A group of two year olds were playing together in an empty room at a Capitol Hill church in September when representatives from the Office of the State Superintendent for Education showed up to investigate.

“They told us, ‘we’re here to investigate whether you’re operating an unlicensed daycare,'” says Lis Kidder, who has a two-year-old daughter in the Capitol Hill Cooperative Playschool. “And we really thought we would just explain it to them and they would go away. We are parents, this is not a daycare, nobody is getting paid. This is just a co-op.”

That’s not how things played out. OSSE’s preliminary report found that the group was in fact an unlicensed child development facility, and officials warned the parents that if they declined to comply with a myriad of licensing requirements, they would be issued a notice to cease and desist. “They said our best option was to seek licensure, meaning that we needed to hire staff to watch our children play with toys,” says Kidder. “We had to get background checks, this whole long list of regulations to comply with.”

The Capitol Hill Cooperative playschool has been in operation in the District since 1973, when a group of parents in the neighborhood started gathering to trade off caring for a group of toddlers for a few hours a week. Over the years, the play group has become more organized and formal, with designated group meeting times, rules for parents to comply with, and a lottery system to choose the children who take part. Each week, three parents are assigned to watch the kids in the group (all of whom are two or three years old) for three hours as they play in the church or on a play ground. There are several different play groups that meet at different times, and any given child can be a part of more than one. Parents have to pay a relatively small fee to cover space and administrative expenses, says Kidder, but no one gets paid for watching the children. All of the people watching the kids are a parent or guardian of one of the group’s children. There is also a nonprofit structure behind the play group, which the parents use to be able to rent space in the church.

According to OSSE, such formal structures count as a child development facility, which has to obtain a license to operate in the District. That would entail following several local and federal requirements, including certain adult-to-child ratios, background checks for all adults that will be in charge of children, making parents mandated reporters, instituting health and safety standards for the space where children are cared for, and training parents in emergency response. According to parents, such strict requirements defeat the point of a flexible community play group they can use to help socialize their toddlers and get a break for three hours a week.

As it became clear they weren’t going to convince OSSE, the Capitol Hill Cooperative Playschool parents reached out to Ward 6 Councilmember Charles Allen. In early October, at the urging of parents, the D.C. Council passed emergency and temporary legislation to exempt play groups from OSSE regulations to prevent the agency from simply shutting the operation down. On October 3, Allen and Chairman Phil Mendelson introduced permanent legislation that would define the play groups as something different from a child development facility and totally exempt them from OSSE requirements and oversight. (Under current law, “informal parent-supervised play groups” are already exempted. OSSE contends the Capitol Hill model is too formal to count under this exemption, given the regularity of the meeting times, the fees, and the rules instituted in the group).

The bill appeared to have broad support on the D.C. Council when it was introduced. But there’s at least one other hurdle: it has to get through the Education Committee, chaired by Councilmember David Grosso, who has expressed reservations about completely deregulating play groups. On November 1, the committee had a public hearing on the issue.

“It appears to me that some play groups may have become more organized, coordinated, and regular than others. Some even have an application process, a fee, a lottery to get in, and a waitlist,” Grosso said at the hearing. “I have many questions about this as it has serious repercussions for our city, particularly as the Office of the State Superintendent crafts their state plan for child care, which they have not finished.”

Grosso’s comments have parents worried about how the committee will mark up the bill. Kidder and several other parents at the hearing said that play groups cannot survive any kind of regulation or licensing requirements, especially because some play groups see 100 percent turnover (in the Capitol Hill group, children can only participate for one year).

“Any regulation that requires reporting and paperwork and record keeping is untenable for a play group. We don’t have records, we have no institutional memory. I literally don’t know how we would do it,” Kidder says. “Just telling people where the key to the stroller is is hard enough.”

Parents at the hearing argued that such play groups have been working perfectly fine, and keeping children safe, without regulation for decades. But OSSE says that the groups obviously fall under its regulatory umbrella. The agency testified asking the Council to amend its exemption bill to include at least some requirements for play groups.

“Under current law, any arrangement that provides care and other services, supervision and guidance for children, infants and toddlers on a regular basis is defined as a child development facility and must obtain a license to operate,” said Hanseul Kang, the state superintendent of education, in testimony at the hearing. “The bill as introduced does not set forth any requirements to ensure the health and safety of children in a cooperative. It does not require that the cooperative develop and establish a minimum standard of emergency planning or require that parents and children in a cooperative conduct emergency drills.  It also does not require that parents sign in when dropping off their child or sign out when picking up their child. There is also no requirement to maintain a certain adult to child ratio or a requirement to set forth procedures to prevent the spread of chickenpox or hand foot and mouth disease.”

OSSE declined to comment on the record beyond the agency’s statements at the public hearing.

This isn’t the first time that OSSE has tried to regulate a play group. Last year, it issued a similar notice to a Petworth play group, which has traded off care of 12 toddlers for a few hours a week since 2011. In order to escape OSSE regulation and a possible shutdown, the parents moved their operation onto federal land (to President Lincoln’s Cottage).

Now, the disagreement is in the hands of Grosso’s office. Kidder says parents met with the office last week to discuss their concerns, and she thinks they’re trying to find a compromise that won’t eliminate play groups. But she says she worries they’ll end up facing a lot of pressure from OSSE to regulate. If that happens, she says, her youngest son (her fourth child) will be the only one of her kids she may not be able to put in a play group next year.

This piece has been updated to clarify that three parents are assigned to watch the play group each week, not one.