The D.C. Council on Tuesday signed off on a plan to send thousands of child care workers in the city one-time payments of between $10,000 and $14,000 as part of a broader plan to raise wages in the industry.

The council approved a bill authorizing the city to distribute a $53.9 million pot of money among child care workers, as proposed earlier this month by a task force exploring how to more permanently raise wages for workers who in most cases make only barely above minimum wage. The money comes from a tax increase on wealthy households the council approved last year, and is expected to grow to $74.8 million by 2025.

“Child care is the backbone of our economy,” said Councilmember Janeese Lewis George (D-Ward 4). “The predominantly Black and brown women who do this work have been underpaid for decades despite being asked to educate our children during their most foundational years. Today we start paying them much closer to what they deserve.”

The move is years in the making, following the passage of a sweeping child care bill in 2018 that promised to bring down costs for for families while also increasing pay for the thousands of workers who care for infants and toddlers in D.C.

But local officials and advocates have since been stymied by just how to increase wages in an industry that is predominantly privately operated. The District has more than 470 licensed facilities with over 3,100 staff serving more than 11,000 infants and toddlers in D.C. Another challenge is how to raise pay without increasing costs for families who can already be faced with monthly payments of more than $2,000 for care.

The task force, which the council created last year, decided on a two-part solution: the one-time payments this year of between $10,000 and $14,000, depending on a worker’s exact responsibilities, and a more permanent system to equitably funnel the new tax revenue to child care workers into the future. A second report outlining how that system could be structured is expected in mid-April.

The council’s passage of the bill drew cheers from child care advocates, who say that child care workers have long played a critical part in children’s development — but are paid a fraction of what public school teachers make.

“Early educators are an important part of the foundation of young children’s early education & development, they’re the pros families rely on to care for their kids while they work, & they’re people who deserve the resources they need to care for themselves & their families,” tweeted Ruqiyyah Anbar-Shaheen, a member of the task force and director of the Under 3 D.C. Coalition.

The debate over pay for child care workers has been simmering in different cities and states across the country in recent years, and a mechanism to increase pay was included in President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better bill that has failed to move forward in Congress. Still, even proponents say how wages are raised matters, and that any steps have to ensure that costs aren’t simply passed along to families.

Some experts say how people think about child care across the country needs to evolve, and that more officials should start looking at child care as part of the broader education system. That in part happened in D.C. in 2008, when the city opted to expand public education to encompass free and mostly universal access to pre-kindergarten for three- and four-year-olds.

“We’ve learned a lot about how to do this for three- and four-year-olds. And we need to shift our thinking to really be thinking about this from from birth to five and not just for three- and four-year-olds,” says Caitlin McLean, a researcher at the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at the University of California at Berkeley.

Anbar-Shaheen says the next step in D.C. will be focusing on a provision of the 2018 child care law that would cap a family’s overall child care expenses at 10% of their income, a provision that would likely require expanded existing subsidies that currently go to low-income families to help them afford care.