Investing in DC's Littlest Learners
As a national leader in early childhood education, the District continued to make great strides in service to our littlest learners and the educators who support them with OSSE leading the way. Robust investments in DC’s early learning sector helped the District increase the number of child care slots during the recovery period while facilities in jurisdictions across the country saw declines and closures.
District investments in 2022 included a $10 million infusion into the Access to Quality Grant program, which improves the supply and quality of child care services through grants to child development facilities to expand, open and improve new and existing facilities. Between FY18 and FY20, Access to Quality Grants helped create 1,244 infant and toddler slots in the District. Other investments included the $38 million DC Child Care Stabilization Grant program funded through federal American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds, made available to nearly every licensed child development facility in the District; the $32 million Back to Work Child Care Grant program to help licensed child care facilities, particularly those in neighborhoods most impacted by COVID-19, resume and maintain full operations and enable families to find the child care; and the DC Child Care Road to Recovery Fund II, a $3 million grant program to help support facilities with increased costs incurred during the pandemic.
Getting a Strong Start
While referrals to OSSE’s Strong Start team initially declined at the start of the pandemic, they rebounded and surpassed pre-pandemic levels in 2022. Strong Start served more than 2,500 children and their families throughout the year, a 9 percent increase over the previous year. In its second year of implementing the research-backed Natural Learning Environment Practice and the Primary Service Provider Model, the Strong Start team developed a plan to effectively measure this work. This included new provider requirements, provider coaching requirements, guidelines for observers and the coaching observation checklist tool for observers.
Early Childhood Educator Pay Equity Fund
DC is committed to growing and sustaining an early childhood educator workforce that will be a model for the nation.
The District also recognizes not just the critical economic role this sector plays, but that education does not start in kindergarten or even in pre-K 3. Learning starts at birth, and investing in high quality early education and the early education workforce is just as important as investing in K-12.
To align with that commitment, OSSE launched the Early Childhood Educator Pay Equity following the recommendations of the Early Childhood Educator Equitable Compensation Task Force. The Early Childhood Educator Pay Equity fund is a first-in-the nation initiative in FY22 to sustainably increase compensation for educators working with children age birth to 5 in licensed child development facilities.
In FY22, the fund distributed payments ranging from $5,000 to $14,000, totaling more than $37.8 million, to more than 3,172 early childhood educators; eligible early childhood educators will continue receiving quarterly payments in FY23. 3,172 early childhood educators; eligible early childhood educators will continue receiving quarterly payments in FY23.
