Many challenges ahead as Illinois unifies early childhood programs, report finds

Parents of young children in Illinois often find themselves navigating a complex, fragmented system as they try to get quality day care, preschool or services for babies and toddlers with developmental delays.

Gov. J.B. Pritzker created a state agency to untangle this mess. But a new report shows that won’t be easy given the depths of the problems in the early childhood system and the obstacles to improving it.

Come July, the new Illinois Department of Early Childhood will be fully responsible for the state programs that offer home visiting, early intervention, subsidized day care and preschool. It will also license and provide quality ratings for early learning programs. Prior to the agency’s creation, these programs and services, as well as the grants that pay for them, were handled by three different state agencies.

Teresa Ramos, the secretary of the new agency, said that by unifying all these services under one umbrella, “Illinois will be better positioned to address the complex challenges facing Illinois’ early childhood ecosystem.”

The report lays out the state of the early childhood system so the new agency can measure progress, said Lily Padula, a policy and research associate at The Civic Federation who authored the report.

Families found it challenging to navigate their early learning options across three state agencies, Padula said. For example, some parents had to fill out duplicate forms. And several different government agencies and organizations — some local, some statewide — monitor quality, making it hard to get an overall picture of where quality programs exist.

She also points to broader issues that the agency will have to contend with. One of the biggest: Quality day care and preschool programs are not equally distributed across the state. According to the report, almost three-quarters of Illinois counties are child care deserts with no licensed providers. In 2023, licensed providers could only serve a third of children 5 and under, the report said.

The lack of providers can be at least partly attributed to this fact: Early child care providers and their staff are not well-paid. That contributes to turnover. Workers typically do not want to spend money and time getting more education for low-paid jobs, and often leave the industry after just a few years.

Padula said the state has increased the amount of money it is putting into early childhood programs by 40% over the past five years, but there’s still a significant gap between how much government funding child care providers get and the true cost of providing quality child care.

Ramos said states across the country are struggling with many of these same issues around access and workforce shortages. She points out that even as Illinois has increased funding for early childhood programs, the Trump administration is threatening to make child care less affordable. As recently as Friday, a court prevented the federal government from withholding child care subsidies from Illinois and five other states.

Many child care operators run on tight margins and some fear they could go out of business. Pandemic-relief money that helped them offset operational costs is gone, and many rely on the child care subsidies the Trump administration is targeting.

That’s on top of the “complex and overlapping funding streams” that child care providers often have to piece together, according to the report.

The agency also is charged with improving home visiting and early intervention services, which sends therapists and workers to help babies and toddlers with developmental delays.

But there are significant delays in getting children services, particularly in rural areas. White children are far more likely than children of color to have their needs identified and addressed.

Padula said the creation of the new agency should help officials focus on and tackle the many problems in the early childhood system, but “the challenges are real and progress takes time.”

Getting more young children access to better programs and services is essential, she said. When children don’t have access to early childhood programs, it affects their school trajectory. Currently, less than a third of children show up for kindergarten ready in all areas, according to the state’s assessment — a percentage that has been increasing but still is relatively low.

“These kids… are substantially less likely to meet academic standards in the future, and you can see those disparities between race, income, English Language Learner status, disability and geography across the state,” Padula said. “Being able to increase access to services can help kids become ready for kindergarten and increase future academic success.”