On Tuesday, October 15, Councilmember Nadeau made the following remarks at the Council’s Legislative Meeting in support of B25-0992, Early Childhood Educator Pay Scales Emergency Amendment Act of 2024. The bill, which passed unanimously, sets pay scales for early childhood educators that reflect a decrease in funding for the pay equity program in the fy25 budget after a significant increase the year before. 

One of the points I want to really drive home today is who and why this is important. 

We have been legislating wider access to early childhood education for years now, and we are going to have to continue doing it until it is fully implemented. 

When we passed the birth-to-three legislation authored by councilmembers Robert White and Gray, we put out the blueprint for what we wanted our city to be like and what we wanted to offer, which is high-quality, accessible, early childhood education.  

The piece we are talking about today is the one that makes it all come together. Because we can raise education standards and we can put out subsidies for facilities and we can increase the number of subsidized slots but if we are not adequately paying the workforce, there will not be teachers there to take care of these children.  

You’ve heard me talk about my girls. If Semillitas Early Learning Center could not pay their employees adequately, I would not be here on this dais, because my babies would not have anywhere to go during the day. 

And then to know, until we passed the pay equity fund, they were not being adequately paid, the people who keep my children safe all day five days a week so I could come to work and serve the people of the District of Columbia, the fact that some of them were eligible for Medicaid, some of them working second jobs, that’s not right. 

So we did this. And then the mayor decimated the Pay Equity Fund and we had to do it again. 

So we are not in the situation today we thought we would be in, which is further down the road and each year adding to this. 

Instead, we had to find a way to restore as much as we possibly could and then ask a few people, some of the people in this program, to wait a little longer. 

That’ s not where we thought we would be; it’ s where we are. 

I do want to emphasize that this Council has been shoulder to shoulder on this issue. We need our Mayor to be shoulder to shoulder with us and shoulder to shoulder with those women – mostly women, mostly black and brown women, who show up to work every day to ensure that our workforce can go to work and to ensure we can have the deep bench of early childhood educators that we need and to retain the excellent ones so our children come to school ready to learn when they are in pre-k-three and kindergarten. Because we know this all goes together. 

I want to thank the Early Childhood Educator Compensation Task Force for its work. 

We can’ t legislate everything [proposed by the task force] in this bill today, and what that means is we are obligated through rigorous oversight to ensure that OSSE implements the recommendations that we’re not legislating, and I know we’ll stick together on that. 

I want to thank the Birth to Three Coalition that has been fighting to keep this together since we first passed the law, thank you.