New State Law Could Unlock Thousands of Child Care Seats, Critics See Risks
Originally published in
NYS Focus
on
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Despite having room to serve more children, Middletown day care owner Peggy Fuentes often has to turn away families in desperate need of care. Each of her toddler classrooms has 10 students — the state caps class sizes for that age group at 12 — but to fill the remaining seats, she’d have to hire another employee. That’s because a decades-old state regulation says day care classrooms have to have one adult for every five children between 18 and 36 months old.
With operating costs climbing across the board, from utilities to insurance, Fuentes said it simply isn’t feasible to pay another salary to accommodate just two more children.
“I have an inventory of child care spots that I’m reluctant to use because it is cost prohibitive,” said Fuentes, owner of On My Way Early Learning and Childcare Center, which serves around 240 children under 13.
New York state has some of the strictest staffing requirements in the country — stricter, in fact, than New York City’s. As state leaders allocate billions of dollars to address the child care shortage in this year’s budget, a new state law could ease those requirements and unlock new day care seats at no additional cost to providers — but only if the state agency that oversees child care decides to act on it.
In December, Governor Kathy Hochul signed legislation eliminating a provision in a 2000 social services law that has prohibited the state Office of Children and Family Services from relaxing child care staffing ratios. The new law leaves it to the agency to actually change the ratios; if it did so, the same number of workers could care for more children.
State Senator James Skoufis, who introduced the bill in 2024, told New York Focus that adjusting the ratios is “more critical than ever” amid the state’s ongoing efforts to scale up its child care sector and provide more affordable care to working parents.
Child care advocates who oppose the change are concerned having the same number of staff supervising more children would increase the risk of accidents and injuries and fail to address a root cause of the state’s child care crisis: low wages for workers.
Supporters counter that looser ratios are consistent with national norms set by the National Association for the Education of Young Children, a professional membership organization that promotes high-quality early childhood education, and that alignment with the group’s guidance would offer flexibility to providers who already operate with razor-thin profit margins.
So far, OCFS has not indicated whether it plans to update the regulations. In a statement provided to New York Focus, OCFS spokesperson Daniel Marans said the agency is “currently assessing the viability of the requested ratio change, with the goal of supporting child care providers without compromising our commitment to child safety.” The law does not impose a deadline for OCFS to make the switch.
More than 60 percent of New York’s census tracts are classified as a “child care desert,” meaning that there are three or more children under 5 waiting for every available slot, according to the state Office of Children and Family Service. Meanwhile, more than 16,000 children are unable to receive child care specifically as a result of staffing shortages that have led programs to operate under capacity. While that’s not necessarily related to staffing ratios, some think easing them could help address the shortage.
“We can provide more resources to counties and to providers all we want, but if we don’t provide the very common sense flexibility that these providers require in order to effectuate creating more seats, then the money is only going to go so far,” said Skoufis.
Skoufis introduced the bill after providers, including Fuentes, expressed their frustrations to lawmakers over being held to tougher ratios than their counterparts in New York City, where staffing requirements are set by the city Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. Day care providers in the five boroughs must have one staff member for every five children between 12 and 18 months and one for every six children who are 2 years old. In the rest of the state, it’s 1–4 and 1–5, respectively. The discrepancies are even wider for older children.
