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In Case You Missed It, local legislators, community leaders and concerned citizens exposed Governor Sununu’s hypocrisy on the Department of Children, Youth, and Families (DCYF), and his failure to fully fund the department. Throughout Sununu’s campaign for re-election, Sununu highlighted the urgent need to address the crisis at DCYF, but in his budget address he lied by saying he would add 62 new positions to the Department. In his actual budget, Sununu proposed just 26 new positions.
State Senator Jon Morgan, a father of three, urged Governor Sununu to take this crisis seriously and fully fund DCYF:
“DCYF is about supporting the most vulnerable children and families in our state, and it is irresponsible to continue to propose such meager additions to its funding, as the Governor has done… It’s embarrassing how far the standards for childcare have fallen in New Hampshire, and it’s dangerous for the most vulnerable kids who are in our system.”
Remarks from Amelia Hogan, a child protection services worker in Manchester, were read aloud, although she was not able to join in person because of short-staffing at DCYF:
“I am particularly sick of the Sununu administration claiming to have helped the children of this state when their proposed budgets fall vastly short of the recommendations made by multiple studies of our system commissioned by our legislature… it is incomprehensible to me why our current governor is unwilling to follow the many recommendations that have been made about how to help NH DCYF.”
Lawrence Shulman of Grantham highlighted Governor Sununu’s hypocrisy on DCYF funding, noting:
“The small increase in DCYF staff that Governor Sununu is proposing is not sufficient to meet the need for either child protection interventions or ongoing family support services… When [the Governor] originally spoke to the legislature about his budget, he said he was going to create 62 new positions. But the Governor only proposed 26 in his budget. That’s not going to meet the need for something as important as protecting New Hampshire’s at-risk children.”
New Hampshire’s DCYF played an important role in the childhood of Jenn- Alford-Teaster, who spoke about her experience:
"When Governor Sununu said he would fully fund DCYF, I was really excited about this. Because I would not be standing here if it had not been for interventions from the DCYF program. So to find out, actually, it was only 26 positions that were funded in the [Governor’s] budget, is bewildering to me... we're talking about protecting the most vulnerable people in the state of New Hampshire, which are children."
NHDP Chair Ray Buckley issued the following statement:
“Governor Sununu continues to say he will address the crisis at DCYF, but the short-funding in his budget tells a different story. If Sununu cares about the most vulnerable children in New Hampshire, he needs to actually invest in DCYF instead of lying about funding new positions and then leaving the program empty handed in his budget proposal.”
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