Why Child Care Centers in New York City Are Shutting Their Doors
A publicly funded system that long ago cracked the code of affordable, quality care paired with decent working conditions is slipping away.
Fighting for child care is nothing new in New York City. In 1950, parents and children protested outside City Hall after a group of children was dropped from the Brownsville Child Care Center.
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At the 1939 World’s Fair, the longstanding New York City social service organization Sheltering Arms showcased a novel idea for helping needy mothers: government-funded child care. The organization was home to one of the city’s first publicly funded child-care programs, which was considered a “groundbreaking approach to helping women gain employment and pull their families out of poverty.”
New York City would expand on Sheltering Arms’ example to build an enormous yet little-known publicly funded child care system recognized for its commitment to quality care. The system survived the city’s fiscal crisis of the 1970s, the push to privatize social services in the 1980s and 1990s, and a pandemic that gutted child care nationwide.