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What Losing Child Care Would Mean to These Parents

Unless Albany offers more money, tens of thousands of parents in New York City are set to lose child care assistance this year. We spoke to six of them.

Julia Rock · March 24, 2025

A silhouette of an adult and child holding hands over an daycare classroom interrupted by TV static.

Thousands of NYC parents could be removed from the state's child care assistance program, starting in April. | Photos: Yan Krukau, South_agency / Canva | Illustration: Leor Stylar

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Natalie Colon Vasquez works as a clerk at Woodhull Medical Center, a public hospital in north Brooklyn, checking in patients struggling with addiction. She hopes to become an addiction counselor herself, so a couple days a week after work, she attends an online class through Stony Brook University to get certified.

Colon Vasquez wouldn’t be able to work and attend classes without the voucher she gets from the government to pay for her 3-year-old son’s daycare, she told New York Focus. As a single mother whose parents are in poor health, she doesn’t have other child care options.

Thousands of NYC Parents Are About to Lose Child Care Assistance

Julia Rock

“I do everything on my own,” she said. Without the voucher, day care would cost about a third of her income. “Out of pocket, I wouldn’t be able to afford day care…. Without my day care, I wouldn’t be able to work.”

But Colon Vasquez is set to lose her voucher later this year. The Child Care Assistance Program, which pays for her son’s day care and is largely funded by the state and federal governments, is facing a budget shortfall in New York City. The program covers almost the entire cost of child care for income-eligible parents with children aged six weeks to thirteen years old.

Last month, the city Administration for Children’s Services, which administers the voucher program locally, warned that it would have to start turning down new applicants and removing 4,000-7,000 children from the program each month as soon as April, unless the state increases funding. The agency is pleading with Albany for more money, a spokesperson told New York Focus, “so that no child or family loses access.” (Parents receiving cash assistance are guaranteed the child care vouchers and would continue receiving them.)

Governor Kathy Hochul has significantly expanded the program over the past few years, funded in part by a one-time funding boost from the federal government during the pandemic. But the federal money has dried up, and if the state does not increase its investment, thousands of parents will lose assistance each month and those gains would be wiped out.

The expansion has helped people like Colon Vasquez who are working full-time at a little more than minimum wage, earning too much to get most other forms of state assistance for food and housing, but still struggling with the skyrocketing cost of child care.

| Courtesy of Natalie Colon Vasquez

In 2023, infant child care in New York cost an average of about $20,500, the most expensive of any state except Massachusetts. In New York City, the average cost of center-based child care increased by 43 percent over the past five years to $26,000 a year.

ACS says it needs $240 million more this fiscal year and $900 million more next year to maintain current enrollment levels. An independent analysis by the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School came to a similar conclusion.

Governor Kathy Hochul and the state legislature are currently negotiating an approximately $250 billion state budget. Neither Hochul nor the state Senate proposed increasing funds for the Child Care Assistance Program in their budget proposals; the Assembly proposed an additional $213 million, not nearly enough to cover the shortfall.

Other counties may also be facing shortfalls. Washington County, in the Capital District, announced that it is not accepting new applications or recertifications for child care assistance “due to a lack of funding.”

New York Focus spoke with New York City parents who, like Colon Vasquez, have benefited from the program’s expanded eligibility levels and are set to lose their benefits.

Some parents said they’d have to quit their jobs if they lost their vouchers. Others said they would look for a second job in the evenings or weekends.

Here’s what parents told New York Focus about how the assistance has impacted them.

A voucher ticket shows an image of two children playing with colorful toys. In the background, text from the document, "Making Child Care More Affordable, Accessible and Equitable for New Yorkers."

In Brief: Child Care Assistance

Julia Rock

Before she was approved for child care assistance, Shante Hutchinson cobbled together care from neighbors for her three kids.

“I was just trying to find local people to watch my children. It was hard, it was really rough. Whoever had a day off here and there, that’s how we were winging it. It was inconsistent, or I wasn’t able to go into work certain days.”

As a single mother, Hutchinson couldn’t afford not to show up for her job in the medical billing department of Montefiore hospital.

“When I took off days, I was not getting paid. Without getting paid, you cannot pay your bills,” she said. But the day care center she found cost nearly $600 a week. “Honestly, I had to make a decision between paying my rent and paying for childcare, because I needed to go to work. I was behind in rent, facing an eviction notice. It was a struggle.”

The voucher brought her stability, because she didn’t have to worry about always finding someone to watch her kids.

“People don’t talk as much about your mental stability as a parent — but I felt a sense of relief,” she said. “I had been depressed. Having children was very good, but it was also depressing because I was like, ‘Can I afford it this week?’ It was a breath of fresh air, getting accepted.”

“It put my mind at ease. I was able to work confidently and provide some type of security for my family.”

| Courtesy of Donna Martinez

Donna Martinez is used to helping other people get government assistance in her job as a case manager at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx. She has a large caseload of clients, and she follows up with them to track things like doctors appointments and medications. She also helps them apply for benefits such as food stamps and Section 8 vouchers to “live their lives as independently as possible” when they leave the hospital.

“I couldn’t believe it,” she said, when she realized she qualified for a benefit of her own — the Child Care Assistance Program. “I’m used to knowing that I don’t qualify for things.”

Martinez has two young daughters and was facing more than $1,600 a month in combined child care costs without the assistance. She recently became a single parent, and she’s relieved that her kids are cared for during the entire time she’s at work. “I feel very lucky.”

Without the program, she said, “I would probably get a weekend job, but the weekends are to spend with my daughters.”

Alena Polezhaeva said she would find a second job to pay for day care if she lost her voucher.

That would mean “no sleep, no time with my kids,” said Polezhaeva, a single mother of a 4-year-old and an 11-year old who works as a paralegal in the New York City Law Department.

Heastie and ASC in front of a child care classroom

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Her younger daughter is enrolled in one of the city’s “universal pre-K” programs (which cover three- and four-year-olds and are not actually universal), but goes to private day care when the program ends in the early afternoon. She will soon start kindergarten, but even then will need after school care.

Leaving her job is not a viable option, because Polezhaeva gets good benefits as a government employee.

Getting the assistance “changed my life,” she said. “When I wasn’t struggling to pay for the day care, I was able to buy more food, we went to Coney Island for rides, little things here and there. We saw the difference. My kids definitely saw the difference.”

Hipolito Custodio’s job is to keep the Jacobi Medical Center clean. His assignment is to “pull the trash” and red biohazard bags from twelve floors of the Bronx public hospital.

While he’s at the hospital and his wife is at work as a home health aide, their 3-year-old son and 8-year-old stepson go to day care and after-school programs, paid for with Child Care Assistance Program vouchers. Without that help, Custodio thinks he would have to get another job to cover child care costs. It would be the “only alternative,” he said.

“It would be a shame if we lose this program because it’s a great help. We — the people who use this program — would have to get more jobs.”

| Courtesy of Kimani Knox

Kimani Knox has friends who quit their jobs because they couldn’t afford child care.

But she has been able to continue working as a manager in the food service division of a nursing and rehabilitation center, because she has had a voucher to pay for her 3-year-old daughter’s daycare since she was an infant.

“I was shocked and excited to learn [the vouchers] existed,” Knox told New York Focus.

Before she enrolled in the program, she was looking at day care centers that cost $625 a week. That was out of the question, so she relied on her mom or sister to take care of her daughter. The arrangement was unsustainable, as her mom had a child of her own at home and had a long commute to Knox’s Harlem apartment, and Knox felt she couldn’t ask so much of her family.

“When you don’t have child care, it makes you very anxious,” Knox said. The voucher lets her “trust that my child and my home life was well. So when I was able to get into this program, I told everyone that I knew, I shouted it from the rooftop. It’s a beautiful thing to have.”