When it comes to the D.C. government, Marilyn Medrano has some trust issues.
As the owner of a Spanish immersion day care center in Northwest Washington, she said she has benefited from D.C. government programs that subsidize child care costs for low-income families and help child care centers pay their teachers more.
But year after year, those programs have faced budget uncertainty. In January, the city cut teacher pay reimbursements by about 5 percent, forcing child care centers to either dock wages or eat the cost themselves. And next year, D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) recently warned, the subsidies could be reduced and funding for educator raises cut altogether.
“Every single year, we have to anticipate,” Medrano said — “are we going to have a decrease or not?”
D.C. Council member Janeese Lewis George (D-Ward 4) — who is running for mayor — has pledged to end the limbo and vastly expand the child care programs if elected to the city’s top job. Lewis George recently unveiled a plan to significantly expand affordable child care so that no D.C. family would spend more than 7 percent of their income on it, and to raise early childhood educator pay until it reaches parity with D.C. Public Schools teachers. To do so, Lewis George would increase spending to ramp up the subsidy programs over time.
The proposal, if implemented, could be a game changer for parents in a city where child care costs are by some measures the highest in the nation. It is the first big policy swing in the race, where Lewis George’s most prominent opponent is her former council colleague Kenyan R. McDuffie; as of the latest campaign finance reports, the two were neck-and-neck in fundraising.
But Lewis George would have to fund it during an economic downturn — a feat she says she would accomplish by finding and reducing waste in the city budget and potentially raising taxes on corporations. She will also have to reassure people like Medrano, who said she doesn’t see how officials can take on more efforts when the city can’t predictably finance the programs that already exist.
“What she’s proposing, it sounds good on paper,” Medrano said. “But I don’t know how that’s going to work. Who’s going to pay the difference?”
Lewis George said Medrano has every right to be frustrated. But, she said child care “will be one of my top priorities as mayor to make sure that it is funded every year at the level it needs to be.”
As families nationwide continue to buckle under the soaring cost of child care, many — including those in the business community — are calling on the federal government and local governments to step in and offer parents relief.
Expanding child care can be a boon for jurisdictions, economists say: More affordable child care means more working parents — and more disposable income for families.
In New York City, Mayor Zohran Mamdani ran on a platform that included universal free child care; now that he’s been elected, he has gotten to work on that plan with the help of state funding — though implementation will be gradual. New Mexico has also embarked on its free child care policy, funded with an oil and gas fund available to the state.
Unlike elected officials in those jurisdictions, Lewis George is not proposing universally free care. Instead she aims to make subsidies available to more families, including those from higher incomes who still struggle to pay for day care.
“I have to take into consideration where we are in D.C. — where we are financially, what’s possible for us,” she said.
Early efforts boosted city
In many ways, D.C. is already a national leader in making early education more affordable and accessible. In 2009, after decades of advocacy, the city began offering free school for all 3- and 4-year-olds. The program transformed the city economically, studies showed, boosting the presence of mothers in the workforce and making it more likely children would stay in the public school system. A National Bureau of Economic Research working paper published last year found that universal prekindergarten in D.C. was linked to a 1.7 percent increase in labor force participation, and a 1.7 percent rise in employment.
About a decade later, the D.C. Council passed legislation expanding day care subsidies for children from lower-income families and also kicked in city funds to raise their teachers’ pay. But it was not until 2021, when the council passed a new tax on people making more than $250,000 per year, that the teacher pay program received the funding to launch. That legislation set a goal of making sure no family spent more than 10 percent of their income on day care by 2028; This year, the city did not budget enough money to expand eligibility as planned.
The teacher pay program, once implemented, “set off a positive chain reaction,” said Erica Greenberg, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute who has studied D.C.’s child care programs extensively. Teachers were better able to afford their basic needs, reducing rates of depression and anxiety and reducing workforce turnover. The subsidies also allowed more day care centers to stay afloat, she said.
“Together, improved recruitment and retention led to a more stable child care system, meaning more stable child care choices for families,” Greenberg said.
Lewis George’s policy would essentially extend the subsidy and pay programs to cover a greater percentage of families and pay teachers more.
She also proposes investing in family, friend and neighbor care and supporting child care centers with alternative hours — a focus that Greenberg said is missing from D.C.’s system.
But asked about funding sources, Lewis George was scant on details of how she would cut the budget to pay for the expansion, or which corporate tax loopholes she would eliminate. She just said she would find a way to fund the program without upping the tax burden on working families.
“We’re going to look at the budget and make an honest assessment,” she said.
Lewis George is pitching her child care plan as city lawmakers stare down a tough budget process in the coming months.
Bowser said Tuesday that the city would need $1.1 billion more in revenue to keep all programs and services running at the same levels. In addition, city officials said enrollment in the child care subsidy program has spiked, leading to a $32 million deficit in its budget. The Bowser administration is exploring ways to rein in costs — including capping the number of families that the program can serve, creating a waiting list and adjusting income eligibility, as well as changing payments to providers.
The financial outlook and proposed cuts sparked immediate alarm from the Under 3 DC coalition, which advocates for affordable child care and higher teacher pay. “The cumulative impact would be devastating: programs will close, educators will leave the field, and children will lose access to the stable, high-quality care they need to thrive,” the group wrote in a statement. “These outcomes undermine workforce participation and economic stability for District families.”
The Bowser administration’s plan also would eliminate the equity fund that helps child care centers increase teacher pay — for next fiscal year.
If that happened, Medrano said her business would need to absorb half a million dollars a year in extra costs, forcing it to raise tuition for families already struggling to afford it.
“Financially, it won’t be a business,” she said. “We may need to close some of the classrooms.”
Lewis George said she wants to reverse that trajectory, saying in a campaign video on her proposal that “It’s time for D.C. to lead again.”
But implementing the child care program would require repairing and maintaining trust among providers after years of budget whiplash, Greenberg said.
“What we have documented is that all of this uncertainty has led to broken trust among the child care community,” Greenberg said, “and that’s the exact community needed to implement universal child care.”
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