Beginning Dec. 2, many D.C. child-care providers will be required to earn certain credentials in order to continue working, according to new education requirements set by the Office of the State Superintendent of Education. OSSE’s increased education regulations apply to those who care for children ages 0 to 3. The requirement is kicking in at a time when many education centers have only just entered their post-COVID recovery zone, frustration over the contested regulations is mounting.
The new regulations, published by OSSE in December 2016, require child-care providers to have advanced certifications based on their positions. Caregivers and assistant teachers will need a Child Development Associate Credential, teachers will need an associate’s degree, and center directors will need a bachelor’s degree. Caregivers who have “continuously served in the same (or comparable role/position) for the past ten years (since 2006 or earlier)” can be granted exemptions from the requirements, but the waiver must be renewed every three years, in conjunction with the license of the child-care facility where the educator is employed, according to Kathryn Lynch-Morin, OSSE’s director of communications.
After they were announced, the regulations received backlash from parents concerned about the impact on child-care costs and educators frustrated with the new demands in an already difficult industry. Seven years later, many of the same concerns remain.
Alyson McGee is a parent and the board president at a child-care center in downtown D.C., which her second child currently attends. The center’s board of directors is largely made up of enrolled children’s parents. McGee calls it a “glorified PTA,” but her role has given her “a front row view to the business and what goes inside.”
“You need to use a little bit of common sense here,” McGee says. “That’s what’s missing with this regulation. They’re not taking COVID and these equity issues into account. They’re not close enough to these people or the centers themselves.”
The Institute of Justice filed a lawsuit against OSSE in 2018, seeking to stop the education requirements from going into effect. The complaint, filed on behalf of one parent and two educators, claimed “people who struggle to feed their own families will be forced to attend and pay for irrelevant college courses.”
OSSE’s subsequent delays gave educators more time to acquire the credentials, and many have embraced the new requirements. But as the implementation date looms, some community members continue to fight against the new rules.
OSSE has said the regulations will upgrade D.C.’s workforce, says Renée D. Flaherty, a senior attorney at the Institute of Justice. But, she says, some child-care providers are “opting to simply leave the field rather than comply.”
The new requirements stem from research that suggests years 0 to 3 are a critical period for children’s development. The additional credentials, OSSE and supporters of the regulations believe, will enable educators to provide the necessary care for young kids to succeed.
Kathy Hollowell-Makle, executive director of the D.C. Association for the Education of Young Children, an education advocacy group, acknowledges this research is relatively new. Even so, she says early education provides opportunities for meaningful interactions with children, “especially those experiencing homelessness and poverty, that can mitigate the issues that come with this.” Hollowell-Makle says educators can close the income-based academic achievement gap that often manifests by the age of 18 months.
Altagracia Sanchez, who goes by Ilumi, has been a child-care worker in D.C. since 2000, and has operated her own home-based child development center, Mundo de Fantasias, for 18 years. To continue her work, Sanchez would need an associate’s degree under OSSE’s new regulations. Since she meets OSSE’s requirements for the 10-year continuous service waiver, she has not pursued the credential and does not believe the degree would improve the care her center offers.
Despite her exemption, Sanchez is a vocal opponent of the credentialing requirements. She was one of the three plaintiffs in the Institute of Justice’s lawsuit, arguing the regulations inhibit her right as a child-care worker “to pursue an honest living free from arbitrary and irrational regulations,” the complaint says.
Sanchez tells City Paper that other educators she knows “are afraid to fight, especially if they don’t have [immigration] papers. So I have to speak up more.” Sanchez immigrated to the United States from the Dominican Republic in 1995.
Her daughter, who preferred to remain unnamed, also works at Mundo de Fantasias as an assistant caregiver. But while Sanchez decided to take legal action, her daughter opted to complete the additional credentialing. “She wanted to cover mommy’s back,” Sanchez says, laughing.
According to Sanchez, the courses her daughter completed covered programming that Mundo de Fantasias has already implemented. Sanchez lists the kids’ daily activities, which are designed to develop fine motor skills or gross motor skills. Sanchez’s center is bilingual, and the kids she cares for leave with basic Spanish language skills.
“If we provide a child with everything they need—love, security, taking care of them—why do you want us to have the title if we do the same activities [a degree would] teach us?” Sanchez says.
Hollowell-Makle sees the answer clearly: “Rationally, if you’re getting additional training you’re getting additional experience. Our providers have the experience and disposition—I don’t want them to think it’s personal—but we’re moving towards a standardized, minimum requirement.”
She acknowledges the degrees themselves won’t guarantee “outstanding” educators, but the requirements also work to make early child care a desirable and sustainable career choice.
“We have to consider that the 0 to 3 space has to be like any other educator space,” she says, noting similar credentialing requirements exist for K-12 educators.
McGee says her children’s center has only just found a post-pandemic stride, but several issues linger. The center struggles with hiring, pay freezes, and lagging enrollment numbers. McGee understands the goal of the credentialing requirements, but worries about the threat it poses to a recovering industry.
Her concern, she says, is largely for the teachers, especially older, single mothers who have to work and take care of their families. “This new requirement was always going to benefit more privileged women,” she says.
Many child-care centers—especially those in more affluent D.C. neighborhoods—have educators with higher degrees, she says, but those in centers downtown, or neighborhoods with a lower socioeconomic status, are less likely to have those credentials. And many long-serving caregivers are not exempt. Although OSSE calls the waiver a “Ten Year Continuous Service Waiver,” only caregivers who have been working “from 2006 or earlier” are qualified for it, according to the application. Caregivers applying today, in 2023, would have had to serve in the role for 17 years. “It’s pretty disingenuous to say you’re giving a 10-year waiver when it’s actually a 17-year waiver,” McGee says.
At-Large Councilmember Christina Henderson emphasizes that these changes have been planned for several years, and the CDA program can be completed in roughly six months if a participant goes part-time. She says the regulations were the decision “of the early childcare community in an effort to gain increased wages and to improve the quality of readiness as [the kids] transition into school.”
The city has responded to these efforts with the Early Educator Pay Equity Fund. Beginning in Fiscal Year 2022, educators working at least 10 hours a week in a child development facility licensed by OSSE will receive four payments of up to $3,500 each between October 2022 and September 2023.
“As a government, we have not always done well in following through and building trust,” Henderson says. “But with the Pay Equity Fund, I hope we’re moving in the right direction and proving that we can do this.”
“The fear was that if credentials were raised, you’d have to compensate these folks,” says Hollowell-Makle. “With the Pay Equity Fund, people are settling into the idea a little bit more.”
McGee says the educators at her center remain anxious about the looming regulations. One teacher is planning to retire rather than pursue an associate’s degree at the age of 60. None of the educators at McGee’s center wished to speak publicly about the issue.
“The people who are doing this job do it because they can and they love it,” McGee says. “To be told, after decades in this sector, ‘Oh actually you’re no longer qualified to do this job,’ how insulting.”
Sanchez says child-care providers she knows are afraid to fight the new requirements publicly, but have told her they will not have the energy or the time to get the additional degree.
Sally D’Italia, an early learning advocate who works as the director of a local children’s center, acknowledges an immediate change might not occur on Dec. 2. “It will be up to OSSE to decide how to approach folks that haven’t met the credential,” she says. But she cautions against focusing too hard on the negative numbers. “Maybe it won’t happen by Dec. 2,” she says. “But how do we keep it moving forward so we see X number of educators have gotten their CDA. How can we show a positive movement forward and push a positive narrative?”
An April 2023 report from OSSE shows more than 85 percent of center directors have met, or are meeting, the new requirements; 64 percent of home caregivers, 57 percent of expanded home caregivers, 54 percent of associate home caregivers, and 39 and 38 percent of assistant teachers and teachers, respectively, have also met the requirements.