High quality early childhood education plays a critical role in supporting the social-emotional development and school readiness of young children and ensures caregivers can provide for their families by participating in the workforce. Over the past year, an enormous amount of attention has been paid to the child care affordability crisis facing New York City families, with CCC’s own data highlighting just how far out of reach the ability to purchase child care or full-day preschool programming is for the vast majority of families. CCC has also helped bring been much-needed attention to the various operational challenges within the contracted early care and education system (under the New York City Public Schools), that have resulted in thousands of open seats despite high demand.

 Against this backdrop, parents, providers, advocates and local elected leaders have participated in a collective effort to protect against budget reductions that would stall Pre-K and 3-K expansion and continue to advocate to strengthen the existing system to ensure it reaches greater numbers of children across all age cohorts (infants and toddlers, 3-K and Pre-K).  

CCC’s latest brief contextualizes the ECE system through a number of key data points and offers data visualization for key indicators, including: population changes for children under five years old; trends in kindergarten enrollment; the reach of the ECE system over time; budgeted investments in early care and education (ECE) and changes to the payer mix; and estimated capacity for the current year. These data points underscore the important opportunity to not only serve a greater number of children this year, but to strengthen the foundation upon which universal access can be achieved in the very near future.