Public Employee Press

Budget Battle
Massive rally hits Bloomberg's child-care cuts
Parents, kids and day-care workers hit the streets

By JANE LaTOUR

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg unveiled his Executive Budget May 3, revealing plans - shocking in their scope - to cut services vital to children of working-class and low-income families.

A massive labor and community fightback proved effective as last minute budget negotiations between the mayor and the City Council saved some 42,000 child care and after-school program slots in a new fiscal plan that adds $150 million to the funding. From Brooklyn to the Bronx, whole neighborhoods would have been deeply impacted if the mayor's budget won approval and eliminated 47,000 slots in the city's subsidized day care, Head Start and after-school programs. Other budget slashes would have devastated child health clinics and the Administration for Children's Services.

On May 31, thousands of parents and children, unionized day-care workers, DC 37 members and allies, including City Council members and other trade unionists, converged on City Hall Park to protest the proposed cuts.

"We say 'no' to terminating hundreds of child-care workers," said Raglan George Jr., executive director of District Council 1707, which represents the day care staff.

DC 37 Executive Director Lillian Roberts spoke at the rally, calling the proposed cuts "outrageous." Later, at the City Council, she called Bloomberg's entire budget "anti-family."


Attack on working poor

"Bloomberg wants to decimate child care in this community," said President Lee Saunders of DC 37's parent union, the American Federation
of State, County and Municipal Employees.

"This mayor is not about hope. He is not about children," said Local 372 President Santos Crespo Jr. "He is about throwing people out in the street." Local 371 President Anthony Wells called children "our most precious resource," and called on participants to "fight back."

While slashing support for these programs, the mayor wants to implement "Early Learn," a contracted-out restructuring of preschool programs that would wipe out the jobs of between 1,700 and 2,000 members of DC 1707. These cuts could damage the fiscal soundness of the Cultural Institutions Retirement System, according to David Paskin, associate director of the DC 37 Research and Negotiations Dept.

"Many cultural institutions where DC 37 members work, such as the American Museum of Natural History, the Bronx Zoo, the Brooklyn Museum, and the New York and Bronx Botanical Gardens - are members of the CIRS, and our members' pensions are paid from that system," he said. Early Learn accounted for about 9,000 of the proposed 47,000 cuts in child-care slots.

The ripple effects of cutting child-care and afterschool programs would have seriously threatened the well-being of people who depend on these services, including many DC 37 families.

Child-care programs essential

"Everybody is being squeezed so hard," said Clerical Division Grievance Rep Linda Bullock. "A lot of people have child-care issues." Although many parents cannot work without child-care and after-school programs, Mayor Bloomberg doesn't consider these programs "core services." DC 1707 Organizer Julian De Jesus says the cutting is about more than day care. "It's about the mayor's plan to drive poor people out of the city. When you look at the mayor's policies and the communities affected by the cuts, this seems to be part of the plan for gentrification."

Angela Ellington attended the May 31 rally with her two children, ages 2 and 4. "I work and I can't afford to pay more for day care," she said. "I don't know what I'm going to do."

"We are going to lose our jobs and the parents of our children are low-income. They work and they need affordable day care. They'll have to quit their jobs," said Fatima Golden, a teacher at the Star Light Daycare Center in Queens. "It's very unfair."

The City Council, which was scheduled to negotiate the budget with the mayor by June 30, aimed to restore some of the proposed cuts.

Before the final budget agreement, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn said that, based on past experience, she was "optimistic" about the outcome. "We've had great success in acting in a fiscally responsible way that preserves core services," Quinn told the Daily News.