| Advocates Protest Day Care Closings |
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| Thursday, 04 March 2010 14:39 |
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Parents, advocates, employees and elected officials turned out at City Hall yesterday to protest the Administration for Children’s Services plans to close a total of 16 child care centers. The closings are part of Mayor Bloomberg’s efforts to close the City’s budget gap and are designed to save $16 million on an annualized basis.
"These 16 child care centers are the backbone of our communities,” said New York City Councilwoman Annabel Palma, General Welfare Committee Chair. “They provide a safe haven for a number of low-income families, allowing parents to work or go to school while providing their children with a safe and educational environment. The devastating consequences of these closures – burdening families, reducing affordable child care services and capacity, unemployment for child care workers – would effectively lead our bright city into a dimmer future.”
“During a time of economic crisis, we should be doing all that we can to keep people employed, especially lower-wage workers who are usually more affected by downturns in the economy”, said Raglan George Jr., Executive Director of District Council 1707. “Instead, New York City is eliminating educational services for thousands of young children, placing additional stress on parents in neighborhoods of need. These closings will not only reduce the capacity of available day care services by over 1,200 seats but also make it difficult for many parents to look for employment.”
The targeted centers, unlike other recent day care center closings by ACS, were not selected due to low enrollments. Instead, the centers were chosen based on a combination of high space costs under leases directly paid by the City relative to the size of the program and the availability of unused day care slots in other near-by programs. “Every one of the 750 children currently in these programs will be offered a seat in another local center,” said Sharman Stein, Director of Communications at ACS. “Our primary goal was to figure out how to cut costs without cutting services.”
“We are appealing to all of the elective officials and the affected landlords in these areas to work with us and the unions to develop viable solutions to prevent the closing of these programs,” said Andrea Anthony, Executive Director of the Day Care Council of New York. “The City must stop these continuous attacks on the publicly funded child care system.”
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