Two years ago, Washington, D.C., made welcome progress on early education by allocating $75 million to raise early educators’ salaries.

Now, Mayor Muriel Bowser’s fiscal year ’25 budget fund would eliminate the Pay Equity Fund (PEF) that supports these raises.

NBC4 Washington reports, “Bowser said part of the reason she was making such deep cuts to programs such as the Early Childhood Education Pay Equity Fund was a last-minute requirement from the District’s CFO, Glenn Lee, for the District to replenish its reserve funds, a cost of $217 million.”

In addition, “D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson is threatening to ignore the CFO, which could jeopardize the District’s finances.”

Community members are also speaking out against this cut.

“Bowser’s budget proposal hurts working families and our local economy. At a time when high-quality child care in the District remains unaffordable and hard to find, as detailed in a Bainum Foundation study released in February, these cuts will force child development facilities to increase costs for working families,” the nonprofit organization Under 3 DC explains in a press release.

Parents and early educators held a rally to oppose the proposed budget cut. The event was covered by The Washington Post.

The Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) announced that it will “reconvene the Early Childhood Educator Compensation Task Force to help inform the continued implementation of the Early Childhood Educator Pay Equity Fund, a first-in-the-nation initiative to increase compensation of early childhood educators.”

And Anne Gunderson, a Senior Policy Analyst at the DC Fiscal Policy Institute, recently testified at a budget oversight hearing, explaining:

“The mayor’s proposed budget eliminates funding for the PEF across all four years of the financial plan, abruptly ending a program that has already been implemented successfully for two years. For some educators, losing the PEF means a 40 percent reduction in their annual salaries, or racking up medical debt in the absence of affordable care.”

“The DC Council should restore full funding to the PEF across the financial plan. Eliminating the PEF and cutting the child care subsidy program will decimate the early education sector by backtracking on DC’s commitment to Black and brown educators fueling a sector on which all other businesses rely.”

The personal toll would be significant, Adam Barragan-Smith, advocacy manager for Educare DC, tells the Washington City Paper, noting, “Teachers have already started structuring their lives around this. They’ve started buying homes with what they thought was this commitment from the city government to maintain this money. … We all know that the District would never consider an across-the-board cut to D.C. public school teacher salaries like this.”

The business magazine Fast Company provides the larger economic context, explaining, “Childcare center workers earn a median wage of around $30,000 a year. The share of women living in poverty is twice the rate for childcare workers as for all workers; 23% of childcare workers struggle with hunger, and about 15% rely on government assistance to meet basic needs, such as cash assistance for disabilities, housing assistance, free or reduced-price lunch for their children, or food stamps.”

“A study by the research consultancy Mathematica found the PEF has been successful in increasing D.C.’s early childhood education workforce and suggested that it was a “useful strategy for increasing workforce retention and stability”—exactly what the childcare workforce needs.”

Washington, D.C., is at a crossroads. We’ll be interested to see if the city finds a way to protect early educators’ salaries to benefit children and their parents who are working to support the economy.