Dear Mayor Bowser,
As you begin work on your Fiscal Year 2027 budget, we urge you to invest first and foremost in the District’s children and youth to strengthen the resilience and well-being of our city as we continue to navigate the unique hostilities of federal interference and cruelty inflicted upon our communities. By centering your budget around meeting the full needs of kids and the working families who propel our economy, you can ensure that every young person in our city—regardless of background, family income, or circumstance—has access to the support and opportunities they need to grow up reaching their full potential. At DC Action, we are particularly concerned with strengthening the District’s investments in early education, out-of-school-time programming, and housing and economic opportunity for teens and young adults. We request that your FY27 budget include the following:
- Sufficient funding for the District’s Child Care Subsidy Program to support all families seeking affordable, high-quality early education: $127-$153 million
- Restoration of the Early Childhood Educator Pay Equity Fund and HealthCare4ChildCare: $89-94 million, recurring
- Enhanced funding for out-of-school-time grants: $33 million, recurring
- Increased capacity for the District’s youth homelessness system to serve more young people, including young parents, and with longer-term housing and greater levels of wrap around services: $28 million
- Maintenance funding for public benefits and local programs District families rely on to ensure their children grow up healthy, safe, stable, and strong.Â
We also urge you act this fall to initiate Fiscal Year 2026 reprogrammings to close significant funding gaps in the Child Care Subsidy Program and Pay Equity Fund. Now that the District’s finances show a more positive and stable outlook and the District’s revenue is decoupled from costly federal tax cuts, we urge you to utilize the tools at your disposal to add at least $31 million to OSSE’s child care subsidy budget and $9 million to the Pay Equity Fund’s budget to prevent the harms that will befall our early education system – and the children, families, educators, and businesses who rely on it – if a subsidy waitlist or early educator pay cuts move forward in the coming months.Â
$153 Million Will Be Required to Sustain the Subsidy Program
Early childhood education lays the foundation for a child’s social, emotional, and academic growth while providing parents with the support they need to maintain employment and improve their family’s economic mobility. The child care subsidy program currently makes early education and child care affordable for more than 8,000 children, but to continue serving currently enrolled families the program must receive at least $127 million to match its FY25 expenditures ($116 million expended through August 2025 and an estimated $10.5 million paid in September). Ideally, however, your budget would account for programmatic growth as District families welcome new babies and navigate turbulent times in our local job market. Over the past year, the program’s enrollment grew by an average of 20% per month compared to FY24; to enable the program to continue growing at this rate and maintain progress toward serving all eligible families, the FY27 budget should allocate at least $153 million, representing a roughly $57 million increase over the program’s severely underfunded FY26 budget levels. DC Action is very concerned about the impending enactment of a harmful subsidy waitlist during this current fiscal year; a waitlist will displace parents from the workforce and deny young children the educational foundations they require. We hope you will partner with us to get the subsidy program back on track in your FY27 budget by securing full funding – $153 million – for the program ($129M allocated to OSSE and $24M to DHS).
At Least $89 Million is Needed to Restore and Grow the Pay Equity Fund
The Pay Equity Fund and HealthCare4ChildCare have fueled game changing improvements in the District’s early education system. They have grown the strength and credentials of the workforce, improved the quality of care and education available to young children, shrunk our child care supply gap, reduced absenteeism and costly staff turnover, meant less medical debt and reliance on public benefits among early educators, and generated a 23% return on the District’s investment – all without placing additional financial burdens on working families. We cannot maintain this critical progress if early educators return to earning poverty wages next year. The Black and brown women who make up the majority of our early education workforce have already made significant sacrifices on account of chronic underfunding of the Pay Equity Fund; failure to restore adequate funding to this program next year will upend our early education system, pushing early educators out of their careers and shuttering child care classrooms. If we lose our early educators, there will be wide-ranging, anti-growth ripple effects for working families, local businesses, and the District economy. To enable the Pay Equity Fund to pay the wages that all early educators deserve – relative to role, credentials, and restoring parity with public education wages – and to account for growth trends in the sector, including higher credentials, your budget must allocate at least $89 million, recurring; the portion of this ask that is needed to restore the HealthCare4ChildCare program in your FY27 budget is $12 million. However, we urge you to budget up to $94 million to enable the program to include a long overdue cost of living adjustment to educator wages. Due to chronic underfunding, minimum salary requirements have effectively remained frozen from the outset of the program, meaning early educators have seen the value of their paychecks decline every year since 2022. If this essential workforce is going to be able to continue affording to raise up our next generation, their pay must maintain parity with our public school educators and that means ensuring cost of living adjustments are budgeted into the Pay Equity Fund.
Grow the Grantmaking Budgets of the Out-of-School-Time Office to $33 Million
Like child care, high quality OST programs are lifelines for working families and create important opportunities for young people to cultivate their learning, skills, passions, and social-emotional growth. Under your leadership, the District has helped bring free or reduced cost OST programming to roughly one-third of the District’s youth, yet, affordable afterschool and summer opportunities remain out of reach for many others. To build upon the District’s nationally leading OST participation rates and better meet the demand of the 68% of District families who say they would engage their kids in afterschool programs if they were available, we urge you to increase the budget of the Office of Out-of-School- Time Grants and Youth Outcomes by at least 10% – approximately $3 million – to bring the office’s total budget to $33 million, recurring. Increased funding should be designated for grants made to community-based OST program operators. We also urge you to ensure facilities and security budgets for DCPS enable all public schools to continue absorbing building usage costs (maintenance, security guards, facility rentals, etc.) for community- based OST providers who operate programs afterschool or over the summer at our public schools; building use costs for summer programming should cover all 5 days per week.
Invest $28 Million to Improve Outcomes for Youth Experiencing Homelessness
The District’s budget for the prevention and intervention of youth homelessness has remained static over the past five years, when adjusted for inflation, limiting the District’s ability to expand services or support program quality as costs rise. A course correction is needed to sustain progress toward ending youth homelessness and to ensure resources keep pace with need. The District must commit to interagency and community collaboration on a new strategic plan toward eliminating youth homelessness, paired with increased funding and a clear strategy that guides and tracks how new and existing resources can best deliver community-informed outcomes that propel youth toward long-term stability. We have heard from many youth experiencing homelessness that they are interested in programs providing higher-intensity, longer-term housing supports, such as through extended transitional housing and permanent supportive housing. Many young parents have also shared that their experience in the family system’s rapid rehousing program – where most parenting youth are served – leads to recurring instability, rather than housing security or self-sufficiency upon exit. A new strategic plan to guide youth homelessness interventions must enable the District to solve the challenges raised by young people and facilitate greater coordination between the youth, family, and adult homelessness systems, all of whom support housing-insecure youth. Our $28 million FY27 budget request focuses specifically on the need to deliver longer-term, higher- intensity services through the youth system, as this system is best able to provide young people experiencing homelessness with the age-appropriate support they require; the ask reflects an increase of roughly $3.7 million – or 15% – over the approved FY26 budget. Â
Maintain the District’s Strong Social Safety Net and Family Strengthening Programs
Thousands of District children and families experiencing poverty count on programs like Medicaid/CHIP, the Alliance, SNAP, WIC, ERAP, housing vouchers, EITC, paid leave, fair wages for summer youth employment, and more to move toward or preserve financial stability. The District also serves thousands of children and families through its innovative public health, child development, and family strengthening programs like Healthy Futures, Strong Start, HealthySteps, Early Stages, home visiting, New Heights, Help Me Grow, PKEEP, community schools, and more. All these programs are essential for children to grow up safe, resilient, healthy, and able to reach their full potential. We urge you to preserve funding – and expand as the budget allows – for all these programs that create an ecosystem of care and support for DC’s most vulnerable children, youth, and families.Â
As the federal government continues to abdicate their responsibilities to govern or serve the common welfare of our nation, callously advancing policies that exacerbate child and family poverty rather than alleviating it, the District must step up its efforts to protect the financial, physical, and emotional wellbeing of its residents. The investments we are calling for will help ensure all Washingtonians, and especially Black and brown families, can continue living and thriving in the District. To enable full funding of these requests, we urge you to pursue progressive revenue raising strategies to more fully capture federal tax cuts going to the District’s wealthiest residents, close loopholes high earners take advantage of to avoid paying their fair share, or other strategies proposed by the Just Recovery DC Coalition. When we invest in District families, we grow our economy, strengthen communities, and embody the best of our DC values. Thank you for your commitment to our city’s young people. We look forward to meeting with you soon to discuss these budget requests and, as always, I am available to answer any questions.Â
Sincerely,
Kimberly Perry
Executive Director
kperry@dckids.orgÂ