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Rosalinda Rodriguez knows first hand what a difference free, high-quality child care can make for a New York City family.
Several years ago, Rodriguez, a 25-year-old single mom, enrolled her then-toddler-age son in a federally funded Early Head Start program on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Staffers there helped support her son with a speech disability and freed up Rodriguez to work part time.
Years later, her son is thriving in elementary school, and Rodriguez decided to pursue her long-time dream of attending college, enrolling at CUNY’s Borough of Manhattan Community College last fall to study early childhood education.
“It definitely feels like I got a second chance,” said Rodriguez, who hopes she can help families like hers. “There’s lots of low-income families that need child care, and kids need to get an education. [They] need someone who cares.”
Students like Rodriguez are at the heart of a new push from CUNY officials to bolster the city’s early childhood education workforce as Mayor Zohran Mamdani embarks on a historic expansion of free child care.
City officials haven’t said exactly how many new early childhood educators the expansion plans will require, but the need could be acute.
Mamdani, with funding from Gov. Kathy Hochul, has pledged to open 2,000 free child care seats for 2-year-olds this fall, and an additional 10,000 seats a year later, before growing the program to accommodate any city 2-year-old by its fourth year. He also expanded the city’s existing 3-K program by 1,000 seats in an effort to increase supply in oversubscribed neighborhoods.
Across CUNY’s 26 campuses, roughly 3,600 students are working toward a degree in early childhood education, university officials said. Chancellor Félix Matos Rodríguez recently asked all of the college presidents to review their early childhood education curriculum and ensure they’re pushing students out into the work force as quickly as possible.
“This is a moment where we need to meet the city’s demand for their work force,” Matos Rodríguez told Chalkbeat last week during a visit to a child development course at Borough of Manhattan Community College.
For aspiring early childhood educators who don’t want to pursue a full associate or bachelor’s degree, CUNY launched a free apprenticeship program last year to place them in assistant teacher roles. CUNY officials also hope that a separate state-funded program called Reconnect could prove particularly effective in bringing new early educators into the fold: It offers financial support for older students without a college degree to enroll in coursework in high-demand fields.
“You might have people out there who have experience working with kids and they have not been able to get their degree,” Matos Rodríguez said. “[Here’s] a chance to come do that, get an associate, it’s paid for, and be ready for when that credential becomes necessary.”
At a recent City Council hearing, Emmy Liss, Mamdani’s newly appointed director of the Mayor’s Office of Child Care, said “we will need to significantly expand the number of trained professionals working in child care” – jobs she acknowledged have been historically “underpaid and under-respected.”
Unlike teaching positions in K-12 schools, which uniformly require a bachelor’s degree and state certification, qualifications for city early childhood education jobs can vary.
Lead teachers for prekindergarten programs located in public schools need full teaching licenses. But for 2-K, which officials have said will be located in community-based centers or home-based settings, the qualifications are less stringent. Teachers in home-based programs must complete 30 hours of child development training, while center-based instructors must have, or be working toward, an associate degree in early childhood education, according to an Education Department spokesperson.
But even as university officials try to lure more students into early childhood education programs, they know that the meager wages awaiting many of them after graduation can make that task more complicated.
Early childhood educators made a median yearly wage of roughly $25,000 as of 2023, according to a report from former Comptroller Brad Lander — compared to nearly $100,000 for K-12 teachers. Mamdani has pledged to make increasing wages for educators a part of his child care expansion, but hasn’t laid out any specific plans or funding sources to make that happen.
“I think it’s pretty easy for people to find jobs,” said Phoebe Gilpin, a doctoral student at Hunter College and the instructor for Rodriguez’s course. “It’s hard for them to find living wage jobs.”
Michael Elsen-Rooney is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Michael at [email protected].
Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.
