Posted on May 14, 2026
Winifred Smith-Jenkins
Director of Early Learning Policy and Advocacy
The State of Preschool 2025 by the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) once again recognizes New Jersey as a national leader in public preschool; an achievement worth celebrating. While NJ consistently meets 9 out of 10 of its quality indicators, now is a good time to consider how preschool expansion intersects with the broader child care system that families rely on.
New Jersey’s success reflects decades of bipartisan investment and commitment to young children. The Governor and Legislature deserve tremendous credit for expanding access to public preschool and fully funding the Child Care Assistance Program (CCAP), reflecting a growing recognition that early care and education are essential to children’s development, family stability, and the state’s economic future.
As New Jersey continues to build on this progress, there is an important opportunity to think more broadly about how the entire early childhood system functions.
Too often, preschool, child care, subsidy programs, and workforce policies are discussed as separate issues. Families, however, experience them as one connected system. Parents are simply trying to find stable, affordable, high-quality care that supports their children and allows them to work.
That broader perspective matters because CCAP is not just a birth-to-five program. It supports children from infancy through age 13, and up to age 19 for children who are mentally or physically incapable of self-care or who are under the supervision of the New Jersey Division of Child Protection and Permanency (DCP&P). CCAP helps families access care before and after school, during holidays, and throughout the summer. Community-based providers are often the backbone of that continuum, offering infant and toddler care, preschool, wraparound care, and school-age programming under one roof.
At the same time, infant and toddler care remains one of the most fragile parts of the system.
A 2023 report from Advocates for Children of New Jersey, Still No Room for Babies: Child Care Staffing Crisis Impacts Supply of Infant-Toddler Child Care, found that licensed child care centers in New Jersey have the capacity to serve only about one-third of infants and toddlers likely to need care because their parents work. In 57 percent of former Abbott communities, qualify as infant-toddler child care deserts.
These shortages are not caused by a lack of demand. Providers and parents consistently report a strong need for infant and toddler care. The challenge is that infant and toddler classrooms are among the most expensive to operate due to staffing ratios and the intensive level of care required, while current funding structures often do not fully cover those costs.
Many community-based providers rely on preschool enrollment to help stabilize the financial viability of infant and toddler classrooms. However, based on calculations using information from the Fiscal Year 2025 and 2026 Report to the New Jersey State Legislature on Preschool Expansion and Mixed Delivery, 87 percent of new state-funded preschool seats were added in district and charter school classrooms. Community child care providers accounted for only 507 of the 2,913 new preschool seats added statewide — approximately 17 percent — while Head Start seats decreased by 4 percent.
As public preschool expansion continues, it will be important to ensure that growth strengthens, rather than unintentionally destabilizes, the broader early childhood infrastructure families rely on.
That is one reason New Jersey’s mixed-delivery model remains so important. Mixed delivery enables school districts, Head Start programs, and community child care providers to collaborate to serve public preschool children across multiple settings. At its best, it preserves family choice and recognizes that different settings meet different family needs.
As the system continues to evolve, there is an opportunity to strengthen these partnerships even further.
Moving forward, the focus cannot only be on creating more preschool seats. It must also include strengthening the broader ecosystem that supports children and families from infancy through school age.
New Jersey has already demonstrated what sustained investment in early childhood can accomplish. The next opportunity is to ensure that preschool expansion, child care, workforce development, and family supports are aligned to create a stronger, more sustainable system for children, families, and communities statewide.
