New York City’s free 2-K program will expand to include an additional 10,000 seats across all five boroughs beginning next fall, according to an announcement made Monday by Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Gov. Kathy Hochul.
The initial 2,000 seats opened this September across five districts in every borough but Staten Island.
“We are just so, so thrilled to be able to announce this next step in expanding access to 2-K,” said Emmy Liss, executive director of the Mayor’s Office of Child Care and Early Childhood Education.
In an interview Friday with The 74, she described the move as “part of this broader commitment we have made as an administration to ultimately provide free, high-quality childcare to every child under 5 … as we really make this shift to recognize childcare for the public good that it is.”
Mamdani and Hochul were set to announce the expansion from a Bronx trampoline park on Monday, surrounded by families and childcare providers.
“For far too many New York City families, the joy of welcoming a child comes with a terrifying set of questions: How will I afford child care? Will I need to give up my job? Will I be forced to leave the city I love?” said Mamdani said in a release. “Today, for 10,000 more families, we have an answer.”
In New York City, a family needs to make over $330,000 a year — the equivalent of 10 minimum wage jobs — to afford the average cost of child care for a single 2-year-old.
Earlier this year, Hochul committed more than $1.2 billion to help advance the city’s vision of universal childcare, including around $500 million to fund the first two years of 2-K.
The state’s investment is also supporting a number of other initiatives. Two weeks ago, the mayor announced he’d be moving 10,000 kids off of a voucher waitlist, providing them all with free childcare. And he’s pledged almost $700,000 towards early childhood educator apprenticeships to help better recruit, train and retain these teachers.
This fall’s expansion will bring free programming to 17 of the city’s 32 geographic school districts and will also expand capacity in the five districts already being served. New seats will open across dozens of neighborhoods including Bedford-Stuyvesant, Coney Island, Corona, Jamaica Hills, East Harlem and Randall’s Island.
Mamdani also made good on his promise that Staten Island would be part of the 2027 expansion after the borough was left out — or once again forgotten, as some angry Staten Island officials charged — in the initial rollout.
The announcement comes just over a month after a bumpy rollout of the initial 2,000 seats. Delayed payments and contracts left a number of providers scrambling to open, without months worth of city funding. Mamdani ultimately pledged $43 million to make sure all classrooms were operational, though a number of centers welcomed kids without receiving contract registrations. When asked Friday if all contracts had since gone out, Liss told The 74 “the vast majority” had been registered or were pending with the comptroller’s office.
She added that while the mayor’s office is “incredibly proud that on the first day of school all of our 2-K programs opened,” they also recognize that the delays in the run-up were “really unacceptable and do not represent the way that we, as a city, believe that we should be working with our childcare providers and partners.”
Funding and contract delays have long plagued the city’s early childhood system; they appear to be particularly brutal this year thanks to a confluence of factors, including a restructuring and scaling back of the department under former Mayor Eric Adams.
Liss said her office has been working toward systemic change and improvement by reforming and modernizing systems; improving communication and transparency with providers; and significantly expanding hiring to address some of the staffing gaps that contributed to the delays. Mamdani has committed to hiring over 200 new city employees who will focus on early childhood education.
But a number of those actually running centers remain skeptical. Millie Carbajal, owner of M&M 24-HR Daycare in the Bronx, said historically providers have been forced to join networks that don’t pay them on time, leading to significant financial stressors, which she worries will persist under Mamdani’s expansion. She also argued childcare workers still aren’t being paid a living wage.
Rebecca Scott, a Bronx mom whose 2-year-old son is currently enrolled in the pilot 2-K program, echoed some of these concerns, emphasizing how important it is for providers to be adequately compensated as access expands.
From a parent’s perspective, though, she’s been “very delighted” with her son’s program so far. Scott said she’s been impressed by the caliber of teachers, the class size, the dietician-approved meals and the play-based curriculum.
Scott said that had her son not gotten one of the coveted first 2,000 slots, she and her husband would have had to make real sacrifices. He works for the city and she is an independent public health consultant. Without 2-K, they would have kept their son enrolled in part-time care, forcing her to “fit in work around my husband’s hours, which obviously is not ideal career-wise and also compensation-wise.”
This fall, 2-K will continue to be delivered through center-based and licensed family-run programs, and the model will remain full-day, all year round.
Liss said contracting with these home-based family programs will remain a major focus for the administration since, “we know that in some of the city’s past early childhood expansions, home-based providers have not had as much of a seat at the table.”
For many families with very young children, she added, this type of learning environment is most comfortable. Of the first 2,000 2K seats, “a large portion” are in these programs, she said, though official enrollment numbers won’t be available until later this fall.
Within the next week, the mayor’s office plans to release a survey for existing providers as well as new ones interested in offering 2-K services.
Of the upcoming expansion, Scott, the Bronx mom, said she thinks it’s “incredible.”
“I mean, the cost of full-time childcare is over $20,000 a year, and that could be half of a Bronxite’s salary, and so it’s really inaccessible at the moment,” she said. “The expansion to all of the Bronx — and eventually to all of New York City — is completely game-changing for working families.”