Miss Joyce, Miss Tameca, Miss Parker and Miss Dewey.
These are my co-mothers.
They are the women of Hill Preschool who helped tame my feral little boys. They taught them how to stand in line, how to share the cool firetruck toy with 10 other badgers who all wanted it, who (so very patiently) showed them how to hold hands during a walk across a busy Washington street.
They are the early childhood educators who teach most American children how to treat others with respect, how to obey rules in a group and how to be a cooperative and productive people.
"We are a child's first teacher," said Tasha Brown, one of the assistant directors at the preschool on Capitol Hill where my boys were caterpillars and butterflies before they became kindergartners. "We are teaching them how to be kind citizens of the world."
And yet, our society routinely undervalues these workers, who are overwhelmingly women and 38 percent of whom are women of color, according to a Center for American Progress analysis.
We saw this in stark relief Wednesday in our nation's capital, where the budget proposal for the next fiscal year from Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) showed deep and insulting cuts to a program set up to assure these valuable professionals a living wage.
"It feels as though we are proposing to balance this budget on the backs of Black and Brown women," said council member Christina Henderson (I-At Large), in emotional testimony about a proposal that critics say will devastate the city's preschool teachers, many of whom struggle to afford to live here on meager pay.
In a city where thousands of people are paid millions of dollars to do, what exactly -- PowerPoints? White papers? Studies? -- preschool teachers shape the future, and make all of that other work possible.
And for a few years, the District government acknowledged it.
This was thanks to the Early Childhood Educator Pay Equity Fund, a fantastic plan to elevate salaries using the city's earned income tax credit. Early childhood educators' pay went from unsustainable and shameful ($48,000 annually for a lead teacher in the bumblebee room at Hill Preschool) to livable and respectful (up to $75,000 annually for those with degrees).
The fund has paid out more than $80 million to 4,000 day-care teachers since it was created in 2021. Bowser said its elimination was a cut she didn't want to make, but that it was necessary to fulfill Chief Financial Officer Glen Lee's requirement to replenish one of the city's reserve funds at a time the District's revenue outlook is bleak.
The discourse around such cuts as D.C. offers the billionaire owner of the Caps and Wizards a $515 million deal to stay downtown is reductive; the money comes from a different pot. But targeting the program will impact a nationwide push to get early educators the respect and pay they deserve. It was the only initiative of its kind in the country and was being carefully watched.
"This changed teachers' lives," said Brown, who marched downtown to tell the mayor what she thought of the budget proposal this week.
"You could just see the boost in morale, the excitement and joy when it began," Brown said. "Teachers were finally able to look into becoming homeowners for the first time or finally trading in their old cars for reliable transportation."
The subsidies raised their pay to bring them in line with public school teachers. The howls were -- yawn -- familiar:
"If you can't afford children, don't have any."
"I don't have kids. Why should I pay for other people's kids?"
"Why should I subsidize private child cares?"
Most of the people who like to talk about affording children wouldn't be alive if their babyhood's economy looked like it does today and their parents heeded that advice.
It takes an annual income of around $235,000 for a family of four live comfortably in most American cities today -- from $186,784 if you're in Wichita to $275,642 in Washington, according to a report by Smart Asset.
Most families need two incomes and, in most cases, that means they need child care until kids are of school age.
The annual cost is staggering for most folks -- $24,400 on average per child in the D.C. area, according to a report by the Annie E. Casey Foundation.
And it's not because child care is a luxurious, highflying business.
I was looking back at my emails from Hill Preschool while writing this, when I was on the board (ah, the volunteer spirit of a young parent). I found memos begging families to join for fall and spring cleanup, when we painted the school walls and pulled weeds. We had long discussions in that church basement about balancing the budget and squeezing a raise out of tuition payments for teacher salaries. We pushed ourselves to ensure the program's health, but our 3 percent pay increase yielded only about 50 cents more per hour for many of these women who loved our kids.
So when the city stepped in with a morally righteous use of taxpayer funds amid a pandemic-fueled moment of introspection -- raising the pay, and therefore the standards in child-care centers throughout the nation's capital -- it was a relief.
And now, asking those teachers who went out and financed the degrees to help them reach these salaries, who bought their first homes and traded in their broken-down cars, will set them all back.
"If they said they're going to try this for a three- or a five-year period, educators would've had an understanding of how to treat this money," Brown said. "But now you're asking educators to go back to those low salaries and do the same job? We have teachers in tears."
Here's the thing.
Investing in kids at this impressionable, crucial age is an investment in the future, for everyone. For a future workforce, for safer neighborhoods, for stable employees.
"A lot of times, you hear people talking about, you know, crime and youth and problems," Brown said. "But they say that without realizing how what we are doing in the early-childhood education industry can affect how those kids behave as they grow older."
Henderson's voice was shaky when she spoke about the issue, describing the betrayal she felt this was.
"I don't know how many different ways to scream it or to say it," Henderson said. "Child care is not just about education. It is an economic issue. It is a workforce issue."
And it's a humanity issue.
This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/04/04/dc-budget-cuts-early-childhood/
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