The Epoch Times: Child Care Advocates Want Pre-K Baseline in Budget
NEW YORK—For the past several years, young children have flocked to the steps of City Hall to protest proposed budget cuts to child care and after-school programs.
Each year the City Council successfully uses discretionary funding to save nearly all the programs for another year, but parents and teachers have grown tired of the tradition, affectionately known as the “budget dance.”
Child care advocates once again took to the steps of City Hall on Wednesday, this time asking for support from mayor-elect Bill de Blasio to end the dance.
“This system cannot remain dependent on successful advocacy annually and the restoration of one-year funds,” said Jennifer March, executive director of Citizen’s Committee for Children. Her organization is one of 150 advocacy-and-provider organizing groups making up Campaign for Children—a group that has been fighting budget cuts to child care since 2011.
The group wants to see $150 million of funding in the budget baseline, taking it off the chopping block and keeping it funded permanently. The money would provide child care and after school for over 47,000 children, according to Campaign for Children.
