By DEBORAH E. LANS
A child care update
HUDSON–In child care, it seems, the good news is to be found by visiting a provider and watching children learn, play, explore and grow, and the other news is to be seen in reports about the struggles faced by parents seeking to find care and providers struggling to make ends meet.
The Columbia Paper recently toured the Columbia-Greene Community College Day Care Center, a licensed facility located in its own building on the college’s grounds serving some 30 children ages 3-5 years old. The center’s Director, Bronwyn Taylor, has been there for 17 years, the last 10 as director. A Catskill native, Ms. Taylor is currently supported by a staff of seven, one of whom is her daughter. Staff retention is excellent – an unusual and important attribute – as the stability of the child-educator relationship is a key to learning.
The center gives a first priority in enrollment to the children of C-GCC students, and those students receiving financial aid can apply part of that aid to the center’s fees, which are also reduced for them. Faculty children are also prioritized, and community members’ children are welcomed. The center charges less than the market rate for child care in the county ($340/week is market rate and the center’s weekly fee is $277).
The center uses play-based learning to provide skill building: teaching letter identification (spelling letters with macaroni), name recognition, writing and recognizing one’s own name (this reporter was introduced to each student, who stood – or jumped up – and shouted his or her name in each of the two classrooms); counting and number identification, storytelling and social interaction.
The day (7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., to accommodate student/working parent schedules) is gently structured, with play times, story times, meals and snacks. At some point each day, the children leave their classrooms and head to a small library, full of colorful books, to hear a story and talk about it.
The center takes advantage of its setting in the college as well as opportunities in the county. The children visit various college classrooms, seeing the work of nursing and medical technician students, visiting the science lab, using the dance studio and gymnasium, walking through the construction center. Mud Creek Environmental Center visits regularly, sharing natural education.
The center is a member of the Early Literacy Learning Network managed by Greater Hudson Promise Neighborhood, that regularly gathers child care providers at different facilities around the county to share information and best practices. It also participates in the state’s Quality Stars program through which it receives guidance on education techniques as well as financial support for items like new mats and enhancing its play area.
One set of parents wrote a letter to the center that summarizes what a quality care setting can provide for parents and children:
“The decision to be a working mother is never an easy one. Sometimes it’s not a decision at all. The balancing act of performing well at work, and performing well as a mother, is nearly impossible at times. So when you find a place where, when you drop your child off in the morning, you can take a deep breath and go on with your day, it makes all the difference in the world. Not only to the child but to the mother herself…
“I truly believe both of our children will do better in school and their overall life because I went back to work and they had the opportunity to be exposed to such wonderful people like all of you. You have taught them more than me as an at home mother could have ever attempted to. You have given me the gift of confidence that not only did I not do them a disservice, which so many mothers fear as they make the decision to go back to work, but that I chose a gift for them far beyond I expected.”
Set against the obvious benefits of quality child care is the reality that finding such care in Columbia County is a dire challenge. Columbia County meets the definition of a “child care desert” – an area where there are three or more children under age five per available child care slot.
–New York State Comptroller’s report
“In 2023, the median wage for those working in the child day care services sector was $38,234, more than $20,000 less than the median wage for all New Yorkers.”
Child Care Connections (CCC), a program of the non-profit Family of Woodstock, is the county’s publicly-funded child care resource and referral service. CCC has just released its 2025 Needs Assessment (the first since 2022). CCC’s survey shows that regulated child care programs of every type – centers and various sizes of home-based facilities – have decreased by a drastic 53% in the past decade in the county. (The decline is less dramatic in Ulster and Greene counties, which CCC also serves.)
Summarizing the situation, CCC writes: “The need for additional child care slots, especially for infants and toddlers, is at a crisis level…with no increase in slots and the high cost of regulated care, [there will continue to be] a burden on working parents and employers. The lack of consistent early childhood education has been cited as a reason for a significant number of young children being ill-prepared for kindergarten.”
More specifically, CCC’s survey shows several alarming facts: first and foremost, it reports that throughout the county no municipality except Hudson and Kinderhook had even one available slot for toddlers (Hudson had 7, Kinderhook 3) and no municipality at all had an open slot for infants. As CCC’s Director Suzanne Holdridge explained to The Columbia Paper, while CCC’s remit includes directing parents to available care, in fact their advice often boils down to: put your name on a waiting list everywhere you can and if a slot opens up, grab it immediately – it won’t stay open for more than a few hours.
Indeed, even the number of licensed slots for infants and toddlers is alarmingly low: there are none at all in Ancram, Austerlitz, Canaan, Claverack, Copake, Gallatin, Hillsdale, Livingston, New Lebanon, or Taghkanic. There a few licensed (but not available) slots in Chatham, Clermont, Germantown and Ghent. Only Hudson, Kinderhook and Stuyvesant have sizable numbers of licensed slots, though none has enough to meet demand. CCC estimates that demand for toddler slots are more than double the supply; for infants, demand exceeds supply about six-fold.
Moreover, too often, potential care is not located where parents can access it or care is not available at the times needed. Shift-workers needing care at night go begging.
While all types of care settings have diminished, the greatest loss has been among the forms of regulated home-based programs. These smaller settings can be more conveniently located for parents in rural communities, and are often preferred because they feel “homier” and because they mix age groups in ways centers are not permitted to do. Such programs can also be good small businesses for their owners, and because the staffing ratios in them are more lenient than for centers, they have the prospect of running profitably.
Because supply is so limited, even though child care subsidy amounts have been increased by the state, the preponderance of subsidy funds have gone unused in the county because slots are simply not to be found. In addition, C-GCC Center Director Taylor says that many parents find it stigmatizing to use subsidies.
In February the New York State Comptroller issued a report called “Lingering Challenges in the Child Care Sector,” that surveyed the state-wide landscape. While the report saw modest increases in some forms of child care post the pandemic, it too noted that the greatest decline in providers was in the regulated home-based care sector.
Indeed, of the five recommendations contained in the comptroller’s report, one is that efforts be made to “boost home-based providers in rural areas, where relatively small increases in capacity could be meaningful.”
Like other reports on the sector, the comptroller’s analysis noted that “child care worker wages still present a significant barrier to growth of the industry’s workforce. In 2023, the median wage for those working in the child day care services sector was $38,234, more than $20,000 less than the median wage for all New Yorkers.”
Like so much else, this picture may grow worse under the new federal administration. As the comptroller’s report explains, the primary source of funding for child care comes to the state from the federal government through the Child Care and Development Fund. In addition, the state is able to allocate federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Parents (TANF) monies to child care. Finally, about 75% of the monies used for child care subsidies (the Child Care Assistance Program, CCAP) comes from the federal government.
Federal pandemic funding has been a substantial source of child care spending since 2020, but the state is likely to be unable to make up the gap.
The C-GCC Center parents who wrote that their children would do better not only in school but in life because they received quality early childhood education were not wrong. Quality early child care is crucial, the benefits have been shown to last a lifetime, and its absence is detrimental to the social, emotional and educational development of children.
The state’s budget proposals include significant sums for child care, including a sizable construction fund. It is to be hoped that overall governmental funding for this crucial service will not decline.
To contact reporter Deborah Lans, email deborahlans@icloud.com.
