When it comes to preschool, Washington, D.C., is in a relatively strong position. The district offers free preschool for every 3- and 4-year-old, regardless of family income, through the Pre-K Enhancement and Expansion Program (PKEEP). Additionally, the Early Childhood Pay Equity Fund ensures that PKEEP teachers earn the same pay as their elementary school counterparts.
As a result, studies have found more children, particularly disadvantaged children, are being set up to succeed in kindergarten and beyond; more parents, usually women, are joining the workforce; and families enjoy greater economic security and the ability to grow. All in all, the effort has been considered a community-wide success.
But even the best-designed systems can’t succeed if, the federal government undercuts providers’ ability to find and keep qualified workers by revoking work authorizations, limiting visas, and deporting immigrants en masse, efforts that ultimately reduce, the number of kids childcare providers can serve. Every child may be eligible for preschool, but only if they can get a spot.
Prior to the recent changes in federal immigration policy, hiring was “challenging, but doable,” said Raúl Echevarría, the co-founder, president, and CEO of CommuniKids, a language immersion preschool that also offers after-school care and summer camp. Now, however, the renewed enforcement efforts to expel immigrants “are having a significant impact on our teachers and team members.”26
By fall 2025, federal rule changes had reclassified a “small but significant number of teachers” at the preschool as ineligible to lawfully work in the United States. Because daycares and preschools operate under strict licensing requirements, those teachers were forced to quit.
“It’s created a lot of anxiety, and put some pressure on our human resources staff to make sure we can bring in teachers at the last minute,” Echevarría said. Children, too, “who are very sensitive to who their teachers are,” have been affected, he said. “They have lost their teacher.”
CommuniKids has been serving families in the D.C. area since 2005. Today it operates four centers in the District, accepting children ages 18 months to 5 years; and one in Virginia, accepting children ages 2 1/2 through 5. In total, some 500 students are enrolled—but hundreds more are on waitlists.
Nearly all of the students are U.S. citizens, and more than three-quarters are from homes where English is the dominant language, typically because one or both parents were born in the United States. CommuniKids is the largest community-based provider in PKEEP, and about half of its students are in the 3- to 4-year-old age bracket covered by the program. Some spend up to 50 hours a week at a CommuniKids center, almost always so their parents can go to work.
What sets CommuniKids apart—and makes it particularly vulnerable to federal immigration policy shifts—is that it is a fully immersive language program. Teachers need not only be licensed for preschool employment, which includes being authorized to work in the United States, but they must also be a native speaker of either French, Mandarin, or Spanish. “Those languages are spoken in the classrooms at all times,” said Echevarría. “Students develop a significant amount of fluency by the time they enter kindergarten. … The special nature of our program requires that the teachers be native speakers.”
Even with the high pay—to be commensurate with public school teacher salaries, the average preschool teacher salary is $75,000 plus benefits, some of the highest daycare wages in the country—people with such qualifications can be very hard to find. CommuniKids currently has 117 teachers, nearly all of whom are female immigrants and who together represent 25 nationalities and all the world’s major religions.
“We’re always looking for ways to find and nurture teachers who bring those skills to our classrooms,” said Echevarría. “We will always do all we can to get the best teachers for our program.”
