Nassau day care providers say delays in county subsidies may drive them out of business

Nassau County’s home-based day care providers say late payments from the county’s Department of Social Services are forcing some to cut staff hours and run up credit card debt, problems they say could drive them out of business.

In interviews, several providers described a roughly monthlong delay in tuition payments from the department, which administers a state program subsidizing child care for nearly 5,000 families so that parents can work or look for work. One provider said she was owed money going back to August for caring for two children with special needs. Generally, local departments of social service have 21 calendar days to process child care provider claims. 

Some providers said they were owed thousands of dollars. One said that, until recently, she was owed more than $30,000. Several providers said the department accepted communications only by fax and they were unable to reach department staff by phone or email.

"We’re behind because we’re not being paid on time," said Kimberly Burke-Petty, who cares for 20 children at her West Hempstead day care, Petty’s Playhouse II. At an April 23 Nassau County Legislature meeting, Burke-Petty said that payments to some providers had come as much as six months late. In an interview, she said the county had not paid her for March and owed more than $30,000. A subsequent payment brought that amount down to about $24,000, but the county’s late payments have already caused her to incur bank fees and pushed her behind on her own bills, she said.

Some parents said they also waited months to learn if they were eligible for day care tuition assistance, even though state regulations say they must be notified within 45 days of applying. Some said they paid market rate for day care, money they could ill afford, while they were waiting.

Spike in day care applications

In a statement forwarded by a county representative, Nassau DSS Commissioner José L. López attributed the problem to a "tremendous increase in the number of applications, and we are currently hiring more people to process the claims." Nassau spokesman Chris Boyle did not make López available for an interview.

Several providers said the program at issue was the Child Care Assistance Program, or CCAP, overseen by the state’s Office of Children and Family Services but administered locally by the Department of Social Services in most counties. Recent changes to the state program increased the number of eligible families.

OCFS spokeswoman Karen Male said in a statement that the office "continues to work closely with our partners in Nassau County to ensure they can fulfill their obligation to deliver payments to child care providers as quickly as possible."

CCAP provides tuition assistance on a sliding scale. The income ceiling for the program as of June was $91,250 for a family of three. Market-rate child care would take a hefty chunk of that income. In 2024, according to federal Department of Labor data, infant center-based care — the most expensive type of care, partly because it is the most labor-intensive — cost families on Long Island an estimated median $18,742.

In Nassau in February, the latest month for which statistics were available, 4,886 families participated in CCAP, up from 4,296 in February 2024, according to state records. Participation was 3,205 in February 2019 before dipping to as low as 2,098 in 2020, during the pandemic, before it began climbing.

Nassau has 1,174 day care facilities, according to the state, including 780 operating out of residences.

In Suffolk, 3,175 families participated in CCAP in February, up from 1,193 in 2021. Michael Martino, a county spokesman, wrote in an email that the average processing time for payments to child care vendors in April was 24 days. The county’s caseload was up 26% since January 2024, he wrote.

From 2020 to 2025, staffing in Nassau’s roughly $613 million Department of Social Services rose from 884 to 949, but the number of employees in job titles like caseworker and social welfare examiner has remained relatively flat. The county currently has job postings for entry-level caseworker and social welfare examiner positions.

Justine Hanif, Nassau’s director of Day Care Services, did not respond to an interview request, but in an April 24 letter to day care providers, she wrote that delays in payment processing were "recent" and that payments were approximately two weeks behind. The delays were "beyond the control of this department," she wrote, adding the causes of the delays — which she did not identify — "were both on a local and statewide level."

Manhattan-based think tank Fiscal Policy Institute, in a 2024 paper, wrote that changes to CCAP had increased eligibility and participation statewide. In fiscal 2024, the state expanded eligibility to 85% of the state median income, the maximum allowed under federal rules, and in fiscal 2023, the state increased the value of CCAP vouchers from the 69th percentile of market prices to the 80th percentile. The state also lowered the number of hours parents must work to be eligible for the program from 20 hours per week to 10 hours.

Despite those changes, high child care costs and scant availability continue to challenge families across Long Island and New York, the state comptroller’s office wrote in a February report. "The availability of affordable child care has an effect on whether many parents — particularly mothers — can enter the workforce or how many hours they are able to work," Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli said. 

Shoshana Hershkowitz, campaign manager of the Empire State Campaign for Child Care, a coalition of parents and educators, called Nassau’s delays "deeply concerning."

"We saw a lifeline of COVID dollars, but those are gone at this point," she said. "Kids need stability and consistency, and if the people who provide that are unable to keep the doors open, then we’ve got a real problem."

Struggling to make ends meet

The profit margin for child care providers is so thin — usually less than 1%, according to a 2021 U.S. Treasury Department report — that many struggle to make ends meet. Late payment can send a day care business into a death spiral, Hershkowitz said, forcing staffing cuts that prevent a provider from operating at enrollment capacity because of state-mandated teacher-to-child ratios. "A month or two without full enrollment can erase their margins," according to the Treasury report.

Burke said carrying the county arrears was already taking a personal and financial toll. She works as much as 10 to 12 hours a day, she said, but "we are burning out because we can’t hire somebody ... If I hire somebody, I’ve got to pay them." 

Chandra Fogg, who runs ABC 123 Childcare in West Hempstead, said she had resorted to using her personal credit cards to buy essentials like food for children in her care. "It’s hard to catch up," she said.

Janna Rodriguez, who owns Innovative Daycare Corp. in Freeport, said the payment delays would push some of her colleagues out of child care. "The fact is, businesses are going to have to close," said Rodriguez, who is Nassau's representative for CSEA/VOICE, a union representing independent child care educators, but said she did not speak for the union.

Rodriguez, who said she was owed payments from August, said Nassau had taken as long as three months to determine whether some families met eligibility requirements.

"After a week or two [without child care], you’re going to lose the job," she said. "No job is going to wait three months for you to get child care."

One parent, Shayla Brown of Westbury, said she mailed DSS an application for tuition assistance after her daughter, Kenzie, was born one and a half years ago, and fell into a bureaucratic limbo: DSS told her she was approved, but told her day care provider, Kuwana Manley of Mini Miracles in Hempstead, that she was not. When Brown called to try to sort out the confusion, "they never picked up," she said. "You leave a voicemail, but they never call you back." Brown said she paid Manley a discounted rate of $200 per week for nearly two months before DSS approved her application.

Another mother, Niasia Harding of Hempstead, who is just starting her career as a behavioral intervention specialist and also sends her daughter to Mini Miracles, said she waited about six months for DSS to approve tuition assistance when her daughter was born almost four years ago, then weeks more this spring as she tried to recertify for the program.

Harding said her daughter, Aniyah, learned to walk and use the potty in day care. At morning drop-off, "she runs in and jumps all over her friends." 

Harding said the possibility that some providers could go out of business was unnerving. "I literally don’t have anyone to watch my daughter," she said. "If I didn’t have this, I don’t know what I would do."

Jarvis Brown, Long Island regional president for CSEA, Nassau’s largest employee union, which represents social services workers as well as some day care providers through CSEA/VOICE, said in an interview that López "has been working hard to get staffing ... We are working on it as we speak and hoping that in the next few weeks, day care workers are going to be getting paid on time."

Jarvis declined to discuss staffing levels or work conditions at DSS. The union battled Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman over health care coverage this spring.