Earlier today, as her third proposal for the 2025 State of the State Affordability Agenda, Governor Hochul proposed new efforts to make child care more accessible and affordable in New York. The Governor will propose a $110 million Child Care Construction Fund to build new child care facilities and repair existing sites, making this critical service more accessible in child care deserts. The Governor will also propose establishing a “substitute pool” to expand the child care workforce, helping providers find trusted, vetted professionals to quickly step in and keep classrooms open. Finally, the Governor will launch the New York Coalition for Child Care to bring together business leaders, labor unions, service providers and tax experts to identify a sustainable path forward for achieving universal child care.
B-ROLL: Governor Hochul's classroom visit in New York City is available to stream on YouTube here and TV quality video is available here (h.264, mp4).
VIDEO: The event is available to stream on YouTube here and TV quality video is available here (h.264, mp4).
AUDIO: The Governor's remarks are available in audio form here.
PHOTOS: The Governor's Flickr page will post photos of the event here.
A rush transcript of the Governor's remarks is available below:
Thank you, Robert, for the extraordinary work that you and your team and particularly the teachers do at this place to give new chances to kids who grew up in a circumstance where life has been hard. You know, not everything is always perfect at home, and they can come to a place like this — I could sense immediately when I walked in — that is so full of love, so full of life and so full of hope. And that's what we can do to help our kids get that head start in life. And I want to thank you and everyone who's dedicated yourselves to giving these kids a chance. And so thank you to everyone here at this great organization. We'll be hearing from Nathalia Daza, who's one of the teachers here who I just had a chance to meet with her and her children, and the love was so palpable. It looked as if you were the mother of all of them, and they're just absolutely adorable. So, I want to thank you.
And I have another great partner, and that's Henry Garrido, an extraordinary national — but also local — labor leader; executive director of AFSCME DC37. And he's going to be talking about what programs like this mean to his members and how important it is for the working — mostly women, but men as well — who really benefit from child care programs and our investments in them. So I want to thank Henry for being such a great leader as well.
I have my team here as well: Our commissioner of the Department of Labor, Roberta Reardon — thank you — whose job it is to make sure that we get jobs for these kids when they get older. Commissioner DaMia Harris-Madden, the Office of Children and Family Services, who's so dedicated. Also, Senator Julia Salazar, and I want to thank her for being such a champion for families and the children that you represent, and statewide indeed. So, let's give her another round of applause as well. Any other electeds I miss here? Alright. And also the members of the Child Care Availability Task Force, thank you. Thank you for all the great work you did.
Now, the reason I felt so comfortable in that room with the children reading books is that I've been there before. I don't think other governors in the State of New York have been able to claim that. That they know what it's like to be a mom. In fact, I'm rather certain they don't know. But it is that experience and life's experiences that have made me so sensitive and so attuned to the needs of families today. And not just from back when I was struggling and had to leave a job I loved because there was no child care. Literally, that is why I stopped working. I wanted to keep working. I worked for Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. It was an honor. It was my dream since I was in eighth grade to do something like that. And when our kids came along and my husband left his job at a law firm to become a public servant — a 50 percent cut in salary, I left a law firm to become a public servant, another 50 percent cut and then I left the workforce — our income just kept going down and down.
Now, it was by choice. You know, we didn't grow up in those tough circumstances, as tough as people have it, but I will say this: We struggled, and we had to make tough decisions. And shopping for little ones was just a nightmare. I mean, how long can these diapers last? I mean, you can't reuse them. The formula, the laundry detergent, the dishwasher detergent, everything. And so, that's why we're talking so much about affordability, because I see the struggle, not just from my experience, but also through the eyes of my own children. My son and daughter in law who are raising a daughter, who struggled, again, to have child care. And my two-year-old granddaughter is in a program like this, and I can see how she's developing in that environment. But they're lucky because that's available to them. It's all about affordability and availability when it comes to child care.
So, let's talk about what we can do as a state: We've invested $7 billion in my first State of the State to say, “I get it. We have to make up for past disinvestment when others didn't see the need.” It was always, “Well, that's your family's problem,” right? Employers didn't care. Government didn't care. You figured that out. You wanted to have kids, you figured it out.
Well, that's not a nurturing society. That's not who we are as New Yorkers. We want to give everybody that lift that they need, especially in those early, tough years. We want to support our families. Not make them feel they have to leave our state because everything was so expensive from housing to child care. We want them to stay and prosper here.
So we had to make a decision, you know, working with our senators and our elected officials. We're going to make massive commitments to child care. And what I'm going to propose in my State of the State one week from today is $110 million to help build more child care centers. Because I've heard from everybody we have a shortage of facilities. And we have an amazing program that if your family earns $108,000 or less, your child care costs can be capped at $15 a week. Think about that. Think about the money that's back in your pockets. But it only helps if there's a place to go. That sounds nice on paper, but if you're in a child care desert, it doesn't matter. So let's build more. Let's have the ambition to build more facilities and to populate them with more nurturing teachers and teams to support them.
So the other challenge we have is the shortage of teachers. And on days when a teacher's own kids are sick, or there's transportation problems, or, as my daughter in law is home with my grandchild today because there's two feet of — well, one foot of snow — and what's one foot of snow, really, in our nation's capital? They've been home for days, you know, parents are taking off work, or if you're a teacher who has to deal with that — who's taking care of the kids? So one of the recommendations of our extraordinary Child Care Task Force was, “Let's build a pool run by the state department of labor, of substitute teachers that we can fill in and plug the holes.” That's smart thinking. That's saying, “We hear you. This is one more way we can lift the burden,” and make sure that when these children show up and their parents are counting on someone to take care of them, that they don't have to be told, “No, you're staying home because the teacher couldn't come in.” Let's start solving for problems like that.
But I also want to make sure we continue a coalition for child care. We do not have the end of all the challenges, but also the answers either. Let's continue having smart experts and people engaged in this career, in this profession, to continue gathering and giving recommendations to myself in the Legislature. So, I want to keep that going. So that's our third announcement: We're going to continue the Coalition on Child Care Task Force and move toward, ultimately, universal child care. We need to get there. We need to get there.
So, we're going to help provide the child care, help deal with the cost of it, because I know that it's a lot cheaper to put your kid through college than it is to have them take care of child care: 155 percent more expensive to put your child in child care than it is to send them to a public college in the State of New York. Think about that. The toughest years are the first years, right? And that's why yesterday we announced — we hear you — that we're tripling the child care tax credit from $330 to $1,000. You have two children, three-years-old and under, that's $2,000 more in your pocket. And just on top of that was our announcement last week that we'll be having the inflation rebate, so every family will receive $500 as well. So, add it up. It starts paying for the diapers, it helps pay for child care, and it starts paying for the clothes that they grow out of, because they grow every couple of months.
So the message is this: New York families, we hear you. We know the struggles, we know what you're going through, and we're going to do everything in our power to deliver policies, programs and financial support to help you get through these tough times so you look back and say, “It was hard, a lot of sleepless nights, a lot of challenges with the little ones, but we got through because we had a state who believed in all of us and we made a difference.”
Thank you very much. I want to thank you all for your support here today.