Earlier today, we hosted our Annual Luncheon — a virtual, nationwide celebration of the transformational power of starting early. Through the inspiring stories of families, educators and early learning champions, we witnessed how quality early learning and care programs lay a positive foundation for our youngest learners and provide necessary supports for all families.

Presented by LaSalle Network and the Zell Family Foundation, our Luncheon welcomed more than 3,000 individuals from coast to coast, many first-time attendees who are new to the Start Early family, along with some of our longest supporters. If you were unable to join us, you can watch a recording of the full program below.

Through this powerful program of diverse voices and experiences, we hope you can see the role we each have as parents, family members, friends or colleagues to support our children, families and early childhood workforce. From spreading the word about early learning’s impact in our communities, to contacting your legislator in support of an advocacy campaign or sharing the gift of financial support, your investment of time or resources will make a difference. Learn more about ways to get involved.

I am overwhelmed with appreciation for the families, educators and early learning champions, including our Luncheon Co-Chairs Kelly King Dibble and Diana Sands, who shared their personal and inspirational stories to help demonstrate the importance of early learning and care programs. Thank you to:

Michelle Obama
Former First Lady of the United States

Dr. Clinton Boyd, Jr.  
Postdoctoral Associate, Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity

Diana Barrios
New Mother

Patricia Ceja-Muhsen
Doula, Healthy Parents & Babies

Danielle Jordan  
Senior Master Teacher, Educare Chicago

Michelle Morris  
Family Support & Community Engagement Manager, Educare Chicago

Kelly King Dibble
Senior Vice President, The Northern Trust Company; Board Member, Start Early

Diana Sands
Board Member, Start Early

Curt Bailey
President, Related Midwest; Board Chair, Start Early

We are so grateful for the overwhelming generosity of our donors and event sponsors, who helped us surpass our fundraising goal of $1.2 million. Each dollar invested in this mission will change the course for our youngest learners and their families. You can still show your support by making a gift. When we come together and invest in early childhood education, we can transform the lives of our future generation.

Thank you for joining us at our virtual 2021 Annual Luncheon, and we hope to see you again soon.

Trivia!

Now that bills are making their way to the Governor’s desk, how much time does the Governor have to act on a bill?

Weekly Highlights

End of Session is Near. After a marathon weekend of floor activity prior to the Sunday, April 11th 5:00 p.m. deadline for bills to be passed out of the opposite house, this week’s lighter calendar may have provided a moment to catch a breath. That’s not to say there was nothing going on, as both the Senate and House held floor sessions where they reviewed and approved changes made to bills in the opposite house, a process called concurrence.

In addition, budget writers continued their negotiations. At a Tuesday media availability, Democratic leadership shared their current expectation that negotiations will wrap up by early next week, giving staff time to do the hard work of turning the agreements into a budget bill and accompanying supporting documents. Both Senate and House Democratic leaders pledged they will allow time for public review of the budget details prior to their respective votes.

As a reminder – the Legislature is scheduled to Sine Die (adjourn) on Sunday, April 25th. Nine days – but who is counting!

Fair Start for Kids Act Almost Across the Finish Line. The Fair Start for Kids Act is very close to the Governor’s desk with one step remaining in the process – the Senate has to concur (agree) to the amendments made to the bill in the House. Note that if further changes to the bill are needed to align with the final budget agreement, there are procedures for further changes as long as both bodies agree.

As a reminder, Start Early Washington has produced a summary of the Fair Start for Kids Act as passed by the House on April 8^th.

Capital Gains Bill Up for Vote Friday.  At 9:00 today (Friday), the House Finance Committee is scheduled to vote on a proposed striking amendment to the Capital Gains bill, ESSB 5096. The proposed striking amendment provides that all funds generated by a seven percent tax on certain Capital Gains be deposited into the Education Legacy Trust Account to support K-12 education, early learning and child care.

Under the previous version of the bill, the first $350 million of the revenue generated would have gone into the Education Legacy Trust Account, the next $100 million into the state General Fund and the balance into a newly created “Taxpayer Fairness Account.” Should this striker be adopted, this funding distribution is changed, with all funding going into the Education Legacy Trust Account.

The striking amendment also exempts certain real estate transactions, commercial fishing privileges and qualified family-owned small businesses. If the bill is approved by the House Finance Committee, it would then move to the House Floor and back to the Senate for Concurrence in House amendments. Both the Senate and House proposed budgets assume passage of Capital Gains in their projections.

What is the Future of the Blue Press House?

On the west end of the Capitol campus sit a blue house and a white house, both of which serve as offices for members of the Capitol Press Corps. These houses were a focus of a 2020 Trivia question.

Changes are coming for these buildings as both the Senate and House Capital budgets contain funding for a “Legislative Campus Modernization” project that will mean the end for both houses.  The Spokesman Review’s Jim Camden wrote a wonderful column this past Sunday about this modernization effort and shared some memories of his time working from that space. It’s a great read.

This blog post was developed in partnership with Senator Mike Simmons, Illinois State Senator, 7th District.

For over 30 years, Start Early has been working to make Illinois the best state in the country to raise young children. Our advocacy strategy has included ensuring that families have access to the high-quality early learning services that we know support healthy brain development, parent child-relationships and that prepare young people for school and life. However, we also know that healthy children grow and thrive in economically secure families.

In Illinois, we have made tremendous progress in addressing the economic insecurity faced by families. However, more must be done. Before the pandemic, estimates showed that almost 20% of children under 5  were living in a family experiencing poverty. When we disaggregate this data by race, we see 38% of Black and 23% of Latinx children aged 0-5 live in families experiencing poverty. It is not a stretch of our imagination to conclude that these numbers are likely higher given the disproportionate impact the pandemic and subsequent economic fallout have had on families of color. As well as the “chilling effect” that the previous presidential administration had on undocumented families.

It will take a focused, sustained, and bold policy agenda to adequately address the needs of families with young children. Here are some things we can urge our policymakers to do:

• Increase access to poverty mitigating supports such as Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and Children’s Health Insurance Program.
• Implement family-friendly work policies that allow families to remain employed and provide necessary care for their loved ones, including comprehensive paid family and medical leave policies and increased access to affordable childcare.
• Provide more opportunities for direct cash assistance, such as expanding access to the state’s Earned Income Credit, leveraging cash Assistance through Temporary Assistance for Needy Families dollars, and a permanent, statewide child tax credit.

The research is consistent. Children experiencing poverty are more likely to live in disinvested neighborhoods, attend schools that have been chronically underinvested, experience adverse health outcomes, and become involved in the child welfare and criminal justice systems. COVID-19 has accelerated the urgency and given us the opportunity to recommit to the economic well-being of families. Our time is now!

This blog post is a component of Illinois Childhood Advocacy Week, a week of full of opportunities for providers, parents and caregivers to share with their legislators that early education is essential—now more than ever as we rebuild and recover from the COVID-19 pandemic. Learn more.

A year ago, the pandemic was in full swing and most child care programs in the state of Illinois and across the country had temporarily closed in an effort to slow the spread of the COVID-19 virus. Like many parents, I was adjusting to working from home while simultaneously occupying a 3-year-old who was used to spending his days in a structured and stimulating learning environment. In those early days, my home was chaos and I found new respect, admiration and appreciation for the essential work my son’s teachers at his child care center do.

As time went on, child care center reopened and my son returned, but it looked much different than before. His class was smaller, everyone wore masks, and upon entering the center, his teachers took his temperature and screened for symptoms of COVID-19. And, children from different classrooms could no longer come together at the beginning and end of the day. We are fortunate that during these past ten months there has not been a single case of COVID-19 in my son’s classroom, and that the few cases in other classrooms did not spread to others or require total closure of the center.

It’s more than just luck that has kept my son and his classmates safe—it’s the incredible commitment and hard work of the center’s staff. Every day, for 11+ hours a day, the staff is fastidiously masking, cleaning and doing what it takes to ensure that the risk of transmission remains low. They do it all with grace, calmness and the trademark bubbliness of early childhood educators. I was initially worried about how much my son would learn and how comfortable he’d be with all of these new protocols, but I quickly realized that I didn’t need to worry. He was thriving.

Given my work, I know that child care is an incredibly low-margin business and teacher compensation is low, but witnessing the heroics performed by my child care provider cemented just how unjustly under-resourced the system is. According to the recent Illinois Salary and Staffing Survey of Licensed Child Care Facilities, the median hourly wage for a full-time early childhood teacher is just $13 per hour and only about half of facilities are able to provide health insurance coverage to staff.

Extended closures, decreased enrollment and increased costs associated with the ongoing pandemic have threatened the very survival of the child care sector. We don’t yet know the full extent of the fallout, but as we emerge from the pandemic, many child care programs will be lost from the system—child care providers will lose their livelihood and communities will be left with inadequate supply of care programs.

The good news for Illinois is that our state has already taken action with policy changes and dedicated grants for child care programs, which is detailed in a previous post. With the recent passage of the American Rescue Plan, billions of federal dollars will soon be distributed to states, so that we can continue and build on these efforts. In addition to continuing critical supports like the Child Care Restoration Grants, we must also invest in our entire early learning and care workforce – increasing compensation should be our top priority.

Now more than ever, we must honor the significant contributions and sacrifices the early care and learning workforce makes to keep our communities going. One way to support increased compensation for early childhood professionals is by telling legislators to invest more in early care and learning programs.

In closing, I hope you will join me in thanking all of the early care and learning professionals who have supported families and communities throughout the pandemic, either through personal outreach or by posting to social media using these templates. From the Early Intervention providers, home visitors and doulas who pivoted to virtual services, to child care providers who ensured safety and stability for children, and to the Head Start and preschool teachers who kept children learning whether at home or at school—you have all gone above and beyond to support families.

Thank you! Ms. Latantha, Ms. Lillian, Ms. Janet, and Ms. Genny—because of you, my son is learning, growing and thriving, and I’ve been able to continue working. Our family will be forever grateful to you and I hope and will work for a future where you and every other early childhood professional will finally be compensated as you deserve to be.

This blog post is a component of Illinois Childhood Advocacy Week, a week of full of opportunities for providers, parents and caregivers to share with their legislators that early education is essential—now more than ever as we rebuild and recover from the COVID-19 pandemic. Learn more.

By Sarintha Stricklin

How can we as leaders ensure our early childhood programs are providing the highest quality care to our children?

Even before the pandemic, we asked ourselves this question often. Our search for a way to support teachers and continuously improve the quality of our programs within the Jefferson Parish Early Childhood Collaborative in Louisiana led us on a journey, which culminated in the implementation of The Essential 0-5 Survey. The Essential 0-5 Survey, developed in partnership by Start Early and the University of Chicago Consortium, is a measurement system that provides insight into the strength and weakness of organizational climate for individual programs.

The Jefferson Parish Early Childhood Collaborative focuses on providing intentional professional development to support teachers and leaders. Prior to engaging in The Essential 0-5 Survey, our professional development focused on day-to-day interactions between teachers and children inside the classroom; for directors, the focus was team support, assessment of children and behavior management strategies. We did not offer any professional development focused on the organization as a whole.

After years of implementing CLASS across a variety of programs within our network — including child care centers, Early Head Start and Head Start and public schools — we were seeing only marginal improvement in our quality improvement metrics, specifically instructional leadership. Upon reflection, we realized that our administrators needed different kinds of supports to elevate their instructional leadership to the level needed to improve quality within their programs. The Essential 0-5 Survey presented an opportunity to gather information in a systematic, research-based way and give leaders a unique vantage point into their programs. What’s more, the Survey measures both teacher/staff and parent perceptions in order to provide program leaders a holistic understanding of their programs’ strengths and weaknesses.

Despite the challenges brought on by the pandemic, 14 community-based programs within our network signed up to pilot The Essential 0-5 Survey in the fall of 2020. These 14 programs have now successfully implemented the survey, received their program-level data and begun to engage in growth efforts recommended through the process. The survey data has empowered these leaders and their staff to explore the “why” behind their stagnating instructional leadership metrics. The small changes they have identified to make as individuals and as a team have resulted in rapid and meaningful improvement for themselves and the families and children they serve.

The Essential 0-5 Survey is rooted in decades of research from the University of Chicago Consortium and their 5Essentials framework focused on K-12 education. Research demonstrates the impact organizational conditions have on program quality: a program strong in three of the five essentials is 10 times likelier to substantially improve student engagement and achievement in math and reading (see the graph below).

Schools Strong in Three or More of the Five Essentials 10x More Likely to Improve

Want to learn more? Check out startearly.org/theessentialsurvey or email essentialsurvey@startearly.org.

Dr. Stricklin serves as the Director of the Jefferson Early Childhood Network supporting leaders of publicly funded programs in south Louisiana. She has worked in early education for over 30 years as a teacher, administrator, trainer, coach, and consultant. Currently, she leads a broad coalition of thought partners who are collaborating to increase access to high-quality early care and education across neighborhoods in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana.

Despite an ongoing pandemic and the subsequent virtual society that has evolved, new parents and newborn children still must have access to necessary and adequate supports. In particular, for many new families, home visiting services already may be a distant or unknown resource, which is where Coordinated Intake (CI) workers come in. CI workers are responsible for providing education on and recruiting and enrolling families in a community’s home visiting programs.

For successful CI outreach and relationship-building, under normal circumstances, they need to hold a physical, visible presence in their community. However, the ongoing pandemic has forced CIs to undertake innovative strategies for reaching families, including joining community-wide efforts to address basic family needs. See below for a handful of approaches CIs took to continue connecting with families and encouraging home visiting participation.

Social Media

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, CIs had been experimenting with using social media platforms, such as Facebook, for promoting home visiting, but the stay-at-home order forced programs to rely on these platforms to a greater degree. In response, CIs have made their own CI program accounts and/or have intentionally worked with their organization to include CI related content in social content strategies on an ongoing basis. Although developing a social media presence takes time, these efforts are paying off at a rapid rate as programs have already started receiving referrals. Many CIs intend using social media outreach as strategy on an ongoing basis.

Engagement Opportunities

In addition to reimagining how to engage families for enrollment into home visiting, CIs have taken on additional responsibilities to connect families with basic needs. This dedication shows how CIs are willing to go above and beyond to serve families. For example, in the early stages of the pandemic, one CI, after hearing that a family’s refrigerator was broken, partnered with a local charity to connect them with a replacement. CIs have also organized community diaper drives, staffed food pantries and have even organized a virtual cooking class for families participating in home visiting programs. In this instance, the CI and home visiting program used money that had been allocated for food during in-person groups and partnered with the University of Illinois to provide the cooking demonstration. The event was a success—giving families the opportunity to connect and learn cooking and nutrition tips.

Infrastructure Investment

While CIs do not provide a direct service to the family, they connect families to resources and collaborate with partners to improve the system of supports offered to families. Their ingenuity and determination show the importance of continued infrastructure investments to the early childhood system. Without these investments, CIs would be unable to devise new strategies to support and empower families. The contributions of CIs and other local leaders engaging in community systems work show that it truly takes a village to raise a child.

This blog post is a component of Illinois Childhood Advocacy Week, a week of full of opportunities for providers, parents and caregivers to share with their legislators that early education is essential—now more than ever as we rebuild and recover from the COVID-19 pandemic. Learn more.

April is Child Abuse Prevention month and there is a long-standing tradition to set pinwheels around the Capitol grounds. Pinwheels are the symbol for child abuse prevention because they symbolize playfulness and joy and are a physical reminder of the great childhoods we want for all children.  It is great to see the pinwheels return this year (and great to see the blooming trees!).

Breaking News (and the Trivia Question!)

While we did not intentionally omit today’s Trivia Question to stump you, doing so provides an opportunity to share the breaking news that late last night, the House passed the Fair Start for Kids Act on a bipartisan 62-36 vote. The bill is so close to the Governor’s desk, but first needs to return to the Senate so they can concur in the amendments made in the House. One step closer!

A total of three amendments were adopted prior to the vote. We have updated our summary to include the details of the latest version as adopted in the House last night.
And, here is the Trivia Question:

Trivia

How many Olympic-sized swimming pools would it take to fill the Legislative Building with water?

Weekly Highlights

Floor Activity Dominates Week. This is a shorter update because there is not a lot to report. The public focus of the legislative work this week has been on the Senate and House floors as both chambers review bills from the opposite chamber prior to the Sunday, April 11th deadline. The days have blended into each other as legislators spend hours in their respective party caucuses reviewing bills and then “on the floor” in debate and voting.

Status of Early Learning Bills. As reported in last week’s update, E2SSB 5237 will be the vehicle for the Fair Start for Kids Act.  As a reminder, the Start Early Washington website has a summary of the version of E2SSB 5237 as passed out of the Senate Ways and Means Committee.

E2SSB 5237 is currently awaiting action on the House Floor. As of this writing, there are seven proposed amendments to E2SSB that will be considered prior to a House vote, action that could come after our publishing deadline. The proposed amendments range from adjusting some of the implementation deadlines to shifting representation on the Early Learning Advisory Committee and its subcommittee(s) to other clarifying changes.  We will report out on the adopted amendments in next week’s newsletter and will also update the summary document on our website shortly after the House floor vote.

On April 6, the House approved SSB 5151 by a vote of 88-10, with one member absent. This is DCYF-request legislation sponsored by Senator Claire Wilson.  It has a component related to creating child-specific child welfare licenses, waives child care licensing fees through June 30, 2023 and makes the outdoor preschool pilot permanent. Because the bill was amended in the House, it needs to return to the Senate for concurrence (approval of) House amendments before it moves to the Governor for hopeful signature.

With the Fair Start for Kids Act taking a comprehensive look at early learning policy and budget issues, there are fewer early learning bills in play this year. A final key bill is ESHB 1370 which makes improvements to the Early Learning Facility Funds and names the funds in honor of former Representative Ruth Kagi. The bill is currently awaiting action in the Senate.

Budget Negotiations Underway.  In addition to the public facing floor activity, lead legislative budget writers are meeting with staff reviewing and negotiating on differences between the Senate and House budgets. We expect a final negotiated budget for Senate and House approval toward the end of the scheduled legislative session.

The Senate budget bill, ESSB 5092, will be the vehicle this year.  (Start Early Washington also has a summary of key provisions of the Senate and House budget proposals on its website).