Taking a page from his mayoral challengers’ playbooks, Mayor Eric Adams on Tuesday announced an expansion of the city’s after-school program for elementary school students as a step toward making it free for all students who want a seat.
Adams, during a Tuesday afternoon press conference at P.S. 20 Anna Silver School on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, revealed that he will begin investing $331 million in his upcoming Fiscal Year 2026 Executive Budget toward adding 20,000 new after-school seats for K-5 students over the next three years.
The mayor also pledged to launch a commission of nonprofit providers and other stakeholders charged with developing a long-term universal after-school program, which he calls “After-School for All.”
“After-school programs that are free for all students is our way of saying to families and loved ones and children that we see you, we hear you and we are going to make it happen,” Adams said. “Our parents will know that the growth of their child doesn’t stop when the bell rings at the end of the day but it will continue. And parents shouldn’t have to choose between picking up their child and working a job to put food on the table and now they won’t.”
Adams announced the move as part of the rollout of his budget plan for the upcoming fiscal year. He is set to unveil what he dubbed the “best budget ever” later this week.
The mayor’s announcement comes after candidates running to replace him in the Democratic mayoral primary, which he is no longer participating in since launching an independent bid instead, have pitched their own plans for making after-school free for all students who want to participate. Those challengers include Brooklyn state Sen. Zellnor Myrie and city Comptroller Brad Lander.
Myrie was the first candidate to roll out a universal after-school plan, which he also called “After-School for All.” His plan seeks to make after-school programming available to all students, from three-year-olds in pre-school through high school seniors, no matter where in the city they live.
The state Senator, in a statement, said Adams’ announcement comes after three years of wide-ranging budget cuts to education programs and reversals to those trims.
“I decided to run for mayor because Eric Adams has spent the last three years undermining the programs that make it possible for New Yorkers to raise a family here,” Myrie said. “We deserve better than his budget shenanigans and policies that do the absolute bare minimum for parents and providers.”
Yet, as the current mayor, Adams can beat them to the punch by flexing his executive muscle to shape the city budget.
According to his office, the mayor’s effort to expand after-school programming, which is run by the city Department of Youth and Community Development (DYCD), begins with allocating $21 million to add 5,000 seats to the upcoming city budget for this fall. The amount will grow to $112 million for another 10,000 seats in 2027 and then again to $136 million for another 5,000 in 2028—at which point it will be baselined, meaning that amount will be a locked-in starting point for future budget negotiations.
The program currently serves 164,000 K-8 students and will be expanded to serve 184,000 by the fall of 2027. The program will recieve $755 million in annual funding starting in 2028, up from its current level of $424 million.
DYCD will then work with communities to see if it is necessary to add more seats.
According to Adams’ office, an additional $195 million will go toward improving the city’s current after-school system by opening a request for proposals to providers for the first time in a decade.
Adams has also unveiled the restoration of funding for 3-K and universal pre-K, which will be baseline going forward, and new investments in housing programs ahead of his budget announcement this week.
