‘Their loss is not forgotten’: Officials pitch bill to fund futures for kids who lost parents to COVID
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Veronica Fletcher speaks in support of a bill, introduced by Assemblymember Catalina Cruz and Senator Jamaal Bailey, that would provide financial assistance to children who lost a parent or guardian to COVID-19. Eagle photo by Jacob Kaye
By Jacob Kaye
As the federal government’s emergency COVID-19 declaration came to end on Thursday, a group of families, doctors and lawmakers gathered in the Queens neighborhood that was once the epicenter of the pandemic and called on New Yorkers not to forget them, or the loved ones they lost.
Just down the block from Elmhurst Hospital, the healthcare facility that was among the hardest hit in the earliest months of the pandemic, the group remembered members of their family lost during the pandemic. The Fletcher family lost their patriarch. Dr. Pilar Gonzalez lost her father and her brother. State Senator Jamaal Bailey lost his mother-in-law.
The group, which also included members of COVID Survivors for Change, Queens Assemblymembers Catalina Cruz and Steven Raga, and a representative from the Queens borough president’s office, stood in front of the Missing Them memorial project on Thursday, a project by the nonprofit news organization THE CITY that memorializes a number of New Yorkers who died of COVID and is hung on the fence of Elmhurst’s Moore Homestead Playground.
Life appeared to be back to normal for many, several speakers noted on Thursday. With temperatures hovering around 80 degrees, a number of local residents sat on parking benches, children ran around the playground and a group of men played basketball. But for tens of thousands of New Yorkers, the grief of the pandemic hasn’t disappeared.
“There are people on that basketball court who are not going to have somebody to show them how to shoot that first jump shot, take them to prom, to watch them graduate,” Bailey said. “That's the reality. It's a reality that my daughters will face – that they won’t have their grandmother.”
Bailey and Cruz introduced on Thursday a bill aimed at providing financial support to New York children who lost a parent or guardian to COVID-19 during the time the federal coronavirus emergency was in place.
The legislation, if passed into law, would provide $1,000 per year to each eligible child until the year they turn 18, at which point they could use the funds to either pay for college, open a business or buy a home.
In order to be eligible for the funds, the child would have to be a New York State resident.
Only New York State residents – regardless of immigration status – would be eligible for the funds. Additionally, the child would be required to have had come from a family making, as a household, less than 500 percent of the federal poverty level.
The bill is expected to apply to around 16,500 children and cost the state $16.5 million in the program’s first year, with costs decreasing each year after.
According to the legislation, a board, overseen by the state’s comptroller, would be responsible for doling out the funds and would be comprised by nine members – including the comptroller, the commissioner of Taxation and Finance, the inspector general, a member appointed by the Senate majority leader, a member appointed by the speaker of the Assembly and four members appointed by the governor.
Cruz, whose district includes parts of Elmhurst, Jackson Heights, Corona and Rego Park, said that the bill would help carry on the legacy left by the parents or guardians who died unexpectedly of COVID-19 during the pandemic.
“It offers a little bit of hope that in that darkness, their children can have the kind of future that their parents, who are no longer with us, fought so hard for them to have,” she said.
“What we want to do is ensure that these kids can go to college and start a business to buy a home – to do all of the things that mom or dad, or sometimes moms or dads who are no longer with us, can’t do for them,” she added. “They had huge expectations for their children, and we are going to work to help them get there.”
Among those who would be aided by the legislation is the Fletcher family.
Veronica Fletcher lost her husband, and Joshua, Ziggy and Maddie Fletcher lost their father, Joseph, who worked for the MTA. He died within the first month of the pandemic.
When he died, Veronica, who was born in Elmhurst Hospital, was also debilitatingly sick from the virus, and couldn’t comfort her children as they began to grieve their father, she said.
“We endured the trauma of devastating loss and sickness alone, quarantined and isolated from the world,” she said.
“The void of the parent's loss lives in a child's life is unfathomable, immeasurable, intangible and unending,” added Veronica Fletcher, who lost her own mother when she was 9 years old. “The legislation for baby bonds will help them cope with the loss because it gives hope. Baby bonds let the children know that their loss is not forgotten, that they are not forgotten, that the elected officials for whom their parents voted for and believed in have not forgotten them.”
Cruz noted that she expects pushback from her fellow lawmakers over the bill’s price tag. But she added that she believes that the alternative is likely far more expensive.
“If you look at the price tag, it's pretty cheap in comparison to a lot of other projects that we have,” she said. “And the impact is even wider, because you are providing the resources for kids to be able to fund education, to possibly start a business and do a number of other things that will uplift them away from social safety net programs that probably cost more money.”
The Queens lawmaker said that over the next several months, she and Bailey plan to speak to their colleagues and collect as many stories about impacted families as they can.
“Even if we have this perception that the politicians are going to forget about [the pandemic], their constituents are not,” Cruz said.
“I suspect that the minute many members of the community who are going to be impacted by this hear about it, they're the ones who are going to go to the elected officials and say, ‘Support this,’” she added.
Around 77,000 New Yorkers died of COVID dating back to March 2020. Of those, around 10,000 lived in Queens.
