Child Care Promises Leave Funding Questions Open: State of the State 2026

Hochul also announced plans to shore up the city’s existing 3-K program, which began in 2017 but has faced significant implementation challenges, including uneven seat distribution, accessibility gaps for students with disabilities, and funding cuts under former Mayor Eric Adams.

Her plan extends beyond New York City, too. She unveiled a $470 million investment to ensure universal pre-K for 4-year-olds statewide by the start of the 2028–29 school year. Although New York’s “universal” pre-K program has existed for decades, school districts are not currently required to participate. Many districts have opted out because of insufficient state funding, said Melinda Person, president of New York State United Teachers union. Others outsource the program to local private schools or community-based organizations, which may offer only a few hours of child care each day.

The additional resources could motivate more school districts to offer on-site pre-K, Person noted.

“The program was originally designed to be another grade in the public school system,” she added. “Four-year-olds were supposed to be getting an educational program rather than just daycare.”

Some lawmakers don’t want to leave the decision up to school districts.

“Just like we don’t provide the option to public schools to offer an education to first-graders or second-graders or third-graders,” State Senator James Skoufis said at a child care rally in Albany last week, “we need to require our public schools to educate the 4-year-olds.”

The governor’s proposal would also pour an additional $1.2 billion into the state’s child care voucher program, allowing most eligible families to access child care for no more than $15 per week. The new funding would ease the strain on struggling counties, many of which had stopped enrolling eligible parents last summer because of a funding shortfall.

The self-proclaimed “mom governor” said she also wants to pilot affordable daycare programs for children under 3, including newborns. On Wednesday, she announced that the state would provide Dutchess, Monroe and Broome counties with $20 million each to support up to 1,000 new child care seats. The pilot programs would be overseen by a new Office of Child Care and Early Education, which Hochul proposed establishing to manage the rollout of universal child care throughout New York.

It’s still unclear how the multibillion-dollar plan would be funded. Last week, Hochul said it would be financed through “existing state revenues,” but she did not provide details on long-term funding. In Tuesday’s speech, she said that the state already has the revenue “to get these initiatives off the ground.”

The announcement comes amid uncertainty surrounding federal child care and family assistance funding. On Friday, a federal judge temporarily blocked the Trump administration from freezing billions in federal funding for child care and social services in five Democratic-led states, including New York.

New York State Department of Labor Commissioner Roberta Reardon, who also co-chairs the state’s Child Care Availability Task Force, applauded another facet of the governor’s plan: expanding access to early childhood education, funding, and credentials.

“It’s a very tough job, and very essential,” said Reardon. “There’s a whole build-out to make sure that the workforce also gets supported, because you can’t do it without skilled workers.”

Still, absent from Hochul’s agenda was any proposal to raise wages for child care providers, who are among some of the lowest-paid workers in the state, with an average annual salary of $38,000 in 2023. Advocates have pushed for the establishment of a workforce compensation fund as one way to support such raises.

Education accounts for the second-largest portion of state spending, but neither Hochul’s speech nor briefing materials mentioned any changes to Foundation Aid, the state’s main school funding mechanism. Last year, after commissioning the Rockefeller Institute of Government to conduct a study on how to modernize the formula, lawmakers revised the poverty metric and approved additional support for English language learners. Advocates are calling for more revisions to include pre-K allocations, and better support students with disabilities and those experiencing homelessness.