PUBLIC TESTIMONY
Testimony by Antonio Reynoso, Borough President of Brooklyn, on Early Childhood Care Center Closures
2:30:54
·
7 min
Antonio Reynoso, Brooklyn Borough President, criticizes the Department of Education's decision to grant one-year extensions to early childhood care centers facing closure, arguing it's a political move to delay inevitable closures. He disputes DOE's claims about enrollment, lease negotiations, and funding issues for specific centers.
- Reynoso highlights discrepancies in DOE's statements about Grand Street Settlement and Nuestros Niños, including enrollment figures and lease negotiations.
- He accuses the DOE of being disingenuous and responding only to public pressure, not genuinely addressing the issues.
- Reynoso expresses concern about the long-term impact on universal childcare availability in affected communities.
Antonio Reynoso
2:30:54
I'm doing good.
2:30:56
You know I'm deeply troubled they're about to go to the public portion and it happened in my time in the city council and it's gonna happen now.
2:31:03
I don't know if one person from the Department of Education
Rita Joseph
2:31:06
Did they leave?
Antonio Reynoso
2:31:07
I think the entire team left.
2:31:10
Oh.
2:31:10
Not even a staff member to take notes for public portion.
2:32:03
Thank you for that, chair.
2:32:04
I really appreciate it.
2:32:05
And and I really don't know where to start, but what we've seen here is that we are delaying the inevitable ultimately is what's happening.
2:32:14
Throughout this entire process, we asked the Department of Education if there was something that any of these centers could do to ensure their survivability past the new deadline that has been imposed.
2:32:23
Should any of these centers have 95% enrollment, should these leases be negotiated to a decent amount, should the saturation issue not be something of concern, the the those metrics make it so that we can extend these leases long term and they did not say yes.
2:32:40
I think what's really happening here is that the mayor is punting this down till after the elections.
2:32:47
Before the closures would have happened in June 30, now they're gonna happen after the election and I think he's just trying to buy time considering the childcare closures made a lot of noise and he was in the press every single day having to answer for this.
2:32:59
So I do think it's a political decision.
2:33:01
But outside of that, just hearing the DC speak on a lot of issues that are just not factual.
2:33:06
I want to be very clear that Grand Street's enrollment, I think they have around let's say 68 children.
2:33:12
So if they have one children not enrolled, they they go below 95%.
2:33:18
So they can have 68 children out of 69 and be considered under enrollment in their eyes.
2:33:23
The negotiation of the lease for Grand Street settlement was originally seen there as a $30,000 lease going to increase to an $80,000 lease.
2:33:33
After we called the landlord, the landlord said that he is not asking for $45 a square foot, that what he was actually asking for was $27 a square foot, which is more than half of the cost of what the Department of Education is saying.
2:33:46
So in Grand Street's case, the saturation is no issue.
2:33:49
The landlord is willing to negotiate a lease that's well below the market of what the City Of New York is looking for, and they have a % enrollment, and the city is still not willing to extend their lease.
2:34:00
When you do that, they lose all credibility.
2:34:02
On the other side, when Estras Ninos, as you heard from the DC, they went in to reevaluate the amount of seats that they're saying are available in that building.
2:34:11
The city of New York, ACS, and the Department of Education have different standards for class size when it comes to to students or enrollment for students in ACS than they do for DOE.
2:34:23
So they're going in and they're gonna right size a lot of these capacity, the capacity in these buildings, which makes it so that right now, Nessos Nunez is at 76 or 80%, but tomorrow they could be at 90% with the new numbers that they're gonna get from capacity within those those things those agencies.
2:34:43
And it's just more of the nonsense that they talk about.
2:34:46
Nessos Ninos contract is is it's a what comes first, the chicken or the egg.
2:34:52
They're submitting their documents that need to be approved by the Department of Education to then for them to then apply or submit invoices, and is they're they're playing semantics and saying that they don't owe them a million dollars and they absolutely do.
2:35:05
The only reason they don't owe money from last year is that the city of New York made a payment the day after an article came out that Nueces Ninos was owed money.
2:35:13
The next day they got their money, and it's because these people respond to the energy in the streets and nothing else.
2:35:19
They only respond to organizing.
2:35:22
They don't respond to anything else.
2:35:23
And the DC, the deputy chancellor has made it very clear that this is about numbers.
2:35:28
It's about money.
2:35:29
It's not about people.
2:35:30
She says they gotta keep talking about right sizing the system and fixing the system.
2:35:34
It's all about the the the money because every single thing we've said, we've clarified across the board.
2:35:40
Nurses Nino has more than 76% enrollment.
2:35:43
Their request for is not a twenty year lease.
2:35:45
She keeps talking about a twenty year lease that doesn't exist.
2:35:48
It's a ten year request from Ernesto Esninos for it's a ten year lease extension at two to 3% with your standard lease renewals under the city of New York.
2:35:56
With Grand Street, same thing.
2:35:58
They're asking for fifteen, they understand that the negotiations don't happen, they start high and they come low.
2:36:04
They don't even want to negotiate.
2:36:05
This landlord in Grand Street hasn't had a contract and hasn't met with SCA since 2017.
2:36:11
And SCA is saying that there's communication problems.
2:36:13
There isn't.
2:36:14
The landlord would have loved the contract back then, but SCA was having trouble communicating with them.
2:36:18
We called him one time and he told us everything we needed to know.
2:36:22
So to me, it looks like negotiations weren't happening in earnest from SCA side.
2:36:26
So they're just being disingenuous.
2:36:28
They're not being honest.
2:36:29
And I really don't think that we are going to be back here again about these four or five centers.
2:36:35
There is no intention for the city of New York to actually solve for this issue and it's gonna be a problem.
2:36:40
And also the city of New York believes in universal childcare is something they actually care about with smaller class sizes coming along with the Department of Education alongside the need to expand seats for potential universal childcare, we're not gonna have spaces in this community.
2:36:58
It's gonna be at a community that won't have any opportunities to have universal childcare because we will have no spaces.
2:37:03
And then when they talk about sites that are available, Nuecero Dos Ninos is the only site in the South Side Of Williamsburg.
2:37:09
There is another site about 10 blocks away that's the closest thing to.
2:37:13
10 blocks is not is not a distance that that we would have parents have to travel when they could literally walk two blocks to this center.
2:37:21
I think it's all made up, we're all wasting time, and what we need to do is organize, which is why we're gonna get back to organizing because we don't think this is sufficient and the Department of Education did nothing here.
2:37:31
But I wanna thank you because the problem we have is that if we don't keep bringing attention to this issue, really speaking to the facts, because that's what we're here to do.
2:37:41
We've changed all their facts and the outcome stayed the same.
2:37:44
All their facts have been changed.
2:37:46
They said four students in West Los Ninos, that has changed, doesn't matter.
2:37:50
The lease is not $80,000 in Grand Street.
2:37:53
It's it's half of that, doesn't matter.
2:37:56
Every time we change something, none of it matters because it never mattered.
2:38:00
It's about shutting these sensors down, and that's what the city of New York is trying to do.
2:38:04
So thank you
Rita Joseph
2:38:04
so much for this hearing chairwoman.