With more details available almost one month after the announcement was made, the possible closure of Morningside Heights day care center has teachers fearing they may soon be jobless.
The city’s Children’s Services Administration recently told the Harbor Morningside Children’s Center, located at 120th Street and Manhattan Avenue, that it was one of the city-funded childcare sites slated for closure at the end of the year to save money.
The center provides a preschool and an after-school program for elementary school students almost completely free of charge to low-income residents. The high cost of rent and utilities, which the city pays for, coupled with the center being under-enrolled, led to the site being one of 15 chosen to close, according to ACS and Harbor Morningside officials.
Harbor Morningside’s director Rory Scott said two weeks ago that he had not directly heard about the closure, and instead learned about it secondhand at an ACS meeting on Jan. 29.
Michael Marrone, executive director of Boys and Girls Harbor, the organization that operates the day care center, explained that he had deliberately waited to notify the center.
“I didn’t say anything to anyone, because I didn’t want to start a panic,” Marrone said. “ACS said I said other things, but until something is definite, you don’t make an announcement. You don’t want to give false hope or make people demoralized.”
He added, “I had a plan about how I was going to communicate with them after I knew what was going on. It’s just that people tend not to hear the word ‘tentative.’”
At least one teacher, Keisha Kennedy, has said that Marrone’s plan didn’t work out.
“Morale is down, very low,” she said. “Teachers are worried they’ll be out of a job and won’t have anywhere else to go.”
The site’s closure is still tentative. It will be presented before the city council’s general welfare committee on March 8, and if passed, the final decision would be forwarded to the City Council, according to ACS spokesperson Sharman Stein.
“We’re going to work with the programs and do all due diligence going forward if everything approved,” said Stein, who declined to comment further as discussions are ongoing.
Marrone said that due to the city’s financial crunch, he thinks there is an 80 percent chance that the center, which houses a preschool and an after-school program for elementary school students, will be closed.
“From what I understand, it costs the city $400,000 to operate that facility from a real estate perspective,” he added. “It’s not I disagree or I agree with the city, but I understand it. There are very limited dollars.”
Boys and Girls Harbor has been dealing with economic problems of its own, and just this week voted to consolidate all of its services, from preschools to a charter high school, under one roof at its headquarters on East 104th Street.
If the Morningside center does close, ACS has said it will help parents find seats in other ACS centers or provide them with vouchers to use elsewhere.
Parents have expressed concerns that there aren’t any nearby sites that would take the vouchers, but Stein disagreed.
“There are other ACS-contracted sites nearby—that’s how we made a decision, lease cost and the availability of other ACS care,” Stein said. “I assume there are places that may not take them, but there are private, home-based, and contracted centers that take them. There are many choices.”
The city has been trying to fill seats in their childcare programs for years, and started a program called Project Full Enrollment in 2008 to encourage centers to better market their services to the community.
The system currently works so that the city pays day care providers for capacity—if they have space for 40 students and enroll 20, the city still pays for 40.
Stein said the program was not related to the closings, but Scott acknowledged that his center had vacancies.
“We’ve had issues with enrollment … but we don’t think any centers should be closed,” Scott said.
Some residents were unaware that the Morningside center had run into financial difficulty.
“I haven’t heard anything about them shutting down. That’s pretty surprising if they were to do that, because they gave me a job here just a month ago,” said Ron Williams, a janitor at Harbor.
Denis Smith, who works across the street from the day care center, said he hadn’t seen any evidence of problems at the day care. “I see parents and children coming in and out of there all the time, but it doesn’t seem like anything is going to change,” he said. “It still seems the same every day, and I haven’t heard at all about it closing.”
Kim Kirschenbaum contributed reporting to this article.
COMMENTS
Comments will be moderated in accordance with our comment policy