(Photo by Mike Fox / Unsplash)

By DCist contributor Amanda Palleschi

As D.C. lawmakers wrestle with ways to bring childcare costs down through new legislation, some caregivers argue that another city regulation will have the opposite effect and drive some longtime workers from the field.

Mayor Muriel Bowser’s administration is requiring that daycare workers earn advanced degrees, making D.C. one of the most stringent jurisdictions in the country. Bowser extended the deadline for the new education requirements earlier this summer, but some say it will do little to resolve their concerns.

Issues include a lack of financial and logistical bandwidth to complete further education, and a suspicion that higher degree requirement will drive up childcare costs in a city that is already among the most expensive in the nation.

“They are giving us more time, so the agony is just longer,” says Adriana Gomez, the director of Semillitas Early Learning Center, a five year old Spanish immersion daycare center in Northwest.

The city set new education requirements for daycare center employees in 2016. Daycare center directors will need bachelor’s degrees, lead teachers will need associate’s degrees, and assistant teachers must earn childhood development associate degrees, or a CDA. Initially, the D.C. Office of the Superintendent for State Education (OSSE) set deadlines for meeting those requirements within two to four years.

But after significant pushback from daycare center employees, including protests outside the Wilson Building, the Bowser administration announced new deadlines on June 29. Lead teachers must now earn an associate’s degree by December 2023; assistant teachers and associate home care givers have until December 2019 to earn a CDA. Daycare center directors must have a bachelor’s degree by December of 2022—a deadline that was not extended from the original 2016 policy.

The new requirements are part of the District’s longtime efforts to be at the forefront of early childhood education reform—the city is frequently lauded for its universal pre-kindergarten program, which provides free preschool for 3 and 4 year olds, and is already one of many states with credentialing requirements in place for pre-K and kindergarten teachers. These guidelines apply to all licensed daycare centers in the District, and are among the first in the country.

The city has answers for some of the challenges the regulation poses, most of which aim to make earning new degrees more affordable on a low salary. The city offers its own tuition grant program, and many childcare workers in the District already receive scholarships through the federal Teacher Education and Compensation Helps (T.E.A.C.H.) program.

While only two D.C. universities offer associate degree programs in early childhood education—Trinity University and the University of the District of Columbia Community College—an OSSE spokesperson said in an email that the agency has worked to collaborate with those schools, including coordination of information sessions and in some cases instruction for students earning degrees at their place of work.

The city is also at work finalizing a waiver process where qualified workers—ones who have been in the business of childcare for decades, say—can be grandfathered in, and do not have to pursue additional education.

Illumi Sanchez, the plaintiff in a lawsuit filed by a local libertarian law firm on behalf of daycare employees, could now be eligible for a waiver from the new requirements based on her decades of experience caring for children and running a daycare out of her house in Northeast. But her attorney, Renée Flaherty, says the waiver can be revoked at any time, and that for others like Sanchez—who speak English fluently but don’t read and write it at a college level—the deadline extension does little to help.

“I think for her and a lot of providers, the extension doesn’t really matter because if you can’t write on a college level in English, a couple years isn’t going to make a difference there,” Flaherty says.

The city has moved to have the lawsuit, which experts say has slim chances of success, dismissed.

Even if her staff received scholarships for their education from the city, Gomez says that she can barely pay her staff minimum wage, many do not speak fluent English, and most have kids of their own. Some have young children that they could not care for with a full time job and night school in the mix; others are already worried about affording college for their older children.

Maritza Delgado, the assistant director at De Colores, a Spanish immersion daycare and pre kindergarten program with two daycare locations in Northwest, has similar concerns about her staff.

“It’s been tough because most of our teachers only speak Spanish, so in order to get an associate degree, or a bachelor’s, they’re gonna need to write and read English. Most of them understand [English] but they are not at the high level,” she says.

She says De Colores has been working closely with a licensing specialist from OSSE, who has helped explain the new guidelines to the staff and pointed them toward resources. Still, Delgado says, “everyone’s been doing their research on their own and seeing what other options we have.”

The administration acknowledged difficulties some centers face in their policy published on June 29, noting that commenters on the proposed extension opposed any credentialing requirements at all, and “raised concerns regarding language barriers, increased costs for parents, supply and demand issues, and other barriers for the workforce.”

The city seems unlikely to reverse course on the policy itself: “While OSSE appreciates the comments, the proposed rulemaking did not make any changes to the actual credential requirements,” it added.

The idea behind requiring progressively more advanced degrees for the city’s daycare workers, who make an average of $32,000, or $15 an hour, is part of the District’s overall push to adopt progressive education policies that respond to a growing body of research showing that the quality of education and care in a child’s early years has implications that extend throughout the child’s life in terms of health, IQ and income. But the results of studies, including a 2015 report from the National Academy of Sciences, which explicitly recommends credentialing requirements like the Districts, are inconclusive.

In other words, the quality of a child’s daycare matters, yes, but it’s not clear if earning degrees matters if they are not accompanied by other investments in education and the quality of classroom.

Gomez has mixed feelings and admits there’s no easy solution. “We would love for all of our teachers to have a degree. This is the type of career that should be taken seriously,” she says.

The city also has plans to expand a public private partnership with a foundation that advocates for higher credentials in early childhood educators, specifically targeting daycare centers in Wards 7 and 8. The program, known as the “Quality Improvement Network,” is intended to extend “Head Start” standards—a federal program for low income preschoolers—to care for children before they reach preschool.

Gomez says more support from the city is needed, arguing daycare providers should have the opportunity to further their education on Saturdays only, for example. She also favors Maryland’s credentialing program, a voluntary tiered system where the state offers money—in addition to education vouchers—to workers who complete progressively higher degrees, which incentivizes workers to do so without making it a requirement.

“It would be wonderful if we could be the first state doing something like this, but if the government is going to force people to do it, maybe they should support programs that motivate them and work with staff members,” she says.