The importance of an accessible, affordable child care system cannot be overstated for families across the city. This is why CCC stood with parents, advocates, and child care, education, and youth services partners to co-host a Mayoral Forum in late April to give New Yorkers an opportunity to hear from candidates on real concerns around education and child care. A throughline of these conversations, which you can view the livestream recording of here, focused on the city’s Early Childhood Education (ECE) system contract payments and workforce rates. The ECE workforce is the backbone of this vital system that supports working families and child development. Yet this workforce, which is mostly women of color, is underpaid and underprioritized. CCC has been outspoken about these issues.

In FY’22, CCC and partners highlighted a serious crisis facing providers across the city: NYC Schools (formerly DOE) was not fulfilling its contractual obligations to reimburse ECE providers for the full amounts of their contracts. Since fall of 2022, this crisis has caused several early childhood education centers to close permanently. Delayed contract registrations, chronic payment lags, and persistent procurement issues continue to burden our city’s ECE providers, threatening their ability to keep their doors open and the livelihood of hardworking care workers. A recent Human Services Council survey found that 90% of members are owed delayed payments totaling $365 million. Over 32% reported payment delays exceeding six months, while more than 48% have taken out loans or lines of credit totaling $87 million, incurring $6 million in interest alone. According to the NYC Comptroller’s report published in February 2025, the percentage of late registered human services contracts rose from 88.5% in FY23 to 90.7% in FY24. In FY24, nearly 40% (1,387 contracts) of human services contracts were registered more than a year late, due to late submissions by city agencies. This is unsustainable and unconscionable. At the forum, candidates all emphasized the urgency of fixing procurement procedures to ensure timely payments across the human services sector, reiterating that the ECE system is essential for all New York families.

The forum also included discussion of wages. Low wages in the child care industry account for massive turnover and vacancies, which hinder the success of programs and hurt economic growth across the spectrum. According to data from Robin Hood, 1 in 4 employed child care workers in NYC live in poverty while more than half (53%) have incomes low enough to qualify for a child care subsidy themselves. In the 2023 Early Childhood Poverty Tracker report, “Child Care Affordability, Accessibility, and the Costs of Disruption”, 1 in 10 parents experienced turnover as a result of disruptions to child care and nearly one third of working parents reported a child care disruption that hindered workforce advancement, demonstrating further the importance that reliable, affordable child care plays in workforce attachment and income security.

Although there has been some recent progress on salary parity between community-based child care providers and their counterparts within New York public schools, much work remains to ensure the community-based workforce is adequately compensated.

Keeping centers open and workers adequately compensated is a major component of child care accessibility. The Mayoral candidates who spoke made several promises to address these critical challenges in the ECE workforce and at the city level around procurement. Several suggested that the goal of New York City should be a universal, free child care system and CCC agrees. View the livestream recording of the forum at the button below–at the beginning you’ll also get to hear from CCC’s new executive director, Raysa S. Rodriguez.