Throughout much of the time his toddler has been in daycare, William Perryman has covered more than half of the monthly costs with a District-funded subsidy.
However, in the midst of a Congressional budget battle and current budget deliberations clouded by a projected $1 billion revenue loss, Perryman said he can’t help but worry about what would become of the early child care subsidy– and his son’s academic future.
“Daycare is important,” said Perryman, a father of two who lives in Northwest. “My son’s 2 years old, [so] he needs to be able to socialize, to learn these social skills, to interact with children his age and intellectual level.”
In 2016, when Perryman’s first son entered daycare, he paid nearly $400 per week at a time when, as he recalled to The Informer, no early child care subsidies were available to District parents. At the time, his wife had been pursuing her education while Perryman, the sole breadwinner, made a living as a bartender.
Nearly one decade, and several hundreds of inflationary dollars, later, Perrryman continues to mull alternatives to daycare should he lose his subsidy, and ability to pay for his son’s preschool education.
“My son’s extremely bright,” Perryman said. “I’m not sure that my wife and I, in our limited time…are going to be able to fill that need. So it’d be a huge loss.”
The long-term effects, Perryman said, would most likely haunt his son for years to come.
“It would actually slow down his intellectual and personal development,” he told The Informer.
Earlier this year, Senators Susan Collins (D-Maine) and Chris Van Hollen (D-Virginia) successfully shepherded the District of Columbia Local Funds Act through the Senate, which protected the elimination of $1.1 billion from D.C.’s Fiscal Year 2025 budget. By Tuesday morning, members of the House had already returned from a two-week recess, still, without indication that Republican leadership would bring the Local Funds Act of 2025 to the House floor.
With that continuing resolution budget already approved and currently in effect, the District will have to start shutting down facilities and programs, as indicated in a message D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser (D) sent to congressional leaders. She also issued a mayoral order to initiate a hiring and spending freeze that would likely snowball into furloughs and D.C. facility closures.
With congressional action on the District of Columbia Local Funds Act being the only way of averting this situation, Perryman said he has a message for leaders on the Hill who’ve casted District residents as wasteful spenders.
“What they don’t see is the people that are using [these funds] to help them get ahead,” Perryman told The Informer. “There’s people that need this in order to move forward. I look at these debates and hear this kind of rhetoric [but] I’m living example that this is not always the case that somebody might be… milking the system.
That designation, Perryman said, belongs to another group.
“I mean, the worst milkers,” he told The Informer, “are the big businessmen.”
Mayor Bowser Focuses on Fiscal Year 2026
With the Fiscal Year 2025 budget in a state of limbo, Bowser is releasing a couple pieces of her Fiscal Year 2026 budget proposal– a document that’s dependent on Fiscal Year 2025 expenditures.
While Bowser continues to herald sports and entertainment as the District’s quintessential driver of economic activity, she’s also identified education as a worthy investment during these precarious times.
Her administration recently announced the full funding of child care subsidies, along with the District’s Pre-K Enhancement and Expansion Program (PKEEP) and Early Childhood Educator Pay Equity Fund in the Fiscal Year 2026 budget.
Pending council approval, the D.C. Child Care Subsidy Program will receive an allocation of $86 million in Fiscal Year 2026, while $19.5 million in local funds will go toward PKEEP, a program that provides preschool options outside of public and public charter schools for more than 1,000 District children.
Bowser also allocated $70 million toward the Early Childhood Educator Pay Equity Fund, which helps early childhood education centers across the District offer competitive wages and healthcare.
Another education budget item that she announced last week concerns the Bancroft Elementary School community, which will receive new pre-kindergarten classrooms through the $23 million renovation of former D.C. Department of Parks and Recreation (DPR) headquarters on 16th Street in Northwest.
Such investments, Bowser told The Informer, will help the District build upon its post-pandemic success.
“With our population growth last year, we’re the fastest growing district of all states and of all cities [in the nation],” Bowser said. “We also saw our school population rebound faster than other school districts in the region and around the nation. And also, we had outcome improvements, you know, in how our children were performing. So all of those things are important.”
The mayor went on to point out that District parents need as many cost-saving measures as they juggle responsibilities to home and family.
“We know when families are experiencing costs, increases in other parts of their lives, we try in the city to make sure we have quality programs and services,” Bowser said. “And schools [are] top on the list.”
A Question of How to Sustain Sorely Needed Subsidies
In the days leading up to Bowser’s announcement, a coalition that included early child care educators, program directors, business owners and parents, rallying with Under 3 DC, visited the John A. Wilson Building. There, the group lobbied D.C. council members to preserve the Early Childhood Educator Pay Equity Fund and D.C. Child Care Subsidy in the emergency Fiscal Year 2025 budget that Bowser and the local legislative body would have to pass if the continuing resolution remains intact.
Soon after Bowser’s Fiscal Year 2026 announcement, the director of that coalition, Martine Sadarangani Gordon, expressed gratitude.
“Under 3 DC is pleased Mayor Bowser and members of her administration heard our coalition of parents, educators, child care business owners, pediatricians, and community members about the need for accessible and affordable child care, and will maintain current funding in her FY26 budget proposal during what we know will be a tough budget year,” Sadarangani Gordon said.
Even amid the good news, Sadarangani Gordon focused on the budget crisis that’s currently unfolding, demanding that the Bowser administration maintains its commitment to District families.
“We hope to see consistent funding through this current fiscal year,” Sadarangani Gordon said. “It is imperative that funding for early childhood programs like the Pay Equity Fund and Child Care Subsidies are reliable so that no families are left behind during what is a very stressful, uncertain financial time for many.”
Last week, Bowser didn’t speak much about Fiscal Year 2025 budget deliberations, only to say that she’s not letting the congressional impasse stop her.
“What we’re talking about is the FY26 budget,” the mayor said. “And no matter what happens in FY25, we’re going to have an FY26 balanced budget, and it will include these investments.”
Since the launch of the Early Childhood Educator Pay Equity Fund, the Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) has distributed more than $177 million to increase the pay of 3,600 early childhood educators and support the retention of 365 child development centers.
The D.C. Child Care Subsidy enrollment currently stands at nearly 7,000 District children, in part because of the Bowser administration’s increase of eligibility from 250% to 300% of the federal poverty line.
In recent years, the Early Childhood Educator Pay Equity Fund has found a champion in D.C. Councilmember Christina Henderson (I-At large), chair of the council’s Committee on Health.
During the last budget season, amid tensions about the Early Childhood Educator Pay Equity Fund and other programs, Bowser warned Henderson and other council members about what she called a program that could become financially unsustainable over time.
As last week’s announcement rolled out, Bowser administration officials confirmed that they’re still eying long-term costs of the child care and early childhood education subsidies, especially as they respond to $1 billion in projected revenue loss with a new economic development plan.
Henderson wasn’t immediately available for comment.
Jenny Reed, director of the Office of Budget and Performance Management within the Office of the Chief Administrator, told The Informer that, depending on how the next four budget cycles unfold, District officials might need to employ cost-saving measures.
“For pay equity, for example, it could be capping the growth in salaries. It could be freezing enrollment of new people into the program,” Reed told The Informer. “We have to do a four-year balanced budget…so we have to make decisions now based on a revenue estimate that we think will be true in four years.”
A Word With Bridget Hall of Big Mama’s Children Center
Big Mama’s Children’s Center, based in Southwest, counts among the child development centers where all of the families cover child care costs with a subsidy. That’s why executive director Bridget Hall called Bowser’s Fiscal Year 2026 announcement a game changer.
“Hopefully she’ll add some more to the pot and not take some away,” Hall told The Informer. “We pray that we keep it at the least the same amount and prayerfully get a little bit more. It may sound greedy or selfish, but it’s needed.”
During the pandemic, Big Mama’s Children’s Center and other local early childcare development centers faced an enrollment crisis that threatened to permanently close the doors of the legacy business. In recent years, as parents, and young people alike, fully transitioned to in-person activities, Hall said her establishment has been a God-send for parents whose employers value punctuality, consistency, and fidelity to the job.
“Everything is so expensive, and child care is a necessity so that [parents] can afford all of this,” she said. “They don’t have any anxieties about leaving a child. They, you know, can go ahead and be productive in their work, be successful in their work.”
There’s still the issue of what’s to become of Hall and her patrons this summer without D.C.s Fiscal Year 2025 budget kerfuffle fully resolved.
Hall admits she has anxiety from what’s coming down the pike, especially because Big Mama’s Children Center, a year-round program, serves young people between the ages of 3 and 13 during the summer months.
“During the summer months… our parents can depend on us for them not to have to scramble at times,” Hall told The Informer. “It just heightens the success rate of a parent to keep a job, to be able to go to work every day or as much as possible and be productive in their work. It’s a win-win situation for the people they work for because the parents will come and be productive, and we win [with] parents entrusting us with their most prized possession.”