Kwame Boame is only 6 years old, but he's already got a helluva commute. Every Monday morning, Kwame's mother, Kimberly Paul, rustles him out the door at 6:30 to take the A train from their apartment in the Dyckman Houses, at the northern tip of Manhattan, to the island's southern border. In the Broadway-Nassau station, next to the magazine stand on the A platform, they meet Kwame's great-grandmother, who shepherds Kwame onto the train to Bedford-Stuyvesant, where he goes to school. For the next five days, he'll stay with his grandmother and great-grandmother. Kwame won't see his mother again until Friday.

Kwame's weekly commute and bi-borough living are Paul's response to a common conundrum: a low-income parent's need to find affordable, quality child care. Almost since the city began building its publicly funded day care for low-income families through its Agency for Child Development (ACD) in the 1970s, waiting lists have numbered from thousands to tens of thousands.

City Limits Magazine


January 2003:
The School That Works

Then came welfare reform. The move of thousands of parents into the workplace was accompanied by a massive surge in the number of those who turned to the city to help them pay for child care. The city welfare agency, the Human Resources Administration (HRA), set up a second child care system exclusively serving families on welfare or recently off it. By August 2002, more than 40,000 children received child care paid for by HRA, up from 14,000 in 1998.

Kwame used to be one of them. When he was 4, Paul was trying to get off welfare by taking a paralegal course. HRA paid for Kwame's child care while his mother took the class, as well as for the first year after she left public assistance, through a voucher she gave to his caretaker. Once she'd finished "transitioning" off of welfare, Paul's child care was taken over by ACD. Again, she got a voucher--a coupon for child care that she could give to any kind of provider she could find.

But even with the $200 a month for child care--Paul is now responsible for an equivalent amount herself--she still couldn't find a way to make it work. Her job at a law office regularly requires her to work late, and that calls for extra cash for child care that she just doesn't have. "It's very hard to be mommy over the phone," she says, "but if I had someone [caring for Kwame] up here, we wouldn't be able to eat because I'd have to pay the overtime."

Paul is lucky, relatively speaking. Her mother, Sandra Robinson, isn't just a grandmother to Kwame--she takes care of young children for a living, watching six young kids in her home every day. Though it's a tight fit, the situation works. Paul can keep her job and stay off welfare. Kwame has stable adult supervision. And Robinson gets paid for caring for Kwame, which in turn helps her cover the housing costs for herself and her aging mother.

The after-school hours at Robinson's house are busy, to put it diplomatically. Four wee ones, ages 2 to 4 years, toddle through the kitchen and living room, scrambling to play with cardboard tubes and grabbing at the Sesame Street guitar the older children are playing with. Milk mustaches have to be wiped after snack time, 2-year-old Diarrah stopped from wearing Robinson's eyeglasses out of the house, and all of them lightly admonished for singing Eminem lyrics. When it's time to go to the park, Robinson instructs Kwame and Ashad, who's 8, to form a human barricade against the onslaught of toddlers trying to tumble out the door.

For her part, Robinson would recommend the job--with a few caveats. "Day care is very viable," she says, "but you've got to love kids because they will drive you crazy." As a former worker in youth nonprofits and social services, she's still a bit astonished by her terms of employment. "So yes, for this full day, ACD pays me $1.88 an hour for the older ones, $2.30 for the younger. Is it amazing or what?" Robinson chuckles and shakes her head with a touch of incredulity. Last year, she grossed about $16,000. "It's just unbelievable."