Director's Advocacy Report

Executive Director Howard Milbert has been advocating on behalf of children and their families for many years.  He has his finger on the pulse of current issues affecting child care in Westchester, and welcomes you to get involved with supporting the Centerfs advocacy efforts. 

Directorfs Advocacy Report

June 2008

This year, our greatest advocacy gains were on the state level. We did the impossible! After four years of unremitting lobbying, we succeeded in brokering a waiver to eliminate the Child Support Regulation for Westchester.  This means that single parents in this county no longer have to sue the absentee parent for child support in order to receive funding for childcare. This change has enabled teens, victims of domestic violence, abandoned parents and others that need to eliminate the non-custodial parent from their lives, to do so without the loss of childcare.  As a result of this legislative achievement, we currently have one teen and 5 single parent families that are newly eligible for county scholarship assistance.

On the county level, we succeeded for the fourth year in a row in adding an additional $1M in funding to childcare, keeping the subsidy eligibility ceiling at 20% above the official Title XX limit. Thus, our advocacy on this issue provided our families with an additional $77,980 in scholarship assistance.  Furthermore, we won county approval to lower subsidized parent fees by 5%, making Westchesterfs subsidized childcare fees one of the lowest in the state. Finally, we raised the childcare reimbursement rate across all centers in the County.

On the Federal level, we held childcare funding to its current rate. While we had hoped for better, given the present economic realities, we are relieved not to have received any funding cuts.