New York City’s free 2-K child care for 2-year-olds will expand to 22 of the city’s 32 school districts next year, Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Gov. Kathy Hochul announced Monday, Chalkbeat reports. Six more Brooklyn districts join the program:
- District 16: Bedford-Stuyvesant, including Stuyvesant Heights, and parts of northern Crown Heights and Ocean Hill
- District 17: Crown Heights, Prospect Lefferts Gardens, Wingate, Prospect Heights, Flatbush and East Flatbush, and parts of Erasmus, Farragut, Rugby, Remsen Village, Ocean Hill and Brownsville
- District 19: East New York, New Lots, Cypress Hills, City Line, Spring Creek and Starrett City, and parts of Ocean Hill, Brownsville and Canarsie
- District 20: Bay Ridge, Fort Hamilton, Dyker Heights and Bath Beach, and parts of Bensonhurst, Borough Park, Sunset Park, Kensington, Gravesend, Mapleton/western Midwood and western Flatbush
- District 21: Coney Island, Sea Gate, Brighton Beach, Gravesend, Homecrest, Mapleton/Ocean Parkway and Midwood, and parts of Bensonhurst, Borough Park, Madison and western Flatbush
- District 32: Bushwick, and parts of East Williamsburg and northern Bedford-Stuyvesant
Brooklyn’s Districts 18 and 23, part of this year’s first 2-K program, stay in. Districts 13, 14, 15 and 22 are not on next year’s list. You can look up your district on the Education Department’s school search map.
Toddlers who turn 2 in 2027 will be eligible. The city has not said how many seats each district will get, and officials did not promise a seat to every eligible child. Citywide, the program is on track to reach 12,000 2-year-olds next year, up from 2,000 seats this year, when more than 5,000 families applied.
The city funds most 2-K programs from 8am to 6pm, year-round, which can save a participating family more than $20,000 a year.
Where will the new seats be? 2-K seats are offered by childcare providers that contract with the city. In its first year, the program relied mostly on family providers who run small childcare programs from their homes, though some larger childcare centers also took part. For next year, city officials said they will start reaching out this week to childcare providers in the covered districts that already run city-funded 3-K and pre-K programs, to see whether they want to open 2-K seats.
Stay tuned.
