Mayor Zohran Mamdani visited a South Richmond Hill child care center Wednesday afternoon to mark the Hindu festival of Holi and celebrate the rollout of the first phase of an initiative that will deliver free childcare to two-year-olds.
The mayor on March 4 celebrated Holi with children at Lucy’s Rainbow Daycare in South Richmond Hill, a neighborhood that has been included in the first phase of the rollout, which will provide 2,000 toddlers with free full-day child care this fall. The home-based child care provider is one of almost 6,000 home-based child care centers in the city, which will form a key part of Mamdani’s 2K initiative.
Mamdani announced Tuesday that School District 27, which includes parts of Ozone Park, South Ozone Park, Richmond Hill, Woodhaven, Howard Beach and Rockaways, would be included in the first phase of the rollout. The district also includes parts of Lindenwood and Springfield Gardens North.
School districts included in the initial rollout had been identified due to economic needs and child care gaps, City Hall said Tuesday.
Mamdani first announced his 2K initiative alongside Gov. Kathy Hochul in early January, pledging to provide free childcare to two-year-olds, regardless of zip code, income or family immigration status.
The program will launch with 2,000 free seats this fall and is expected to expand to full universality within four years. Hochul has allocated $73 million to fund the first phase of the rollout and a further $425 million to fund the expansion of the program next year, when the city is expected to offer 12,000 free seats.
However, Hochul is yet to announce a plan to fund the program in following years, when the number of free seats is slated to rise to 55,000. Hochul signaled that the state would fund the expansion on Tuesday, telling reporters that “the state of New York is not walking away.”
Mamdani told QNS on Wednesday that he is confident that the city will secure funding to ensure the expansion of the program beyond 2027.
“I was incredibly heartened by her (Hochul’s) remarks at yesterday’s press conference where she spoke about this being a fiscal commitment of two years, but also a commitment that extends beyond that,” Mamdani said, adding that he remains in “regular communication” with the governor on the subject.
Emmy Liss, who runs the mayor’s Child Care Office, told reporters Tuesday that the city had not exclusively focused on low-income districts for the first phase of the rollout because several neighborhoods did not have the child care infrastructure to offer 2K by September. She said that the city also identified a diverse selection of neighborhoods to emphasize that free child care would be available to families regardless of income status.
Speaking on Wednesday, Mamdani said he was confident that the city would increase child care capacity to match the rollout by the time the program reaches full capacity in four years. He added that the city avoided “the greatest temptation” of moving as fast as possible and setting unrealistic goals in favor of delivering results at every phase.
“These 2000 seats, we will deliver them this year. We will deliver 12,000 next year, so on and so forth, until every single two-year-old has a seat,” Mamdani said.
Mamdani added that the expansion will require an increase in child care workers across the city and said he would be meeting with representatives of child care workers in the coming months to “get a sense of the struggles they face.”
“We view it as our responsibility to not only advance the affordability agenda, to ensure that we’re delivering universal child care, but also to make it easier to be a child care worker in this city, because that is a crisis that they are also facing,” Mamdani said.
