When Deanwood resident Frances Whalen’s daughters were young, sleep was hard to come by.

At the time, Whalen, now a security systems monitor for Fairfax County Public Schools, worked overnight shifts. Her mom or brother took care of her daughters while she worked, and Whalen watched them during the day.

That changed when her daughters started preschool at Houston Elementary in Northeast D.C.

“I would be able to sleep when I needed to sleep,” Whalen, who is now the school’s PTA president, said. “It wasn’t an interrupted or broken sleep.”

Whalen’s daughters, now 9 and 12, are graduates of D.C.’s public preschool program. The District is the only jurisdiction in the U.S. to offer free preschool for children ages 3 and 4. While not all schools offer pre-K and access isn’t guaranteed, the District has steadily expanded the number of spots over the past decade.

For many families, public preschool can relieve a burdensome expense or enable a parent, often mothers, to work. The high cost of childcare is the focus of a new proposal out of the White House and spearheaded by Ivanka Trump, but it’s not news to District residents. D.C. is ranked first out of 50 states and D.C. for most expensive infant care, and the average cost of daycare for a 4 year old is $1,487 a month, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank that studies the needs of low- and middle-income workers.

Free pre-K has helped D.C. parents, specifically mothers, return to or enter the workforce. A 2018 report from the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, looked at the effect. Since D.C. began offering two years of free preschool, the city’s maternal labor force participation rate, the percentage of mothers available for work, has increased by about 12 percentage points.

“You kind of have a double swing there,” Martin Welles, a D.C. father of three, said, “Not only do you have relief from childcare, you also have the opportunity to go back to work.”

In addition to saving on childcare, access to preschool has other benefits. Studies have long shown that preschool helps low-income kids keep up with their wealthier peers before elementary school begins.

As the program enters its second decade, educators say D.C.’s pre-K program has made early childhood education more accessible for all families in the District, with D.C. having the highest percentage of 3- and 4-year-olds enrolled in preschool in the country in 2016-2017, according to the National Institute for Early Education Research.

But, advocates say there are still improvements to be made. The quality of preschool programs varies across the city, and there aren’t enough spots for all parents seeking places for their children. And most challenging for parents: access to all pre-K 3 and 4 programs is by lottery. The District’s (in)famous lottery system can be challenging to navigate, and landing a spot isn’t guaranteed.

D.C. Public Schools became one of the first jurisdictions in the country to offer pre-K in pilot programs to four year olds in the 1970s, according to a report from the Foundation for Child Development.

In 2008, the D.C. Council passed the Pre-K Enhancement and Expansion Amendment Act, with the goal of expanding pre-K to include all 3- and 4-year-olds in D.C.. Funding came primarily from the District and Head Start, a federal initiative that promotes school readiness of low-income children under age five. Kids could attend preschool at public schools, charter schools, or community-based organizations, like nonprofits or religious centers.

Initially, the D.C. Council pushed the group to focus on pre-K 4 and not include 3-year- olds, said education activist Carrie Thornhill, chair of Pre-K For All DC, a group that advocated for the legislation. Community groups spent years pushing for the policy.

Another debate among advocates was whether to give priority to kids from low-income families, she said. They didn’t in the end because they thought it would damage public support for their bill.

“While we would like to think that the community wants to see poor kids receiving all the resources that they need, that is just not the way our community functions,” Thornhill said.

The program has taken years to ramp up, and, despite expanding steadily, it still doesn’t include all D.C. elementary schools. All 59 Title 1 DCPS elementary schools offer pre-K 3 and pre-K 4, but many other schools don’t offer preschool at all. And given the vagaries of the lottery system through which parents are required to apply for pre-K, spots can still be hard to come by. Every D.C. address is assigned to an “in-boundary” elementary school, but enrollment in pre-K programs requires parents to rank their choice of schools through the lottery system, and landing their first choice school—or any pre-K spot—isn’t guaranteed. And while families are prioritized for enrollment at their in-boundary school in the lottery, that school may not offer preschool.

But the District is still far ahead of many jurisdictions in offering universal pre-K.

Vincent Gray, the Ward 7 councilmember and former mayor who spearheaded the pre-K program in the 2000s as Council chairman, said he considers the launch ”right up there at the top of the things I’ve been able to accomplish. There is almost nothing that matches this at all in terms of its importance to our city and our society.”

For children from low-income families, preschool can help close the “persistent reading gap” between low-income children and their more affluent peers, said Marla Dean, executive director of Bright Beginnings, a nonprofit that serves young children experiencing homelessness.

Kids experiencing homelessness, for example, are often exposed to fewer words by kindergarten, Dean said, making it less likely they’ll be on grade level in elementary school.

Investing in preschool “is invaluable for all children, but it is absolutely essential for less affluent families,” Dean said. “It gives them an opportunity, despite all the other things they will have to navigate throughout their lives, to at least get their legs under themselves.”

Gray, the councilmember, said that these programs can be an “antidote” to the achievement gap between students at different income levels, though there are still not enough spots in certain parts of the city for pre-K students.

Rahima Rice, mother of a pre-K student at Bunker Hill Elementary, said it can be a “little competitive” getting a child into certain schools. Bunker Hill was not her first choice, she said, but she’s very satisfied with the school now.

The quality of programs is also a challenge, Thornhill said. It’s not just about getting kids into a program, but making sure those programs are strong, she said, adding that high turnover in the leadership of preschool programs within the D.C. chancellor’s office has made continuity hard.

“We are not where we could be had we had sustained leadership,” Thornhill said.

But it still makes a difference for many District families. For Whalen, the mother who worked overnight shifts, preschool helped her daughters learn to play with others. Petyak, parent of three preschoolers at Bunker Hill, said it’s helped her kids learn problem solving.

When you’re a parent, “you’re like well, what’s the best place to raise my child?,” said Welles, the father of three. Preschool is “like an anchor in the city … I think we’re probably the envy of the nation.”