Each year the Illinois General Assembly passes legislation that can have an impact on families, or the organizations in our communities providing early childhood or related supportive services to families. Start Early leads on some of these legislative changes, often in coalition with others, and in other cases we contribute our early childhood lens and expertise to support the efforts of another lead organization. The 2023 Legislative Summary provides a listing of those bills that became law in the spring 2023 session that we thought would be relevant to families with young children and the field. We hope that this is a resource you will download and share with colleagues and families alike. We are happy to provide additional information about any of these initiatives or connect you with other advocates where needed. Initiatives that were led by Start Early are marked “*”.
Download Our Legislative Summary
Enrollment and retention data have long suggested the home visiting field could do more to meet the needs and desires of families, and workforce data point to challenges finding and sustaining a highly-qualified workforce. Start Early’s Illinois Home Visiting Caregiver and Provider Feedback Project used an organic, mixed-methods approach to understand what families and providers see as needed improvements to the home visiting system, and from this input, created precise recommendations.
The findings of this multi-year project carry significance for programs, model developers, researchers, systems leaders and policy makers. By actively engaging with the recommendations, leaders at all levels can ensure that resources are optimally allocated and can drive transformative change, paving the way for a more responsive, equitable and effective system that uplifts families and nurtures the healthy development of young children.
We encourage members of the home visiting field – including funders, model developers, researchers, program leaders, home visitors, and family participants – to read this report and identify the levers for change that they can act upon to strengthen and improve how the home visiting system supports caregivers and providers.
For questions about this report, please reach out to alowefotos@startearly.org.
Key Recommendations
National Models
- Create curriculum, program materials, and use language that is more inclusive and representative of all caregivers, including gender non-conforming or non-binary caregivers, male caregivers, and caregivers who are not parents.
- Embed and allow for more individualization in service delivery to meet families’ needs; prioritize new and strengths-based measure of the quality and effectiveness of programs, such as parental efficacy and length of retention.
- Reduce educational requirements and create additional flexibilities for programs to hire individuals without a Bachelor’s degree, including developing guidance for how to hire former parent participants, in order to address vacancies and to reflect competency-based skills.
Federal Agencies & Funders of Home Visiting
- Coordinate federal funding streams and offer states added guidance on braiding across different sources (e.g. Head Start/Early Head Start, Title IV-E, TANF, Medicaid, etc.) for more efficient state home visiting systems. The Office of Head Start and Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) should coordinate on allocation of funding, funding timelines and program requirements to ensure that state systems are able to plan around the braiding of these funding streams.
Illinois Agencies & Funders of Home Visiting
- Identify opportunities to extend and individualize services to engage a broad array of family needs and desires, including creating cross-model guidance on enhancements and modifications for priority populations.
- Align funding mechanisms and administrative requirements to alleviate the burden on programs, including streamlining data collection, compensation, monitoring and other requirements.
- Increase supports for programs surrounding workforce recruitment and retention, including implementing cross-funder compensation targets, hiring supports including sample job descriptions, pay differentials for bilingual staff.
- Increase access to supports including infant and early childhood mental health consultation.
The Start Early Illinois Policy team is pleased to release our newest multi-year policy agenda, guiding our work for the next four fiscal years (FY24-27) and building on the work of our recently-concluded inaugural agenda.
The FY24-27 Policy Agenda incorporates the many advances in the field over the past four years, including Governor Pritzker’s exciting multi-year Smart Start initiative, and encompasses our priorities – both within and alongside Smart Start. Our work will also both inform and be shaped by the governor’s recent announcement of the creation of a standalone early childhood agency. The agenda continues to be anchored in community and provider voices, and is organized into four foundational components:
- A stronger, more cohesive infrastructure for early childhood services where families can find the services that work for their children, where providers can easily access supports like I/ECMHC and strategies for inclusion of children with disabilities, and where quality, transparent data guides decision-making.
- Well-designed and administered early childhood programs where programs have the resources they need to meet the diverse needs of young children and their families.
- A thriving representative workforce with stronger pathways to earning needed credentials, receive the compensation and benefits that reflect the importance and complexity of their work and who receive ongoing professional learning opportunities.
- Improved access to health and mental health care, economic supports and healthy communities, which we know are basic necessities all children deserve and need to thrive, particularly in the prenatal to kindergarten entry period of life.
We look forward to work that not only drives us toward this vision but is rooted in the current challenges we know families and early childhood providers and programs face on a daily basis. The challenges the field faces are significant and urgent, and while recent investments have been incredibly helpful, our progress is tenuous. We can be successful only when we work in partnership with families and providers, our advocacy partners, our public partners in city and state government and the tremendous philanthropic community in Illinois. We look forward to tackling these challenges with all of our partners to make Illinois the best state in the nation to raise a child.
Resources
With the close of Fiscal Year 2023, Start Early’s Illinois Policy team ended our inaugural, multi-year policy agenda. In launching that agenda, we wanted to try to capture the breadth of the work we do with our state and local elected officials and agencies to continuously strengthen and improve our early childhood programs, strengthen the early childhood workforce and to improve access to economic and health supports that we know are so critical for children and families to thrive. That agenda launched in the early months of not only a new governor’s term, but also a global pandemic.
Despite the strange mix of both hopefulness and uncertainty of that year, our team was focused on the kinds of change and progress we wanted to see for our state’s children and families – both now and in the years to come. Over those years, thanks to the leadership of Governor Pritzker and the members of the Illinois General Assembly, along with the tenacious advocacy of the early childhood community, we’ve seen:
- Increased investments in early childhood programs* lifting our state commitment from just over $1 billion in FY21 to more than $1.5 billion in FY24.
- A blueprint to re-imagine the early childhood system to ensure that families can find the services they want and need, and that those supports are available equitably across Illinois.
- Use of federal COVID-relief funding to not only to respond to the unique needs of the pandemic, but also to lay the groundwork for changes toward the state’s long-term vision.
- Increased attention towards better supporting the early childhood workforce for the critical work they do.
- Efforts to ensure that our programs are able to enroll and serve families who too often face systemic barriers to participation – such as children with delays or disabilities, who are experiencing homelessness or who might come from a home where languages other than English are the primary.
Despite all of that progress, there is much work to do. We need to continue toward this new vision of our system, but recognize how many serious challenges are being experienced daily in early childhood programs – particularly to attract and retain folks into the early childhood workforce. The child care business model was already fraught before the pandemic. There is a great need for stronger federal partnership and funding to help states advance their early learning goals.
Our team was proud to lead and significantly contribute to so many advances over the past few years – and in our new multi-year agenda will lay out some of the key priorities of work yet to be done. We have a short window in the first five years to help children launch into school and life with the strongest foundation possible – opportunities are in front of us and we owe it to our youngest learners to do what we know needs to be done.
* Early Childhood Block Grant, Home Visiting, Early Intervention and the Child Care Assistance Program and the Early Childhood Construction Grant
Earlier today, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker announced the creation of a new, unified state agency focused on early childhood. This major undertaking, which will take place over several years, aims to simplify and streamline how families access critical early learning and care services – by better aligning and coordinating programs, data and policies.
Across the country, families with young children and those who care for them continue to navigate a complex, fragmented and under-resourced early care and learning system, making it challenging to meet the diverse needs of communities.
Illinois leaders and stakeholders have called for an early childhood agency that can more efficiently and equitably manage the range of services that young children and families need to thrive, and we are prepared and ready to design and implement this new governance structure with success.
For decades, Illinois has been a leader in prioritizing policies and investments that put children and families first and has built a robust early childhood system through deep public and private engagement, helping to ensure services reflect what families and providers need and value. This long history gives the current administration lessons to build upon and partnerships to harness as this new agency is designed and launched.
Start Early is excited to offer its longstanding experiences directly providing early childhood services and informing policy in Illinois as state leaders embark on this historic transformation of the governance and design of our early learning and care system.
“Today, the governor presented a unique, historic pledge to redesign and transform how we serve Illinois families with young children,” Start Early Vice President of Illinois Policy Ireta Gasner shares. “Start Early is eager to be a collaborator in this work. We know that we will have greater success when we bring the voices of the early childhood community alongside our government partners in this effort.”
As the backbone organization of Raising Illinois, a statewide public-private coalition of more than 1,400 parents, providers, advocates and policymakers working to achieve a better future for Illinois’ infants and toddlers, we have seen the power of what Illinoisans can contribute in driving transformational change. It will take the experiences of those on-the-ground in communities across the state for such a notable, positive and sustainable change to be made to our state’s early childhood infrastructure.
While the transition team works to establish the new agency, it remains critical for us to stay committed to the multi-year investments and program improvements outlined in the governor’s Smart Start plan. We must approve and implement substantial annual investments in all early childhood program to address early childhood workforce shortages and waiting lists for services, and to expand services to where families face disparities in accessing programs they need to work and for their children to thrive.
“The first five years of a child’s life are the most important for positive health and development, and our youngest Illinoisans are growing and learning right now,” Start Early President Diana Rauner states. “So, as we look toward this brighter future for how we serve Illinois families, Start Early remains steadfast in its efforts to reach more families with quality early learning experiences through transformational policies, investments and research.”
Next week, the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) is holding the first two of its three fall budget hearings, the first step in determining next year’s proposed education budget for the state. These hearings provide the early childhood advocacy community an opportunity to help shape the state’s Fiscal Year 2025 budget proposal. Please consider participating *virtually or in-person * in requesting a $75 million increase in state funding for the Early Childhood Block Grant (ECBG) and to continue and grow the $5 million investment to improve inclusion supports for children with disabilities and developmental delays.
Here’s how you can participate in the ISBE budget hearing process:
- Visit ISBE.net/BudgetRequestForm, and enter your name and contact information.
- Choose the hearing you’ll attend or select the option for submitting a written testimony. Written requests must be received by ISBE no later than Oct. 31.
- Under the “Add Program Request” drop-down menu select “Early Childhood Education”
- Enter $75,000,000.00 under the “Additional Requested Funding” section.
- Under the field that begins with “Please provide the Board with a description of your funding request,” you will need to put further detail on the $75 million ask.
Upcoming Budget Hearings:
- Oct. 3, 4-7 p.m. CT (In-person in Springfield)
Must submit a written funding request online by Sept. 28 - Oct. 5, 4-7 p.m. CT (Virtual)
Registration deadline is Oct. 2 at 11:59 p.m.
- Oct. 30, 1-4 p.m. CT (Virtual)
Registration deadline is Oct. 25 at 11:59 p.m.
General Tips to Testify at ISBE’s Fiscal Year 2025 Budget Hearings:
- Use your time wisely as oral testimony is being limited to three (3) minutes per person.
- Be sure to personalize your testimony with your own perspective.
- Compose your testimony with an introduction, early childhood needs, the $75 million ask and conclusion.
- Use your own words as much as possible, for variety and authenticity.
Contact us if you plan to testify or have questions. Thank you for speaking up for children and families across the state!
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Late summer marks the beginning of the return-to-school season for K-12 teachers across the country. Yet within the early learning field, child care educators work year-round providing care for our youngest learners while earning low wages and working under difficult conditions.
According to 2021 survey data from the Illinois Network of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies, the median wage for early childhood assistant teachers was $12.00 per hour and for early childhood lead teachers, the median wage was $14.29.1 In terms of benefits, only approximately half of centers are able to offer health insurance.1 Not only is compensation abysmally low, but child care teachers work long hours to reflect the unique care schedules of families.
Stay Connected
Stay up to date on early childhood policy issues and how you can take action to ensure more children have access to quality early learning and care in Illinois.
Our child care workforce is greatly undervalued despite the critical role they play in our children’s and families’ lives. Since their work is rarely acknowledged or appreciated, it has become increasingly challenging to recruit and retain early educators. Less staff means fewer open classrooms and more difficulty finding care. This is especially true for infant and toddler slots since infant-toddler teachers are paid the least in their field, despite working under the most difficult conditions.
As a nation, we have failed to recognize the importance of the early childhood workforce—public investment for early care and education is embarrassingly low. This has occurred despite research showing that young children’s brains develop fastest during the birth to age 5 period and that having access to a quality program can help boost their outcomes later in life. Having a nurturing, safe, and healthy place to learn during the early years can help close the opportunity gap and give all children the ability to thrive.
Our early childhood workforce arrives at work every day to provide care for our youngest and most vulnerable students, simply because of their passion for working with young children. As a society, our failure to acknowledge child care staff as essential further hurts not only the field, but children and families who rely on care. This back-to-school season let’s make sure we recognize and thank the early childhood teachers that allow parents and caregivers to go to work while their child(ren) thrive at their early learning program.
Norton, Jordan, Rachel Salrin, Corinne Lee, and Joellyn Whitehead. n.d. Illinois Salary and Staffing Survey of Licensed Child Care Facilities Fiscal Year 2021. Springfield, IL: Illinois Network of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies.
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July marked the beginning of the City of Chicago’s annual budget process, the first for Mayor Brandon Johnson. The City’s new administration has made clear their commitment to K-12 education and they are advocating for increasing quality learning opportunities and supports for all students. It’s our hope that the Mayor and City Council will consider including Chicago’s early childhood care and education system in their education and health priorities. Many early childhood programs in Chicago received a much needed influx of investment from ARPA relief dollars to help stabilize and support their programs. However, many of those funds will come to a cliff in the next few years. Now is the time to increase local investment to support Chicago families and follow in the State’s footsteps of prioritizing early childhood education in the budget.
Stay Connected
Stay up to date on early childhood policy issues and how you can take action to ensure more children have access to quality early learning and care in Illinois.
Continuing the efforts of last year’s budget advocacy, an ever-growing coalition of service providers, advocates, and families have written a letter detailing our shared budget requests. Our collective recommendations urge the Mayor and City Council to invest additional funds into Chicago’s early childhood care and education system.
At the core of our recommendations is a continued appeal to address the worsening early childhood workforce crisis. The City should increase funding for the Chicago Early Childhood Workforce Scholarship. Since the scholarship’s inception, it has annually received more applicants than there is funding to serve, while staffing shortages throughout the city cause significant service delays for some programs. Further, the City should also support pay parity in wages between early childhood professionals in school-based and community-based settings. Funds from the City Corporate Fund should be used to increase compensation for these essential workers in the short-term while working to structurally address the gap. It is critical that the early childhood workforce be acknowledged for their contributions to the future leaders of Chicago.
Advocates also call upon the Mayor’s Office to strengthen governance and continue infrastructure investments to include additional roles in the Mayor’s Office to focus on key areas of coordination and utilize the collective expertise of the standing public-private table, Every Child Ready Chicago. Infrastructure investments should target the Chicago Early Learning application and referral system to make the user experience more parent and provider friendly, and display the same information about community-based options as school-based enrollment options. To further elevate parent and community voice, the City should invest in Community Collaborations to promote Chicago Early Learning engagement and enrollment at the local level. Each program offering in Chicago’s mixed delivery system is important and parents should have the resources to decide what is the best option for their family.
Many of our budget requests echo last year’s, underscoring the critical investments needed in strategic sectors of Chicago’s early childhood care and education system. Start Early and our partner advocates, providers and families will continue our advocacy until these investments to support Chicago’s early childhood system are seen.
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Chicago’s new mayor, Brandon Johnson, has taken office at a pivotal time for shaping the future of Chicago’s early care and education system. Last week, the Illinois General Assembly passed the Fiscal Year 2024 budget, which includes an historic $300 million increase in statewide investments in the state’s core early care and education supports for families with young children. Much of this funding will benefit the over 200,000 children ages birth-5 in the city.
Outlined below are just some of the most notable impacts of Illinois’ newest budget on Chicago’s youngest learners and those who support their healthy development and education.
EARLY CHILDHOOD BLOCK GRANT: $75 Million Increase
Governor Pritzker’s Smart Start plan includes a welcome increase of $75 million (12.5%) in state funding for preschool, evidence-based home visiting services and center-based infant-toddler programs funded by the Early Childhood Block Grant (ECBG) at the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE). As is required by state statute, Chicago Public Schools (CPS) will receive 37% of this increase, which translates to roughly $27.75 million.
Of this allocated funding, CPS has traditionally held on to 60% to fund their school-based pre-Kindergarten (pre-K) programs and sub-granted the remaining 40% to Chicago’s Department of Family and Support Services (DFSS), which are used to fund home visiting and center-based services in community-based programs. This breaks down to roughly $16.65 million more in funding directly for CPS’ pre-K programs and an additional $11.1 million in funding for DFSS-funded community-based early childhood programs.
With Chicago Public Schools recently having achieved universal pre-k for all 4 year-olds in the city, Start Early urges the district to consider how these additional funds coming to the city can support the infrastructure for these pre-k slots, including growing the early childhood workforce, targeting supports for children with disabilities and English learners and strengthening the birth-3 care pipeline that lays the foundation for later success in school.
EARLY INTERVENTION: $40 Million Increase
This astounding 34.5% increase in state funding for Early Intervention (EI) comes at a time when Chicago families continue to experience decreased access to services and long waitlists for children ages 0-3 with disabilities, due to a shortage in the EI workforce. These funds will be used to issue a much-needed 10% rate increase for EI providers beginning July 1, 2023.
EARLY CHILDHOOD INCLUSION: $5 Million in New Funding
Through the state budget, the Illinois State Board of Education will receive $5 million in brand-new funding directed toward supporting inclusion in schools and community-based early childhood settings for preschoolers with disabilities and developmental delays. Chicago Public Schools and Chicago’s six federal Head Start grant recipients have already been working together over the last year to build a plan for ensuring that children with disabilities who are enrolled in community-based early childhood programs have access to inclusive special education services in the least restrictive environment. This new ISBE funding signals a commitment to supporting the statewide infrastructure that makes efforts like the one in Chicago possible.
Stay Connected
Stay up to date on early childhood policy issues and how you can take action to ensure more children have access to quality early learning and care in Illinois.
Understanding how these additional funds are being allocated by the state to support families with young children is especially important as we head into the City of Chicago’s budget season. Early childhood advocates, providers and families have already worked together to identify funding gaps and submit recommendations to Mayor Johnson’s administration for the city’s investment of local funds to best serve the city’s early learning system.
Read Start Early’s analysis of the state budget to learn about other important legislative measures impacting the state’s early care and education system.
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Early Saturday morning, the Illinois General Assembly approved the state’s Fiscal Year 2024 (FY 2024) spending plan, which contains historic investments in the early care and education system, including proposed measures outlined in Governor J.B. Pritzker’s multi-year Smart Start Illinois plan.
Start Early is thrilled that the final budget contains nearly $300 million in new state funding for child care, preschool, home visiting, the Early Intervention (EI) program, and inclusion supports for preschoolers with disabilities and developmental delays.
“Today is a remarkable day for young Illinoisans and their families,” Start Early Vice President of Illinois Policy Ireta Gasner said. “The General Assembly passed a budget that directs significant state funding to a set of bedrock early childhood programs families know, benefit from and love. We thank the legislature for funding the first year of Governor Pritzker’s Smart Start Illinois plan, and we stand ready to work with the administration and the General Assembly to continue building and strengthening the early childhood system Illinois children and families deserve.”
With these dollars, more families will gain the access they need to critical early learning programs, and many in the early childhood workforce will see long-overdue increases in pay. Early Intervention providers, for instance, will receive a 10% rate increase come July 1, 2023, and the administration has promised to issue grants to child care providers that will allow them to increase salaries for teachers and staff. The state will also have new resources to further strengthen and expand its nation-leading system of home visiting services. Along with the creation of thousands of new preschool slots in schools and child care centers throughout Illinois, communities will be able to use additional education funding to further deepen services for families with infants and toddlers, like home visiting.
Here are the specifics:
- $170 million (41.4%) increase for the child care system at IDHS
- $75 million (12.5%) increase for the Early Childhood Block Grant at ISBE
- $40 million (34.5%) increase for the Early Intervention (EI) program at IDHS
- $5 million (27.9%) increase for evidence-based home visiting programs at IDHS
- $5 million in brand-new funding at ISBE to support inclusion in schools and community-based early childhood settings for preschoolers with disabilities and developmental delays
- $50 million in new, one-time funding from the Build Illinois fund for the Early Childhood Construction Grant (ECCG) program (though in an unexpected policy change with which we disagree, funds will be directed only to school districts in FY 2024)
Several other important measures impacting the early care and education system – and the families and workforce who are a part of it – have been approved by the legislature this session, including:
- HB3817 (Rep. Gordon-Booth, Sen. Sims), the FY24 budget implementation bill, which:
- Makes permanent the current income eligibility threshold (225% of FPL) for the Child Care Assistance Program (CCAP)
- Establishes in law parts of the governor’s Smart Start Illinois plan,
- SB1794 (Sen. Pacione-Zayas, Rep. Ortiz) – establishes in law the existing IDHS home visiting programs
- SB2390 (Sen. Pacione-Zayas, Rep. West) – among other changes to address teacher vacancies in the state, extends for five years the current staffing flexibility that allows early childhood educators with a Level 5 from Gateways to Opportunity to teach in a Preschool For All classroom provided they are working to secure their teaching license
- HB2396 (Rep. Canty, Sen. Lightford) – requires each school board to establish a developmentally appropriate full-day kindergarten program by the 2027-2028 school year
We expect the Governor to sign and approve this final budget package soon.
This suite of policy changes and funding increases was made possible by the commitment and diligent efforts of advocates across the state! Throughout the spring legislative session, parents, educators and advocates contacted state legislators thousands of times on behalf of Illinois families and those who serve them. We encourage you to reach back out to Governor Pritzker and your elected officials to thank them for prioritizing early childhood programs and services that set up our youngest learners for health and success in school and in life.