Low-income Bronx families will soon have more child care options for their young children.
Six new Head Start centers will launch in the borough, with some facilities opening as early as this year, offering families with children up to the age of 5 free, year-round care.
Grand Street Settlement, a social services provider, told Gothamist it received $18.4 million from the federal government to expand its early childhood services in child care deserts around the city. The six new Head Start sites will open in the Bronx and another in Sunset Park to serve 583 children whose families fall below certain income levels.
“When the city catches a cold, the Bronx gets pneumonia, because of the lack of resources, because of the concentration of poverty,” said Robert Cordero, CEO of Grand Street Settlement. “Our strategy is, we should take our high quality childcare services to where they are needed and to build programs that address the needs of the whole family.”
Grand Street Settlement already runs Head Start programs in the Lower East Side and Brooklyn. Cordero said families in the Bronx have five times less access to a Head Start program than families in the Lower East Side.
Head Start is a federally-funded program and offers comprehensive services for children, but also for their families, including health, mental health care, assistance with housing, employment or education.
“When we engage with families like that on the upfront, it changes the entire trajectory of their life and their family’s life,” Cordero added.
Most New Yorkers can’t afford to pay for child care despite the city’s free programs for 3- and 4-year-olds. And child care costs are among the major factors driving young families out of the city. But the problem is more acute in the Bronx, where households in Mott Haven and Hunts Point spend as much as 63% of their income on infant and toddler care, according to the Citizens’ Committee for Children of New York.
The nonprofit child advocacy group also found only 1% or less of families in those Bronx neighborhoods — where median annual income ranges from $30,000 to $43,000 — and others like Highbridge, East Tremont and Morrisania can afford to pay for infant and toddler care, based on federal affordability standards. Federal guidelines say families shouldn’t pay more than 7% of their household income to care for one child.
“Now families really don’t have to choose between daycare and food or daycare and paying their rent. This is really going to be a game changer for families that are really struggling,” said Rigaud Noel, executive director of New Settlement, a social services provider in the Bronx that will house one of the new Head Start programs run by Grand Street Settlement in its existing community center.
“Families really don’t get a break. And so this is really a moment of relief for them,” Noel said.
Early Head Start and Head Start is offered to children from birth up to 5 years old, with the goal of preparing them for kindergarten. Programs can be based in a center or can involve an educator visiting a child or a pregnant person’s home to work with a parent and provide services.
To qualify for Head Start, families need to earn below certain incomes. In New York City that means a two-person household earning $20,440 or less a year and a family of four earning $31,200 or less are eligible.
Willing Chin-Ma, chief operating officer for Grand Street Settlement, said while they ramp up to open all six Bronx sites, they will also partner with about two dozen existing providers that run programs in their homes or at locations and for children that would otherwise be eligible for Head Start.
That includes providing training for staff, bringing in mental health staff workers to conduct screenings, paying for teachers to go back to school and helping families apply for the services they need.
“Head Start is helping families stay in their communities, and boost with all this comprehensive wraparound service,” Chin-Ma said. “We’re targeting the areas where there are not enough child care centers.”
Chin-Ma expects all sites will be running by 2026. Families interested in applying for the new sites can reach out to Grand Street Settlement.