Child Care Workers Say They’re Getting Shortchanged by the District on Salaries. It’s Part of a Pattern of Broken Promises.

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Imagine putting in decades of work at your chosen profession, learning all the tricks of the trade, and then being told you’ll be earning the same salary as someone fresh out of school. Welcome to the new reality for D.C. child care workers.

The District has made major progress in recent years to improve the generally horrid pay rates for these educators, but workers and advocates alike feel that the city has once again fallen short in its efforts to ensure adequate compensation for this essential work. Loose Lips hears that the Office of the State Superintendent of Education is responsible for this latest problem, one of many that child care workers have endured since lawmakers first promised to raise their salaries five years ago. Like many of the previous battles over the Birth-to-Three Act and its progeny, the Council has pledged to do one thing for these educators but ultimately been unable to actually achieve it.

The city has already sent out bonus checks of up to $14,000 to many of these workers, who staff the District’s preschools and day cares, in a bid to address years of pay inequity, not to mention the strains of the pandemic. But the Council also wanted to boost pay rates going forward and set aside a portion of revenues from a tax hike on the wealthy for these child care facilities in order to ensure they can increase salaries for their workers. The current issue is that OSSE, which oversees D.C.’s unique mix of public and charter schools, gets to set the salary floors these businesses have to meet to earn this funding, and the agency appears to have disregarded both the Council’s directives and the recommendations of experts.

OSSE released a set of minimum salaries for fiscal year 2024 last month that quickly set off alarm bells in the advocacy community. On first glance, the new salary floors might look like a raise for workers—OSSE’s new minimum starts at $43,865 annually, when the average pay for these educators was $37,000 a year in 2020. But the salary scale fails to include any adjustment for experience, even though a 14-member task force established by the Council specifically suggests that the city do so. The Birth-to-Three law, perhaps the signature policy initiative Ward 7 Councilmember Vince Gray championed since he won back a seat in 2016, similarly requires it.

The Under 3 DC Coalition, a collection of D.C.’s leading progressive advocacy groups, estimates that the absence of those experience incentives will cost workers between $3,900 and $6,700 each year, on average, directly contrary to the Council’s good intentions.

“How do we live up to the promises that we made to early educators, who we are making great demands of?” wonders Ruqiyyah Anbar-Shaheen, the director of the coalition, a member of the pay equity task force, and the director of early childhood for the progressive group DC Action. “That’s the issue at the end of the day here.”

Finding the answer, it seems, will have to wait until next spring. Christina Grant, the state superintendent of education, told the Council in a hearing last month that it would probably cost an additional $20 to $25 million in funding for the city to fund larger pay hikes, and the city’s budget is already set. OSSE representatives didn’t respond to LL’s requests for additional details.

“I’m just making a commitment to say that we can go revisit and project back to the Council, what the dollar amounts would be to achieve that goal,” Grant said at the June 13 hearing convened by Chair Phil Mendelson’s Committee of the Whole, which handles education policy.

Several councilmembers wondered during that meeting, however, why they find themselves needing to find more money for a program they thought they had already fully funded. The pot of money set aside for the purpose stood at just under $70 million in the new budget cycle, not exactly chump change.

“I guess I’m just trying to understand: Why did OSSE then choose an approach that does not meet that definition in the law?” asked Ward 4 Councilmember Janeese Lewis George.

Grant painted the decision in her testimony as essentially a cost-cutting move, even though the requirements of the law make no allowance for the city to avoid accounting for experience if it can’t afford to do so. Theoretically, at least, it was Mayor Muriel Bowser’s responsibility to find the extra money if OSSE needed it. But it’s not exactly breaking news that the mayor would resist directives from the Council if she could find a loophole to do so.

In this case, it seems OSSE relied upon a different reading of the task force’s recommendations to justify this move. In determining how much money to send to each child care facility (and therefore, what salary floors to mandate), the agency calculated the difference between the minimum salaries the task force described and the average salaries of the existing workforce. But that wasn’t quite what the task force recommended: They wanted OSSE to use the difference between the average proposed salaries and the average of current workers.

“We meet the minimums as described by the law,” Grant reasoned. But by handing out smaller payments to each business, the agency effectively eliminated their ability to offer pay rates commensurate with experience. In a budget season filled with difficult choices, it seems that this requirement fell by the wayside.

“Many of these educators have been doing this longer than some of us have been parents,” said At-Large Councilmember Christina Henderson. “They know from just looking at something like, ‘Oh, that’s eczema, or that’s some allergic reaction, try this, this and this.’ And I think that that experience is valuable enough to receive compensation.”

OSSE’s current salary structure allows for workers to earn more money if they have a more advanced degree, but child care workers themselves say their industry is one where experience is what truly matters. There’s only so much you can learn about wrangling screaming toddlers in a textbook, it seems.

“I’ve worked with people who have all these credentials, but … all they have done or focused on was the paperwork, paperwork,” Kiera Hernandez, assistant director at Blandi Child Learning Center in Brightwood Park, told the Council.

Grant noted that “if a facility decided that they wanted to acknowledge experience, they would be able to do so,” as long as they still met OSSE’s minimum salary requirements. However, it seems unlikely that many will have the wherewithal to do so, considering most facilities are relying on the city funding to even offer higher pay rates to begin with.

“Some of the smaller centers with 30 or less students will probably have difficulty meeting the minimum salary,” said Cristina Encinas, board president of the Multicultural Spanish Speaking Providers Association, which represents roughly 800 child care workers in the city. “This will put them in a financial dilemma, and I’m not sure how that can be worked out, because we definitely want the hard work of the teachers to be compensated.”

All of these problems might sound a bit abstract to your average parent, but Anbar-Shaheen stresses that these concerns are directly relevant to tamping down the costs of child care in the city. “It’s increasing salaries for teachers without asking parents to pay more,” she says, noting that staffing shortages are one of several factors that have made D.C. day care some of the most expensive in the entire country. Without higher wages, many of these workers simply can’t afford to live in the area.

“If there is no guarantee of a raise, how will we continue to thrive?” Jameka Fogle, another worker at the Blandi Child Learning Center, asked councilmembers.

Many of the lawmakers that attended the hearing expressed interest in revisiting the matter during the next budget cycle, including Mendelson, Henderson, and Ward 3 Councilmember Matt Frumin, some of the most education-focused members of the legislative body. But there are many months yet before those discussions begin, and LL has seen plenty of similar pledges go unfilled when councilmembers are forced to start fielding budgetary requests from all sides.

Anbar-Shaheen hopes that the unique plight of child care workers is enough to push the Council into action. The Birth-to-Three Act, of course, has never been fully funded despite years of promises to make its requirements a reality. Similarly, it took the city many long months to actually send out the bonus checks these workers were counting on. Withholding these raises would be one last slap in the face to these educators.

“We need seniority to be valued in an education system,” says Travis Ballie, the organizing director for DC Action. “OSSE knows this, the mayor knows this and the Council knows this, because that’s the system they set up for public school teachers. And we just simply ask that that same promise be extended to early educators.”