Little Gibran Freilla-Williams of The Bronx sure looks like a schoolkid as he trundles off to class like 65,000 other 4-year-olds in the city’s universal pre-K program.
But to state regulators, Gibran, who has not been allowed to enroll in after-school daycare, is not a schoolkid. Instead, he and his fellow pre-K-ers are defined as “preschool” kids, a designation that has thrown daycare facilities into turmoil.
“Our world is turned upside-down,” Omar Freilla, Gibran’s father, said after his son was kicked out of after-school care.
“It’s a hot mess,” he said. “And it’s completely on a technicality.”
The technicality is this: The state Department of Health sets strict caps on the number of schoolkids and preschool kids a home daycare can accept.
Four-year-olds are always counted as preschoolers under those caps. And the state DOH, which sets regulations for the city’s 7,800 home daycares, says pre-K-ers like Gibran remain preschoolers.
But providers are lumping these 4-year-olds in with the older kids as “school-aged” since they go to school and need only a few hours of daycare after school.
The disparity in definitions has led to the daycares getting fined for unwittingly having too many preschoolers — and they can lose their licenses if they don’t kick 4-year-olds out.
“The majority of the child-care providers don’t know” that pre-K kids can’t be lumped in with the other schoolkids, said child-care advocate Lehilany Labarca.
“The first they know is when they get a violation,” said Labarca, executive director of Child Care Network of New York. “They’re blindsided.”
“We are struggling,” said Tricia Lowther, a daycare provider in Canarsie who got slapped with a $450 fine for violations that included having too many pre-K kids in her care.
“We have parents begging for help, but no one wants to take these children.”
A spokesperson for the city DOH — which regulates home daycares — said pre-K kids are categorized with the younger, non-school kids “for safety reasons.”