What Day-care Workers and Preschool Teachers Really Think About Their Jobs

Photo: Anna Nahabed/Getty Images/iStockphoto

Child care in New York City is both notoriously hard to find and outrageously expensive — recently deemed unaffordable for about 80 percent of families who live here. But contrary to logic, the high prices and high demand have not led to a profitable road for child-care providers. Instead, in part because the U.S. lacks national child-care subsidies and tax credits, and in part because of the unpredictable availability and funding for the city’s pre-K and 3-K programs, the business is barely, if at all, economically viable. Mayor Adams cut pre-K and 3-K spots earlier this year, and some community-based providers in the program say they’ve been waiting months for city reimbursements.

Here, six child-care workers — some in nursery schools serving tony Brooklyn neighborhoods, some in home-based day cares in Queens and the Bronx — candidly share their day-to-day lives in the face of a chaotic and untenable child-care economy. Their stories reflect a convergence of challenges, including teacher burnout, behavioral problems in children, and parents requiring ever-longer working hours, as well as deep love for the kids they serve.

Alisalda Coronado is a Spanish-speaking provider at Joallys Family Group Daycare, an in-home day care in the Bronx that currently serves 12 families with 15 children, ages 1 to 12, among them.

This child-care environment is a lovely home. We have two rooms with a small table and chairs for meals and art projects, a play kitchen, a reading rug, and cribs for the babies. It’s small, but we keep it very clean. The child is given affection, respect, love, dedication. He is fed. He is protected. The older kids come after school. The little ones come at 7:30 a.m. and leave at 5:30 p.m.

The majority of our mothers are home health aides, immigrants from the Dominican Republic, Salvador, Gambia. As a mother, as a Latina, I know what it’s like for them. Many of these families leave grandparents and parents in the Dominican Republic or in Africa, and they have to send them an allowance for their medicines.

These families receive child-care vouchers from the city, but the subsidy does not come close to the cost of day care. The amount of staff, and the rent, insurance, and taxes, have made my expenses higher than $435 a week for one child. And right now, an infant pays me $325 a week. For older children, I get even less.

None of the families have the financial capacity to afford the cost of full-time child care, and this causes difficulties. A mother brings her child Monday and Wednesday, because that’s when she’s working, and she pays for that time only. Then on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, I have that space empty and I have to pay the same amount of staff.

We also need more staff than we had before the pandemic. That’s because there are more children with more challenging behaviors. They are doing unsafe things, like running out of the classroom. Or they have a meltdown and they need one-on-one attention to calm down. Before, I could run the day care with two people — another person and me — no problem. Now, for the same number of children, I have a staff of five on rotation.

And we have four children who need speech and occupational therapy. We’re the ones who noticed the signs and told the parents. We are more than child-care providers. We are raising these children. Many of these mothers may see the behavior, but they don’t know what it means. They just think, Oh, he is like that. But we see them all day long.

Although I connect them with resources, many of my families do not understand or do not know the importance of early intervention. The children who can’t speak well get frustrated more easily. Say I can’t reach a ball, I might ask for it. But when they can’t ask for it, they start to cry. Then it’s more tense for everyone because a child is crying.

The city does have therapists available, but only remotely on tablets. I told one mother to try it, but I know that the child is not going to be able to learn on a tablet. I haven’t seen it work yet. A child needs people.

Families — we have dreams about our children, and we see them as perfect. They are the doctor who is going to graduate. And, then, unfortunately, we are faced with this situation of a developmental delay. There is some natural denial. It’s hard to get bad news from a child-care provider.

It’s an uphill battle trying to make a living at this. There is no profit in this business even though the benefit it brings to the state and the federal government is very important. Inflation is getting us. We pay $15 an hour, the city’s minimum wage. Food is expensive. Cleaning products are more expensive too, and we’re using more of them.

But these kids, when they go to pre-K at 4 years old, their teachers are very pleased. They congratulate the mothers because this child knows how to behave in the classroom. And the mothers come and say, “He got this from you in the child care.” And this fills my soul.

With her husband, Lisa, who asked to go by a pseudonym, co-owns a small private Montessori preschool serving 40 children ages 3 to 6 in Brooklyn. The annual tuition (September to June) can run as high as $24,800 for extended days until 6 p.m. The school has two mixed-age classrooms, five full-time teachers, and one part-time teacher. The school also runs a day camp in the summer.

I’ve been a Montessori teacher for two decades. There is no other job that I would ever find as compelling as this. I’m just as enthusiastic as I was when I started.

My husband and I started this Montessori in 2009. My husband cares for our kids at home while also serving as our business manager. We both rely solely on our income from the school; ironically, we could not afford to send our kids here. They each come for a week in the summer. It’s kind of like the chef who goes through the McDonald’s drive-thru on the way home from work.

Since the pandemic, the parents we serve have more need for extended hours because they’re back to commuting and working more. After-care is completely full. We pay teachers $23-to-$25 an hour. Payroll has gone up with inflation, but we have not raised our rates beyond the typical small percentage. Our tuition is significantly lower than most schools in this neighborhood.

This is a particularly vulnerable time for our business. Our enrollment is full for next year, but at one point this year, though, we had only 33 children enrolled in the school, down from the typical 40 we expect. We were full when we ran the admissions process but then had an unprecedented number of withdrawals, probably due to the writers’ strike because a lot of our parents work in entertainment. We eventually filled four spots throughout the year, bringing us to 37 students, but because we prorate tuition for families who enroll mid-year, the loss was still significant. Rent and payroll are far and away our biggest expenses, and those don’t go down just because enrollment is down.

Because of all that, we’ve taken a significant hit in our take-home pay; we’re likely down about 40 to 50 percent in income this year. John and I are dipping into our personal savings to weather this.

Since the pandemic, I’ve noticed that I have more part-time teachers taking time off for convenience reasons — say, going to the DMV in the middle of the week even though we have spring break coming up and they could do it then. I’m actually getting texted the morning of. It’s hard to get across that this is very much an in-person job. I’ve had to leap in and cover classrooms a lot more often.

Families coming in this year had their babies during the pandemic, and if it was their first child, they made the transition into parenthood in isolation. We have more parents asking for workshops related to family life and parenting. They’re wanting a lot of reassurance that things are on the right track.

Meanwhile, I think for the children since the pandemic … We had not experienced children with this level of expectation of adults — with this level of heightened urgency. We have had 3- and 4-year-olds displaying the distress tolerance of an 18-month-old. Maybe they’re waiting for some googly eyes for a craft or they have to wait for their snack. It’s true frustration when they can’t get their shoe on and a teacher isn’t right there to remedy their problem right away.

Another thing in the back of my mind constantly is the red tape. Child care is probably one of the most heavily overseen sectors in the city. In any given year, we can be inspected without notice by the Fire Department, the Department of Buildings, Public Health, as well as by an early-childhood consultant sent by the Department of Health. These are all completely necessary and required, but it is a lot of work on the administrative side. Take something like filing for teachers to be approved with the Department of Health. Pre-pandemic, that used to take a month or two. Now it can take upwards of a year, and we’re continually submitting the same paperwork to stay in compliance.

The idea that we should be offering families financial aid keeps me up at night. I find it interesting that in a sector that is primarily run by ethnic minorities and women, we are consistently expected to subsidize families without any support in the form of tax breaks or government incentives. This expectation absolves the government from stepping in and continues to put the onus on the day-care operator to make child care more affordable for families when the cost of providing that care is increasing rapidly.

Vivian Edwards runs an in-home day care in Jamaica, Queens, that currently serves 14 children.

I’ve been taking care of the neighbors’ kids since I was 10 years old, and now I’m 74.

Here, the children’s parents work for the police department, as home-health-care aides, in the Amazon warehouse. They come from Nigeria, Haiti, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and America too. The babies start at 6 a.m. and go ’til 7:30 p.m. Of the three children who come after school, two are my youngest grandchildren. They are 5 and 7 years old.

This is the home I grew up in. We live upstairs, and the child care is downstairs. There’s a play area, a room with cribs, and a kitchen for the children to sit down at a table and eat; we feed three meals a day, and I don’t buy prepackaged. We cook here. My brother and I only have about $10,000 left on the mortgage. He pays the mortgage, and I pay the utilities.

I have not been paid in about five years. I’m doing it free because there’s not enough money coming in to take care of my assistants and myself and my bills. I live off my Social Security. I’m trying to keep going for another two years ’til all my babies are going to school. That gives my assistants time to find another job.

Most people can’t afford my price, and so if the government’s not paying their subsidies, I can’t take them. They try to make it hard for the parents to get help. You’re in the wind.

I’ve been watching one mother’s child since August, and I have not been paid yet. They keep giving her the runaround and turning her down for the child-care voucher. She’s from Nigeria, and I filled out her application because she doesn’t understand all the paperwork.

The other day, I sat her down and told her she had ’til the end of this month to try and get help. She’s a home health aide. She’s not making a whole lot of money. Plus she sends money for her other child who is back with her mother in Africa. I told her we have to figure this out because I don’t want to take her to court. I asked her, “Would you work for free? No? Well don’t expect me to.” It’s hard. She has a sweet little girl. I know she needs the care.
Not only do parents have a hard time getting the money but the vouchers go up a lot slower than our costs do. With the subsidy, I get about $4 an hour per child. I have to pay my employees $16 an hour, and I struggle every week to pay them. I can’t give them insurance or benefits. I can’t pay them for holidays or vacations. The government does not give us enough money to live on. I’m very lucky my workers are so loyal. I’ve had the same two workers forever. I have one more who comes if I absolutely need her. She started when she was 15, and now she’s 25.

My food costs have gone up about 20 percent. The children have eggs, pancakes, or waffles for breakfast. Lunch they might have grilled cheese, yogurt, soup. And for dinner it’s no telling. Sometimes they have salmon, shrimp, hamburgers, chicken, turkey.

What keeps me going is the love the children give me. When I come downstairs, I feel like I’m a celebrity. “Nonna is here!” I’m not Italian, but I go by Nonna because when I had my first grandchild, I said, “I’m too young to be called Grandma.” My daughter-in-law said, “Well, Nonna is Italian and Greek.” I said, “That’s what it is!” And I’ve been Nonna ever since.

Sarah Brown is the director of the Williamsburg Neighborhood Nursery School, a private nonprofit preschool with 60 students.

I’m in my 12th year here. I started as a teacher for the 3-year-old class. I’ve noticed the neighborhood shifting. When I started, there were a lot more freelancers, parents doing pickup versus a nanny. The neighborhood’s getting more and more expensive and affluent with the high-rises going up.
It’s been a really challenging time to keep a school open in general. We have peers, particularly in Manhattan, who have closed their doors. We’re almost full. When I first came here, there was no 3-K, so everyone who wanted their child in school needed to have a private option. Now, with the increased public free 3- and 4-K, we have room for a couple more in our 3’s and 4’s. We’ve started offering tiered tuition, so about 30 percent of our families are on financial aid. For full time, five days a week, from September to June, it’s $30,900 or $26,700 with the discount. So that does cut into the money we have to spend. We’re a nonprofit, and by and large we spend what we take in on teachers.

We are a preschool, not a day care. Our lead teachers have master’s degrees. Paying our teachers is a huge percentage of our total budget: health insurance, IRA. Those costs continue to go up and they are not something I want to compromise on. We’re competing with public schools for teachers. We were looking for a while at offering publicly-funded 3K, but then the city cut funding and seats.

Lately, we’ve been thinking a lot about what families need. Like, are we losing out to places that are offering longer hours? Our full day is until 4 p.m. Developmentally, it’s the right amount of school for children. There are more options in the neighborhood that have longer day-care hours, 7:30 in the morning to 6:30 at night. That fits the needs of a parent working 60 hours a week, versus maybe a freelancer with more flexibility.

But there are trade-offs to going to a day care with those hours. Here, there’s an expectation that 2-year-olds will zip up their own coats and walk four blocks to the park. A 2-year-old who is doing a nine-hour day in child care, I imagine, might get a little more tired, so the teachers might take them to the park in a stroller. Autonomy and independence is a big part of what children are practicing here and what feels so good about being in school here.
There was a time post-lockdown when we had to be really strict about sickness, which is tough for a preschool. For a period of time, parents were super-understanding. Then they became increasingly frustrated when their child was sent home for a cold or a cough because children are sniffly and they get sick all the time. And on our end, there was a pressure to have kids not get COVID. I think we’re now back in something that feels a lot more familiar to me — if the child has a fever, the child is miserable and not enjoying themselves here, they go home. But if they have a little cough, we wash hands more, we keep an eye on it. And every sniffle is not going to mean no child care.

For our teachers, we have a certain amount of sick or personal days. Teachers are more prone to use all of their time than they were pre-pandemic, and I want them to. But it means that we have a floater this year for the first time — a built-in sub.

To work here, you have to love children. We have people who have been here for eight or ten years. Typically, we hire assistants who are younger and earlier in their careers. I have had a few in the past couple of years who have left midyear, even though they were really happy here. They’re changing careers, trying out something else.

I wonder if it’s generational or this period of time where there’s a shift in people’s relationship to work. It just never used to happen that teachers would say midyear, “This is nice, but I’m going to go.” As a teacher, imagine leaving a class of children who have bonded with you in February? Even if it was a miserable scenario, I would stick it out ’til the end of the year.

Azadeh Jamalian owns the Giant Room, a for-profit after-school care provider in Manhattan and Queens.

My program partners with different community-based organizations to run after-school programs in 15 schools in Manhattan and Queens — mostly public, a couple private. There are STEM, coding, and design courses. We had about 500 students last year.

In practice, it’s a challenge. We pay our instructors $20-to-$25 an hour, and we do extensive training. The programs run after school for just two or three hours, but we pay people for a minimum of four or five hours a shift to cover instructors’ time spent planning activities and writing reports on the kids’ projects. It gets very expensive. And still, by its nature, the job is part time, and that means a lot of turnover. You have students, people in between jobs, and then you lose them and you have to start over. It’s hard for the kids when there are new people coming in all the time. We do have some volunteers and interns, but we shouldn’t have to rely on them. In the end, I think the solution will be government agencies and foundations creating the infrastructures that are needed.

The other challenge is materials and space. Teachers are not happy sharing their classrooms with us after hours. They come back and things are moved around. Parents always say they want hands-on learning, but there is no storage for materials. Instructors have to pack everything up and bring it back next week.

I think there is this big frustration for everyone involved. For families, the program is really expensive and it isn’t always the quality they hope for. I think they pay about $700 a semester. It’s $1,100 at the private schools, which makes it easier on us. But that doesn’t cover our costs, not by a long shot.

We have a bunch of different sources of revenue to make up the difference. We did a week of spring-break programming with the DOE, and we still have not been paid — they pay you after you provide the service and not right after. We just got a grant from the Robin Hood Foundation for working with teachers in classrooms. We have some angel investors. We started a nonprofit arm because the schools told us it would be easier for them that way. Every year doing the taxes, I’m like, Why did I say “yes”?

Robyn Koenig is a teacher at Acelero, a for-profit provider of the Head Start Program in North Brunswick Township in New Jersey, which provides care to 110 children in eight classrooms and is open Monday through Friday from 7:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. The children range in age from 6 weeks up to pre-K.

Head Start is free, but you need very low income to qualify. To give you an idea, we have a rule against children wearing open-toed sandals and Crocs on premises. And I had a parent reach out and say, “I don’t have any income. I can’t buy any shoes.” I put her in touch with one of our family advocates. I’ve had two children in the past four years who are homeless. In my classroom just this year, the families speak Russian, Spanish, Turkish, Urdu, and French. We use Google Translate a lot.

I have 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds in my classroom. One of my children needs one-on-one care, so there are three adults in a class of 15. We have a wait list, especially for infants. We had to close one of our two infant classrooms this year because the funding got pulled.

I’ve been teaching for 26 years. I get paid the district pay, commensurate with my years of experience, but I don’t get any of the perks: pension, union. I don’t work for the district, I work for Acelero, which is a for-profit that contracts with the district.

Coming back from the pandemic, I definitely noticed changes in the kids. Behavior issues and speech delays are the two main ones. But this is the first year I’m teaching pandemic babies. The children born in May 2020, June 2020, in the height of everything. This is their first school experience. They’ve been home not doing anything. They didn’t know how to interact with kids their age. They didn’t know how to play; they had only played with siblings or mom and dad. They’re hitting, smacking things out of other kids’ hands. They don’t know how to use your words to get something.

I see that their speech has been affected because of seeing adults in masks when they were young. You have to see the forming of words to know how it’s done. I have a lot of kids who don’t bring their lips together to make sounds like F. Or they struggle with certain sounds like blends. PLU, TRU. I’ve had to use mirrors to show them I want your mouth to look like mine.

But I love this job. I love how innocent they are and how honest they are. They’re just going to ask you, “Hey, why do you have a red spot on your face?” I love when the lightbulb goes on and they start to learn how to problem-solve and share the space.

A lot of people think teachers have it easy because we have the summers off. I really wish everyone could be a substitute in this classroom for, like, three days. Governor Chris Christie called us “glorified babysitters”?! We’re writing reports, taking notes. We’re not just sitting on the floor playing for eight hours a day. The hardest thing is recognition and appreciation. I don’t want a doughnut. My dream is to become a master teacher and put my knowledge together with other teachers.