requirements for tracking their progress have made it difficult for family child care centers to stay afloat, according to a report released Thursday by the Center for New York City Affairs at The New School.

The report focuses on home-based centers in the city's Early Learn program. These small centers, sometimes located in the providers' living rooms, serve about 8,000 children up to the age of four, and they're the most popular form of care for low-income families.

New York City tried to boost the quality of these subsidized family child care centers in 2012. The report found this helped providers feel like they were more than babysitters. But the extra regulations were more suited to large child care centers than small ones.

"A lot of the providers don't have a high school degree or have GED's, but they're expected to create these lesson plans and to use this computer system that can be challenging for licensed teachers," said Kendra Hurley, senior editor at the Center for New York City Affairs and primary author of the report. "They're struggling with a lot of that documentation and it's taking time and energy away from the kids."

Most networks of family child care providers interviewed for the report said that just about half of their programs were where they wanted them to be in terms of quality. Hurley said the regulations are especially difficult for non-English speakers. An analysis of data from the Administration for Children's Services found a 40 percent decline in the number of city-contracted home-based providers with Chinese surnames since Early Learn launched in 2012. 

Rosa Collado, 55, runs a daycare center on the first floor of her home in Bushwick, Brooklyn. On the wall where the bins of toys and blocks are lined up hangs a board that reads "Homework." Below are multiple pieces of work by children, including construction paper bugs and finger-painted paper plates. Currently Collado is caring for two children, an infant and a girl who's almost two. 

Collado has been working with children since 1988. But when the city regulations kicked in and she had to make regular reports on the children's progress in a computer system, she said she cried.

"I never studied this profession, I never had a title to say 'I'm a teacher,'" she said, explaining that she left school after ninth grade in the Dominican Republic.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo recently issued an executive order allowing the state to shut down day care centers more easily if they violated certain health and safety rules.  

But Hurley said health and safety aren't the only factors in creating high-quality child care. "What's also important is to help the providers actually improve their homes, not just shut them down," she explained.

Her report recommends revising the regulations for simpler lesson plans and less documentation. It also suggests paying the providers more money; some make as little as $35,000 a year caring for four children. And it suggests making better use of the in-person visits by the networks that oversee the home centers by turning them into full-fledged training opportunities.

Sonia Vera, program director for New Life Child Development Family Child Care, oversees 26 programs in Brooklyn, including Rosa Collado's. She said one staff person in her network is funded to visit each of them six times a year, but Vera often makes extra visits on evenings and weekends to train the childcare providers on how to navigate the city's computer system and modify the curriculum.

She claimed six of her providers had to shut down their businesses because they couldn't cope with the regulations and the cost of insurance.

"We need more help. We need more staff," she said. "They're good people, but they need somebody to mentor them."

The Administration for Children's Services, which runs the Early Learn program, did not directly respond to the report's criticisms or recommendations. In a statement, it said: “ACS is committed to providing quality child care, regardless of the setting. EarlyLearn NYC has transformed early care and education for thousands of New York City children and working families, providing them with quality child care and Head Start programming in safe, clean and high quality settings.”