(Photo by Jelleke Vanooteghem / Unsplash)

A sweeping bill that was quietly approved by the D.C. Council earlier this summer is taking aim at one of the biggest expenses for many families in the city: the sky-high cost of child care.

The bill, known as “Birth-to-Three For All D.C.,” will expand a current subsidy program so that more families become eligible for it, and also impose a cap on how much of a family’s income can go towards child care costs. On the high end, the cap would be 10 percent — the standard used by the federal government to define affordable child care.

“We had [Council] members who spoke about their own child care costs being more than their mortgage on a monthly basis. And we’re trying to avert that,” said Council member Vincent Gray (D-Ward 7), who wrote a majority of the bill and shepherded it through the legislative process.

According to Child Care Aware of America, center-based care for a single child in D.C. can cost upwards of $23,000 a year — one of the highest price tags in the country. (In Maryland, it’s close to $15,000 a year, and in Virginia it’s almost $13,000.) And per the Economic Policy Institute, that can amount to 35 percent of a median D.C. family’s income.

Those high costs have recently spurred D.C. officials to action. Starting this year, Mayor Muriel Bowser has directed $12.5 million towards making child care more affordable, both by giving families a one-time $1,000 tax credit and also by offering up government space for providers to open new centers.

But the Council bill represents a more expansive — and much more expensive, at almost a half-billion dollars over a decade — step towards addressing child care and early childhood education. Gray likens it to legislation passed a decade ago that established the city’s free pre-kindergarten program for 3- and 4-year-olds, one of the few such programs that exists in the country.

“Ninety percent of brain development has occurred by the time a child is 5 years of age,” said Gray. “But what’s apparent also is that so much of brain development has occurred by the time a child is 3. And so it was increasingly apparent to me that yes, we could feel good about what we were able to do with the 3- and 4-year-olds, but there was so much more work to do.”

How the new bill would work

The bill is divided into two parts: health and education. On the health side, the bill creates a program to provide specialist services during pediatric visits for families in wards 7 and 8, and expands an existing initiative that puts children at risk of developmental delays and disabilities in touch with medical services. It also creates a program to send child development experts to the homes of immigrant families and at-risk children, and establishes a lactation consultant certification program at local universities.

“It’s a way of thinking about how to support early childhood development that goes beyond what’s going on in the classroom,” said Marlana Wallace, a policy analyst at the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute, of the health components of the bill.

On the education side, the bill address both the cost of care and compensation of those who provide it. First, it requires that D.C. increase its subsidy rates for child care centers serving low-income kids with vouchers. The annual subsidy is currently $15,820, roughly $7,000 short of what the city estimates it costs to provide child-care services. The bill also mandates that the additional subsidy money go to increase salaries for child-care workers, many of whom make just over the minimum wage.

“Despite doing some of the most important work for the District, early educators, the majority of whom are women of color, are very poorly paid. On average, they earn only $29,000. And this legislation raises their pay to be on par with kindergarten teachers,” said Wallace.

And on top of increasing the child-care subsidy rates, the bill expands eligibility. Currently, only families of four making $62,750 or below qualify. (That’s 250 percent of the federal poverty line of $25,100.) But starting in late 2022, all D.C. families could be eligible for some subsidy, and a cap would be placed on what percentage of their incomes can go towards paying for child care.

For a family of four making $85,000 a year, their out-of-pocket expenses for child care would be capped at 8 percent of their income, with anything above that being covered by the city’s subsidy. Families making less would have a lower cap, and families making more would have a higher cap — up to 10 percent of their income.

“If you believe that parents at all income levels should have access to quality early care and education, then you have to build your subsidy system in a way that addresses the needs of all parents,” said B.B. Otero, who founded CentroNía, an early education provider, and later served as Gray’s deputy mayor for health and human services from 2011 to 2015.

The ambitions of the bill are reflected in its price tag: $466 million over a decade, with the most expensive provisions being those expanding the subsidy and paying providers more. The bill, which passed the Council unanimously but still has to be sent to Bowser for her signature or veto, will need to be funded in the coming years. The mayor has the ability to include the bill’s provisions in her budget, but if she doesn’t, the Council can still find the money to pay for the bill.

But Otero says the possible outcomes of better and cheaper child care are worth the expense. Just look at the city’s free pre-K, she says.

“We led the country in terms of the universal pre-K and now nobody questions the fact that 3- and 4-year-olds in the city — some 83 percent of 3-year-olds and 90 percent of 4-year-olds — are in free pre-K,” she said.

And for Gray, the Birth-to-Three bill is a step towards extending the universal pre-K program to infants and toddlers.

“My real goal with this is to be able to say that we have the most complete and comprehensive early childhood education system in the nation. I think we’re on track to do this with this bill. It’s going to take some time, just as it did with the universal pre-kindergarten program. It’s not cheap. But look at the cost of not doing it,” he said.

“Not to be trite, but it is an investment in the future of our city,” he added.

This story originally appeared on WAMU.