On Thursday, Oct. 15, D.C. Attorney General, Brian Schwalb announced that his office filed a lawsuit against defunct Ward 7 child care center Little Swalih Education Center Inc., formerly known as Little Samaritan Child Development Center, Inc., and its owner and CEO, Ode H. Hines.
The 14-page lawsuit alleges that Little Samaritan and Hines failed to pay six child care workers the wages they’d earned when the center was closed permanently—without giving the employees notice—in 2024. The lawsuit also claims that Little Samaritan and Hines failed to pay wages earned in a timely fashion after termination as well as accrued annual leave. The suit seeks to recover nearly $15,000 in wages along with damages and penalties for violating D.C.’s laws.
“We will continue to aggressively enforce our wage and hour laws to ensure childcare workers get paid every dollar that they have earned,” Schwalb said in a statement on OAG’s website. “If childcare workers in DC fear that they might have their wages stolen, DC families will have fewer and more expensive childcare options.”
When a business terminates workers, D.C. law requires employers to pay staff the wages they’re owed by the next working day. For every day that passes without payment, the law states that an additional 10 percent of that paycheck will be added: “We won’t let any company pocket the money that their hard-working employees have earned,” the statement reads.
The OAG, under former AG Karl A. Racine, has previously sued organizations that provide child care successfully. In 2021, the office secured $950,000 from Washington Hebrew Congregation’s preschool for violating D.C. child care safety laws, charging parents fees before services were provided, and automatically removing kids from its programs. The same year, the OAG reached a settlement in which KCE Champions LLC was required to change its business practices to ensure parents received clear, transparent, and timely outreach about fees and services.
Hines closed Little Samaritan permanently in July 2024 with no advance notice provided to either employees or parents. According to the lawsuit, employees learned of the closure when several staff members “showed up for their scheduled shifts that day to find that the locks for the facility had been changed and they could no longer get inside.” The suit continues, “Parents also arrived that morning, expecting to drop their children off at daycare, only to learn that Little Samaritan had closed and the building was locked with many of their children’s belongings and medications trapped inside.”
Located in Ward 7, Little Samaritan provided care and services for kids ages 6 weeks through 12 years old. Before it closed, the business employed at least six workers.
Over the past several years, local child care workers have been at the center of the city’s complicated budget negotiations. In 2021, D.C. became a national leader in its efforts to address stagnant wages in the early child education industry by implementing the Early Childhood Educator Pay Equity Fund, but in recent budget cycles the fund has consistently come under threat. In June, D.C. Council managed to save the program after Mayor Muriel Bowser’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2027 cut the fund’s $60 million salary component. According to the National Association for the Education of Young Children, those cuts would have affected “more than 4,000 educators, the majority of whom are Black and Brown women across the District.”
