Brooklyn – Yesterday at a joint hearing of the City Council’s committees on Finance and General Welfare, members of the Council’s Brooklyn Delegation grilled Administration for Children’s Services Commissioner John Mattingly on the state of child care, asking questions that the Commissioner could not, and in some cases would not, answer. Council Members David G. Greenfield, Brad Lander and Stephen Levin joined Finance Chairman Domenic M. Recchia, Jr. and Assistant Majority Leader Lew Fidler in the questioning, which lasted close to two hours. While the Commissioner offered few answers, one problem became crystal clear: ACS Commissioner Mattingly and the Bloomberg administration, particularly no-show Deputy Mayor Linda Gibbs, do not have a concrete plan to address glaring deficiencies in their plan to eliminate thousands of city-subsidized child care slots and replace some of this with inferior after-school care.

When the executive budget was unveiled in May, the administration took credit for “saving” child care when, in fact, thousands of children are still left under served or not served at all by the Mayor’s proposed plan to have the “Out of School Time” or OST program serve many of the children slated to lose their ACS-funded child care in the coming months. In particular, the Orthodox Jewish community, largely represented by Greenfield, Lander, Levin, and Fidler, will suffer because of a lack of OST programs and capacity to accept new children in existing programs.

“When you came up with this plan, did you take into account the needs of particular communities?” asked Councilman Greenfield. “In particular, did you account for the complete lack of OST capacity in the Orthodox Jewish community?” Commissioner Mattingly and his Deputy Commissioner Melanie Herzog avoided answering directly for several minutes, but finally admitted that ACS and the administration were aware of the lack of capacity in the Orthodox Jewish community when the executive budget was announced. Councilman Greenfield, infuriated, said, “You made a decision to go in a direction that you knew would negatively impact a subset of the population served, namely the Orthodox Jewish community. You don’t have a plan to serve these children, yet you expect us to vote on a budget that does not address the needs of our constituents. From where I sit, it is nothing short of outrageous to profile a community for elimination of child care and that is exactly what you have done.”

Just last year, the Orthodox Jewish community was hit with the elimination of Priority 7 resulting in a loss of child care vouchers for over 2,000 children located predominantly in Brooklyn. While the Jewish community makes up only a small percentage of the children expected to be impacted this year, the fact that OST is not a reasonable substitute for existing priority voucher programs serving the Jewish community remains a sticking point for their Council Members.

“How can you say OST is comparable to existing ACS-funded programs?” asked Councilman Levin. “OST is half the cost of existing school-age ACS vouchers and the resources and personnel provided by OST are in no way comparable to those of the existing child care system in this city. I have not seen a plan that will convince me that shifting child care away from ACS to OST will work. If we cannot determine that this plan will actually work, how can we support it?”

OST for a school-age child costs roughly $2,400, while an ACS-funded voucher costs roughly $5,800. The difference in cost is due in large part to the limited services provided by OST in comparison with ACS-provided programs.

“OST is not child care,” stated Councilman Lander. “Almost every aspect of the narrative around this so-called restoration of child care turns out to be false and misleading. How is it possible for a mayor to claim he cares about families, that he wants people to work and, most importantly, that he cares about the intellectual development of kids when he is on track to cut the subsidized child care system by 61% since taking office in 2002? This is not a structural deficit, it is a choice to not fund child care and it is absolutely unconscionable.”

The lack of responsiveness by the Commissioner even prompted an unprecedented recess of the hearing by Finance Chairman Recchia, who insisted that the hearing would not continue until the Commissioner and his staff produced answers. Commissioner Mattingly and Deputy Commissioner Herzog, visibly embarrassed, struggled to account for the policies of the Bloomberg administration with respect to child care. Particularly, why the administration is gutting funding for ACS-provided programs to instead expand services through a limited and insufficient alternative.

“The logical implication of what you’re saying is that we are taking from one hand and giving to another,” said Councilman Fidler as he explained why funding for child care through ACS should not be at odds with funding for OST. “The reality and the rhetoric doesn’t match.”

(YWN Desk – NYC)