Chalkbeat

Illinois’ children and toddlers are experiencing more delays in getting early intervention services

2024-04-25T23:52:29+00:00

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About a year after Desi Evans’ son Christopher was born, she noticed he wasn’t making sounds or babbling like other young children.

After the mother from Barrington, Illinois – a town west of Chicago — raised her concerns to her pediatrician at Christopher’s one-year check-up, the doctor recommended having him evaluated for a state program designed to help students with disabilities or developmental delays.

The program, known as Early Intervention, serves over 20,000 children and toddlers under the age of 3 throughout Illinois.

But, even though Christopher was found to have a speech delay and approved by the state to receive speech, developmental, and occupational therapies, he was not able to receive service until three months before he turned 3, when children are no longer eligible for Early Intervention.

Christopher, now 3, isn’t alone. Since the coronavirus pandemic hit in 2020, it has become harder for children to get evaluated or start services that are vital to ensuring they are prepared socially, emotionally, and academically for school. Early childhood education advocates say staffing shortages are creating barriers to early intervention services and they are urging state lawmakers to invest another $40 million into next year’s budget for the program.

More than 4,000 children are waiting to be evaluated for services, according to a report by the Illinois Department of Human Services in February. Another 23,000 children have been approved for early intervention services.

The report also found that 7.6% of children who were approved for the Early Intervention program are experiencing service delays — when the state cannot find a therapist to provide services. That’s nearly double what it was in 2019, when 4.7% of children approved for services were seeing delays.

When Christopher was able to receive some services for a couple of months, Evans said he started to talk more and his vocabulary grew.

“He was more attentive and his focus expanded,” said Evans. “Before, he would only focus for maybe like 5-10 minutes at a time when we’re doing an activity.”

Staffing shortages across early intervention

Illinois early education advocates say families face hurdles when accessing early intervention services because the state has a low number of service coordinators, who are responsible for evaluating children and connecting them to therapists, and service providers, independent contractors that provide services such as speech, developmental, occupational, and physical therapies.

In 2023, the state reported about 3,964 providers, a decrease of 6.6% from 2019 when there were over 4,246 providers.

A survey by Afton Partners commissioned by the Illinois Department of Human Services found a high turnover rate of service coordinators due to low wages, lack of benefits, high caseloads, and burnout. That makes it difficult for families to get an evaluation done within a timely matter; often, they are waitlisted.

Even when a child has received an evaluation, services could be delayed if the service coordinator cannot find a therapist to work for a family as was the case for Desi Evans’ son.

According to state law, once parents agree to receive therapeutic services under the Individualized Family Service Plan — a legal document that includes the child’s diagnosis, evaluation notes, and services they will need in early intervention — children should receive services within 30 days. Some families often do not receive services within that time frame.

Alison Liddle, a physical therapist contracted with the state to provide early intervention services, says her practice takes on private clients to keep afloat. Liddle mentioned that one of her staff members was thinking about leaving the practice because they are overwhelmed from trying to pay for student loans and child care.

Illinois is not the only state dealing with shortages. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act Infant and Toddler Coordinators Association, a nonprofit organization that advocates for early intervention nationally, released a report in 2023 that found 44 states and jurisdictions said they were experiencing provider shortages, especially for speech and language pathologists, physical therapists, occupational therapists, special educators/ developmental specialists, and service coordinators.

Early childhood advocates lobby for more funding

On April 16, early childhood education advocacy organizations from across the state bused hundreds of parents and community organizations to Springfield to ask lawmakers for more money for early childhood education — including a $40 million increase for early intervention.

They say the funding boost could be used to increase compensation for providers, bring in new providers, and increase the speed in which families receive services.

In Springfield, small groups of people in purple and yellow shirts that said “For Brighter Futures” walked around the Capitol building searching for state lawmakers. In some cases, advocates weren’t able to chat directly with legislators, as many were voting on bills on the House floor. Some advocates opted to write letters instead.

Zareen Kamal, policy specialist at Start Early, one of the organizations that bused advocates to Springfield, told Chalkbeat that an increase would “allow for a much-needed rate increase for the workforce and prevent providers from leaving [Early Intervention] due to years of inadequate compensation.”

Unlike service coordinators, service providers are independent contractors. The state reimburses them for providing services to families after billing private insurance. However, providers aren’t paid for transportation, missed or canceled appointments, or receive health care or other benefits. Some providers decide to work in hospitals or the private sector to make more money.

Advocacy organizations such as Start Early, a nonprofit organization based in Chicago, is asking the state to allocate an additional $40 million for early intervention. Over the past four years, the program’s budget has largely remained flat or been cut, shifting between a total of $108 million and $115 million since the pandemic hit in 2020.

Last year, Gov. J.B. Pritzker announced his Smart Start Initiative and allocated more funding to early childhood education. In the first year of the plan, statewide programs received an increase of $250 million. The Early Intervention program received a bump of $40 million last year.

This year, the governor proposed an increase of $6 million for Early Intervention— less than advocates had hoped for.

In a statement to Chalkbeat Chicago, a spokesperson for Pritzker said last year’s increase was meant to cover the 2025 fiscal year.

“The program is funded to cover the more than 25,000 families enrolled in EI services, and this year’s additional $6 million investment – representing a proposed $46 million total increased investment in EI since the beginning of the Smart Start Illinois initiative — will cover projected enrollment growth over the next fiscal year,” the spokesperson wrote.

Desi Evans, the Barrington mother, says Christopher is currently receiving private therapy after he aged out of the Early Intervention program earlier this year.

She still feels guilty that she didn’t push harder to get Christopher services sooner.

“I feel like I failed him, like I should have done more,” said Evans. “I wish I knew what I know now, but I didn’t.”

Samantha Smylie is the state education reporter for Chalkbeat Chicago covering school districts across the state, legislation, special education and the state board of education. Contact Samantha at ssmylie@chalkbeat.org.

Chicago’s pre-K expansion fueled by federal COVID recovery money

2024-01-29T23:23:50+00:00

Public preschool has been a lifeline for Kristen Larson.

Larson and her husband couldn’t afford private day care for both their daughters, who are 4 and 1. So last fall, when Larson was able to get a preschool seat just four blocks from their Bridgeport home for her 4-year-old, she was relieved.

Without that, she said, “I probably would have had to quit my job.”

Thousands of Chicago parents like Larson depend on the district’s free public preschool program, which has been expanding over the past five years. This year, the district has 16,062 full-day seats for 4-year-olds and another 7,300 half-day seats for both 3- and 4-year-olds, a spokesperson said. That expansion was possible in part because of tens of millions of dollars in temporary federal COVID relief money, according to data obtained by Chalkbeat through a Freedom of Information Act request.

But the federal relief funds will run out next school year, raising a critical question: How will the district continue funding universal preschool?

Since July 1, 2020, Chicago Public Schools had spent close to $700 million on pre-K programs through the end of last school year, including new summer initiatives and programs for children under the age of 3, according to district budget records. It has budgeted another $262.7 million for this fiscal year, which covers the current school year. Of all of that funding, COVID relief dollars have so far covered about 14% of those costs, or $137 million, most of which went toward employee salaries, according to expense data obtained by Chalkbeat through an open records request.

Chicago is slated to receive a total $2.8 billion in Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund, or ESSER, dollars which districts could use broadly to help students and schools recover from the pandemic, and had spent $2.4 billion as of mid-November. The district has used the bulk of the money to fund existing costs, such as employee salaries. It has also launched new programs, such as TutorCorps, expanded summer school, and purchased new technology.

CPS officials said it used federal dollars to help expand pre-K — and sustain it — because it didn’t have enough state funding to do so, and creating more seats was a district priority.

Studies have found that kids who attended preschool are more likely to have higher test scores, were less likely to be disciplined, have better employment outcomes, and are less likely to be involved with crime.

CPS has steadily reduced its reliance on COVID relief dollars for pre-K over the past four years, increasing spending of district dollars on early childhood programs by $6 million this year, officials said. And observers are expecting the state to increase funding for early childhood education. Last week the Illinois State Board of Education proposed a budget that would increase the state’s Early Childhood Block Grant – which helps cover the district’s pre-K program – by $75 million.

But as federal funds dry up, the district is grappling with how to avoid cuts while also plugging a projected $391 million budget deficit next fiscal year, which begins July 1. That includes figuring out how to cover the cost of pre-K with local or more state dollars.

Asked if the district is considering cutting pre-K seats or laying off teachers in order to save money, district officials said they were not ready to comment on that. But neither is their first choice; the district is pushing the state for more money.

“Chicago Public Schools is committed to ensuring that every 4-year-old in Chicago has the opportunity to attend free preschool to develop valuable academic and social-emotional skills and experiences,” said Sylvia Barragan, a spokesperson for the district, in a statement.

Preschool expansion plan predates pandemic

In 2018, then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel pledged to open a pre-K seat for every 4-year-old in Chicago before announcing he would not seek a third term. It would mean big shifts for the city’s preschool system, which included a mix of half- and full-day programs at public schools and in community-based programs that served 3- and 4-year-olds.

Emanuel’s promise was picked up by his successor, former Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who set a goal to make pre-K for 4-year-olds universal by this year.

Since 2019, CPS has added 1,950 new preschool spots, district officials said.

But even as the district has expanded pre-K, enrollment has been fluctuating amid the COVID pandemic and as Chicago continues to see birth rates decline.

Enrollment initially grew – from 12,900 4-year-olds in the 2018-19 school year to 14,300 the fall before the pandemic – and then plummeted by 34%, to about 9,500 students in the 2020-21 school year.

This school year, just over 13,000 4-year-olds were in pre-K at CPS schools.

The district has reached universal demand in nearly all Chicago communities, said Leslie McKinily, the district’s chief of early childhood education.

As of September, when the district officially counted enrollment, 75% of all pre-K seats were filled, according to the district. That has grown to 81% as of last week, McKinily said. The district’s goal is 85% because officials want to have spots available for new families throughout the year, McKinily said.

CPS does not have plans to open more pre-K spots, but McKinily’s team is looking to see where they need to “right-size.” For example, she said, the city has not met the demand for pre-K seats in the North Side neighborhood of West Ridge. But there are other parts of the city where pre-K seats are going unfilled.

“We’re really thinking about right now, do we have our programs in the right spaces? And how do we ensure that the programming meets the needs of the community?” McKinily said.

Chicago shrinks reliance on federal COVID dollars for pre-K

Over the past four years, pre-K instruction accounted for the third largest use of the district’s COVID relief dollars, behind reducing class sizes for grades K-3 and spending on administrative costs related to federal relief funding, according to the data obtained by Chalkbeat.

Nearly all of the spending of COVID relief dollars on pre-K – about $130 million – went towards employee salaries, pensions, and benefits, according to the data. When looking at all expenses related to pre-K, including separate line items for pre-K students with disabilities, the district spent a total $137 million in the relief funds.

Pre-K programs in Chicago are mostly funded through state dollars as part of Illinois’ Early Childhood Block Grant. The program is also funded by some local taxpayer dollars and other federal money unrelated to COVID relief funding.

District officials said a portion of the federal COVID recovery money went toward early childhood programs outside of the regular school day, including a new summer program called Preview to Pre-K.

A spokesperson provided an additional breakdown of budget figures to show how much was being spent directly on daily preschool instruction during the school year. It showed the district spent nearly $590 million from the fall of 2020 through the 2022-23 school year and about 13% came from ESSER dollars, according to CPS. In that time period, state funding grew by just $3 million.

The data show the district has cut down on its use of ESSER funding in that time period while boosting local dollars.

Theresa Hawley, executive director of the Center for Early Learning Funding Equity at Northern Illinois University who previously worked on early childhood education initiatives in Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s administration, said Chicago officials assumed “with decent enough reason” before the pandemic that the state would pump more money into the block grant and allow them to continue opening more pre-K seats.

Pritzker is a longtime champion of early childhood education and has promised to make universal preschool more accessible across Illinois.

But in 2020, the pandemic put “a wrench in that plan” when Pritzker decided not to increase block grant funding, Hawley said. Illinois, as well as state governments across the country, worried about how the public health crisis would impact local resources as the economy slowed down.

When the federal government sent billions of COVID relief dollars to school districts, CPS decided to spend a chunk of its share to expand pre-K in absence of more state dollars, district officials said. Officials continued to invest in expansion efforts even after enrollment dropped in 2020.

“We did monitor and adjust our enrollment expansion throughout the pandemic,” McKinily said.

Still, district officials said that pre-K expansion was one of several priorities that “couldn’t wait.” The federal dollars have also helped CPS pay for existing pre-K costs, staving off budget deficits.

As the district used federal funds on pre-K in recent years, one Logan Square mother enrolled both of her sons in preschool at their neighborhood school. The program saved the family from shelling out tens of thousands of dollars in day care costs, said the mother, whose name Chalkbeat is withholding because of concerns over immigration status.

She’s currently seeing pre-K’s impact on her younger son, who is 4. For example, he used to try to snatch toys from his older brother because he couldn’t wait to play with them. But after learning how to take turns in pre-K, her son now says to his brother, “When you’re done, can I play with it?”

The mother was surprised to learn that the district used emergency funding toward pre-K. But she thinks it was the right decision.

“They have to allocate money to keep the program going,” she said, saying she is concerned about what will happen if the district can’t find extra money.

“Day care is very expensive in Chicago, and I see how important it is to have early childhood education,” she said. “And if it’s only available to people who can afford to send your child to fee-based preschool, then it’s not equitable to children.”

What lies ahead for pre-K?

Fiscal watchdogs have warned districts against using temporary federal dollars for a program they want to keep permanently, such as pre-K. Doing so can result in painful cuts that can affect children and families, so such spending decisions should come alongside lots of planning for the future, said Joe Ferguson, Chicago’s former inspector general who is now the executive director of Civic Federation, a nonpartisan government watchdog group.

“Obviously, no one’s going to say pre-K education [or] early childhood support is not an important priority,” Ferguson said. “But if it’s an important priority, then the work should have been done already – certainly needs to be done now – to identify where the revenue stream is going to come [from] to maintain it.”

Chicago isn’t alone. In New York City, former Mayor Bill de Blasio used COVID relief funds to expand his signature universal pre-K program for 3-year-olds without a plan for how to pay for those seats once the federal funds ran out. His successor, Mayor Eric Adams, halted the program’s expansion and recently proposed slashing $170 million in early childhood programming, which includes preschool for 3- and 4-year-olds.

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson has signaled an opposite approach, saying on the campaign trail that he wanted “child care for all” and would lobby Pritzker to increase early childhood education funding.

Last year, Pritzker proposed a four-year plan that aims to expand early childhood.

The state increased the Early Childhood Block Grant this year by $75 million, of which nearly $28 million went straight to Chicago Public Schools, as required by state law. Pritzker has not yet proposed a budget for next fiscal year, but the Illinois State Board of Education is proposing another $75 million increase.

District officials have said that more state funding for K-12 would also help. CPS, like other districts, is on a ramp toward “adequate” state funding and is $1.4 billion short of that goal, according to the Illinois State Board of Education.

Elliot Regenstein, partner at law firm Foresight Law and Policy and an advocate for early childhood education who helped launch the state’s Preschool for All program under former Gov. Rod Blagojevich, said maintaining pre-K funding in the future depends on leadership.

“To some degree, all of those sustainability plans are just a hope and a guess that when the one-time funding runs out, that whoever is in charge at that moment will make decisions that carry on the momentum of those one-time funds,” Regenstein said.

He said Chicago’s decision to invest in pre-K, even with temporary dollars, is backed by research that shows it’s beneficial for children.

“The pandemic has had an impact on all children,” Regenstein said. “I think it’s great that CPS looked at its data and said ….we can’t ignore the kids who haven’t even entered kindergarten yet and we believe that if we invest in those kids it will help set them on a positive trajectory.”

Larson, the mother from Bridgeport, agreed. She said much of her daughter’s first years were during the pandemic and in social isolation. Pre-K has helped her make new friends, on top of learning about letters and numbers.

“Sometimes you need to be investing in a program to make it a program that you want people to send their children to,” she said.

Reema Amin is a reporter covering Chicago Public Schools. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker announces new agency to oversee early childhood

2023-10-24T23:28:41+00:00

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Illinois is planning to create a state agency focused on early childhood, according to Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s office.

The new agency would oversee preschool funding and regulation and day care licensing, as well as early intervention, home visiting, and child care assistance programs.

Currently, those programs operate under the Illinois State Board of Education, the Department of Human Services, and the Department of Children and Family Services.

“When you have pieces of agencies that you’d like to bring together, we want to make sure that’s done in a way that’s cost effective,” Pritzker said Tuesday. He said the current system can be an “impossible bureaucracy” that’s difficult for both parents and providers to navigate.

“We need to make it so much easier,” he added.

Pritzker will be signing an executive order to begin a “multi-year process” to create the new agency. The governor’s office said he will work with the legislature next spring to pass legislation to bring together programs for the state’s youngest residents and their families.

The governor’s office said Ann Whalen will serve as transition director as the new agency is formed. Whalen has served as director of policy for the education advocacy organization Advance Illinois since 2019.

An advisory committee will provide input and gather feedback. It will be led by Bela Moté, the chief executive officer of the Carole Robertson Center for Learning, the governor’s office said.

Creating a separate agency focused on early childhood is another step in Pritzker’s work to make Illinois “number one” for child care access. In last year’s budget, the governor announced a $250 million four-year effort to expand preschool and child care.

It’s not clear the size of the new agency or what its new budget will look like. The governor is expected to make his 2025 budget proposal in January.

Becky Vevea is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Chicago. Contact Becky at bvevea@chalkbeat.org.

Gov. J.B. Pritzker renews pre-K expansion push with 2024 budget proposing $250 million increase

2023-02-15T10:00:00+00:00

Gov. J.B. Pritzker promised in 2019 to bring universal preschool to all Illinois children after being elected. Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Today, he’s picking up where he left off with a budget proposal that adds $250 million to early childhood programs.

“I would have done it in year one if the dollars had been available to do it,” Pritzker said Tuesday in a briefing with reporters. He said enhancing early childhood care and education is a “win-win” that will remobilize the workforce and boost the state’s economy “now and in the decades ahead.”

Pritzker is proposing a four-year plan he’s calling Smart Start Illinois that will create 20,000 additional seats for 3- and 4-year-olds in preschool programs. Just over 76,000 students are currently enrolled in pre-K in Illinois public schools.

Pritzker is seeking a $75 million increase to the Illinois State Board of Education’s Early Childhood Block Grant to create 5,000 new preschool spots for children this coming school year. The Illinois Department of Human Services will receive a $40 million increase for early intervention programs that support children with disabilities under the age of 3, $5 million more for the home visiting program, and $70 million more for the Child Care Assistance Program — which didn’t see an increase in the state’s 2023 budget. That department will also receive $20 million to upgrade its payment system for providers.

Smart Start Illinois includes two entirely new initiatives. The first — a $130 million effort called the Childcare Workforce Compensation Contracts — is aimed at increasing the salaries of child care workers and bringing more educators into the field. The other is a $100 million Early Childhood Construction Grant Program to help child care providers improve building and facilities that they use.

After being re-elected in November, Pritzker said he wanted to make Illinois the number one state for child care access during his second term in office. With the spring legislation session in full swing in Springfield, Pritzker has signaled that early childhood education and child care access for families is his top priority.

Early childhood education advocates are pushing the state to increase funding for early education and child care by 20% — or $120 million — to help increase compensation for workers, who are predominantly women or color, and to address access gaps around the state. The State Board of Education proposed a 10% — or $60 million — increase for the early childhood education block grant in January during a monthly board meeting. Pritzker’s plan would fall in between the two figures.

While some have forecast that a recession or economic downturn will hit the nation’s economy this year, Pritzker said the state’s finances are in a better position to make a larger investment in early childhood education.

The proposed expansion comes amid declining birth rates and after a decrease in enrollment for early learners in preschool and kindergarten in the state. Many parents couldn’t keep their children home because they had to work or didn’t see the need for remote preschool.

Illinois law doesn’t require parents to start sending their children to school until they’re 6 years old, which allows families to keep children at home until they enter first grade.

Pritzker said the state will continue to work with private providers and school districts to create additional seats in preschools and help them market their services. The state also has a bilingual public campaign to attract families with young children.

On Wednesday afternoon, Pritzker will give a budget address and State of the State speech that will highlight his entire budget proposal, including what he wants to spend on K-12 and higher education.

The general assembly must approve a final budget for 2024 by the end of the legislative session later in May.

Correction Feb. 15. 2023: This story has been updated to correct one instance where Smart Start Illinois was referred to as Start Smart Illinois.

Samantha Smylie is the state education reporter for Chalkbeat Chicago, covering school districts across the state, legislation, special education, and the state board of education. Contact Samantha at ssmylie@chalkbeat.org.

A $760 million opioid settlement could help fund Illinois early childhood programs, say advocates

2022-09-09T16:40:45+00:00

This story has been updated with a comment from the Illinois Attorney General’s office.

Illinois law enforcement officials are asking the state to use millions of dollars from a national opioid settlement to better fund early intervention and home visit programs for families facing poverty, single parenthood, addiction, and other adverse conditions.

Fight Crime: Invest in Kids, a nonprofit network of 320 law enforcement officials in Illinois with partners across the country, is pushing for the state to use some of the $760 million it’s expecting to get from four pharmaceutical companies to increase funding for early childhood initiatives to support families impacted by the opioid crisis and to prevent parents or children from using opioids in the future.

These initiatives can intervene early to support parents who struggle with addiction and connect them to treatment options and prevent children from experiencing child neglect and abuse.

At a press conference on Wednesday, J. Hanley, Winnebago County state’s attorney, said this is a personal issue. Hanley’s adopted daughter was born with neonatal abstinence syndrome — a wide range of medical complications in children exposed to opioids in the womb — and currently has delayed speech.

“I think it’s the best way to spend the funds that are coming our way,” said Hanley. “Support children in their earliest years and protect them at that time, but also keep them out of trouble and support our communities going forward.”

When asked if Gov. J.B. Pritzker would support giving a portion of the settlement funds to early childhood programs, a spokesperson for the governor said where the money goes is determined by the attorney general’s office.

In an email statement to Chalkbeat, Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul’s office said settlement funds can go to “prevention efforts and enhanced support for children and families,” but did not specifically address the proposal from Fight Crime: Invest in Kids’ proposal.

Earlier this year, Raoul announced that the state would receive approximately $760 million over the next two decades from a $26 billion settlement in a national lawsuit against three major pharmaceutical distributors — Cardinal, McKesson, and AmerisourceBergen — and one manufacturer, Johnson & Johnson.

In July, Pritzker issued an executive order to create the Office of Opioid Settlement Administration to oversee the distribution of settlement dollars. An advisory board made up of state and local appointees and chaired by state’s chief behavioral health officer will make recommendations on how to spend the funds. The board will work with a state opioid steering committee, the Department of Public Health, and the Department of Human Services.

At Wednesday’s press conference, Fight Crime: Invest in Kids Illinois advocates said areas in need of more support are the Illinois Department of Human Services’ home visiting programs, in which trained professionals coach families at home on parenting skills, and Early Intervention services, which support young children with disabilities.

At the press conference, Dora Villarreal, state’s attorney from Rock Island County, said law enforcement officials are “very reactive and instead we need to focus so much more on prevention.”

The state should invest funds in home visiting programs, Villarreal said, especially since those services have struggled to receive new funds. Last year, home visiting programs received a modest increase.

An analysis completed in 2020 by the state’s Prenatal to Three Initiative, currently known as Raising Illinois, found that 15,000 families lack the home visiting help they need. Seventeen Illinois counties have no such services at all. The home visiting program received roughly $1 million in the latest state budget.

Illinois education advocates have said that early childhood education and child care programs are in crisis and funding has been inadequate for years.

Before the fiscal year 2023 budget was approved by the state this year, advocates were pushing for a 10% increase for all early childhood programs to help raise salaries for workers, fund professional development, and keep costs down for families. However, advocates say it’s been difficult to properly fund early education because services are spread out across state agencies such as the State Board of Education, Department of Child and Family Services, and the Department of Human Services.

The state board of education’s Early Childhood Block grant got a 10% increase in this year’s budget, but other programs that early childhood advocates were fighting for did not see a similar increase. The Department of Human Services’ Child Care Assistance Program, which subsidizes the cost of child care for low-income families, stayed flat. Early Intervention regained $7 million that had been cut the previous year.

Pritzker lays out his next steps in rebuilding Illinois’ early education system

2020-01-22T22:47:21+00:00

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s early education agenda is beginning to crystallize, and it will center on expanding home visiting programs statewide and improving pay for a beleaguered set of educators who, in some parts of the state, earn little more than fast-food workers.

Pritzker announced Wednesday that the state will boost home visiting programs by two-thirds, reaching 12,500 more families by 2025 and spending $4.25 million to meet a first-year goal of 500 new families. His declaration was met with enthusiasm by a charged-up room of advocates and providers even while it stopped short of delivering on a campaign promise to build out a universal preschool system for 3- and 4-year-olds statewide.

The governor said that the reality of “constrained budgets” means the state can’t yet afford such an undertaking — and that the early childhood system needs to confront its chronic workforce issues first.

“There’s a lot of capacity building we need to do,” Pritzker said, ticking off low wages and high turnover as issues that undermine efforts to expand programs and improve their quality. “Universal preschool is certainly something that’s important for us to work toward and that I believe in, but we’ve got to start in the earliest years.”

Calling the state’s early education workforce crisis the “elephant in the room” — a statement met with applause — Pritzker said the early childhood office will review compensation around the state with the goal of reaching pay equity between workers in community-run centers and day care centers with public school teachers. The governor said he’s directing a new round of federal money for child care to expand coaching and training for educators and raise pay.

Wednesday’s announcement charged up advocates and providers who’ve been agitating for change in an early education system that has been decimated in the past decade by budget cuts, leadership changes, and a lack of focus.

Maria Whelan, the CEO of Illinois Action for Children, compared the past several years to the mythological hero Sisyphus pushing a boulder up a hill. “I feel today like we are still at a steep hill, but at the top we have a flat spot where we can sit, we can rest, we can celebrate and we can reflect on the fact that we have done good for children and families, particularly the most vulnerable.”

Catherine Main, a lecturer and researcher at the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Education, called it “a new day” for early education in the state, even if the payoffs may not be fully realized for many years. “I feel like we finally have a leader who is saying, this is important, even if we may not see the benefits in my tenure,” she said.

In the past year, the governor has expanded eligibility for a child care assistance program for working families, added $50 million to a block grant program to fund additional preschool slots and salary bumps for teachers, raised reimbursement rates for rural providers, and included $100 million worth of capital investments for early education centers.

In December, Illinois won a competitive $40.2 million federal grant to help it restructure its early learning system. The governor also named a 29-person funding commission tasked with tackling the biggest roadblock in that effort: How to better stitch together fragments of funding sources and a complex web of oversight agencies.

Pritzker said his decision to add universal home visiting to his agenda was supported by a growing body of research that underscores the importance of the first few years of a child’s life on brain development.

“Kids’ brain development starts long before children reach kindergarten,” he said. “It’s often said a parent is a child’s best teacher, and home visiting supports parents in that all-important role.”

Around the country, home visiting programs offer parents of newborns the option of receiving visits from a trained provider — some programs use doulas, others nurses — who can troubleshoot an array of issues, from postpartum depression to food or housing insecurity to early signs of developmental delays in infants.

Because of differences among programs, research is somewhat mixed on the outcomes. But multiple studies have pointed to better health of mothers and infants, reduced rates of child abuse, and improved school performance later on.

Here’s who will try to solve the billion-dollar funding question in Illinois early education

2019-12-16T18:48:11+00:00

After spending much of his first year in office trying to stamp out Illinois’ chronic budget fires, Gov. J.B. Pritzker is moving toward rebuilding the state’s fragmented early education system.

On Monday, the governor named a 29-person commission tasked with tackling the billion-dollar question in state education: How to have the biggest impact with limited funds. Illinois spends an estimated $1.5 billion in state and federal money on children under 5, but those dollars are not spent evenly around the state and reach only a fraction of babies, toddlers, and preschoolers.

Introducing the commission at the Carole Robertson Learning Center, the governor said he had set an audacious goal: “Illinois will become the best state in the nation for families raising young children.”

Pritzker also said he plans to raise reimbursement rates by 5% for a child care program used by low-income working families to subsidize the cost of infant care, day care, and some extended after-school programs for older children. The program lost providers and children during the administration of his predecessor, Bruce Rauner.

Pritzker plans to direct even more dollars — to total a 20% rate increase — to providers downstate who’ve been hit with a staffing crisis and have closed classrooms.

The financing commission has its work cut out for it. The issue of early childhood financing will likely prove a tough question to answer in a state that spends $1 on infants, toddlers, and preschoolers for every $5 it spends on K-12. How to streamline the disbursement of state and federal dollars to reach more children — and, more important, to ramp up child care spending in a state grasping for revenue — is the central question facing the group.

Dominated by state senators and representatives whose buy-in would ultimately be needed to legislate significant changes, the commission also includes providers, advocates, district superintendents, and policymakers. The four co-chairs are Barbara Flynn Currie, the former state House Democratic majority leader; George Davis, the former executive director of Rockford Human Services Department; Andy Manar, a state senator who helped lead the charge to revamp the state’s funding formula for K-12 in 2017; and Jesse Ruiz, the deputy governor for education and a former vice-president of Chicago’s school board.

Pritzker told Chalkbeat in March that, despite encountering a significant structural deficit when taking office, he still planned to pave a path to statewide universal pre-K in his first term, a pledge he made during his campaign.

Illinois has long been recognized for its emphasis on quality early education. But it has struggled to build a system that reaches enough low-income children and even backslid in recent years with how many families it serves. A report released in October from the policy group Advance Illinois showed that only about half of low-income children under age 5 in Illinois were enrolled in any sort of publicly funded early education program, and some pockets of the state had no programs at all.

A similar sobering statistic has become a cri de coeur among early childhood advocates since Illinois began tracking kindergarten readiness. Only 1 in 4 children showed up in 2019 for kindergarten prepared for school, based on three critical benchmarks.

In announcing the commission, Pritzker said Monday that it largely would not address Chicago’s universal pre-K rollout.

“The commission won’t directly involve itself, I don’t think, in the matters of Chicago, although no doubt some of its members will opine on how the funds were distributed,” he said in response to a question. He said the city already had responded to some criticism — presumably referring to a funding extension through next June for some providers who lost funding after the city changed how it distributes state dollars.

In addition to the co-chairs, here are the other commission members named Monday.

Emma Ahiable, prekindergarten teacher, Springfield District 186
Carmen Ayala, superintendent, Illinois State Board of Education
Christopher Belt, Illinois state senator, D-Centreville
Thomas Bennett, Illinois state representative, R-Gibson City
Kristin Bernhard, senior vice president, Ounce of Prevention Fund
Patricia Chamberlain, retired educator
Will Davis, Illinois state representative, D-Homewood
Donald DeWitte, Illinois state senator, R-St. Charles
Shauna Ejeh, senior vice president for programs, Illinois Action for Children
Craig Esko, senior vice president, PNC Bank
Phyllis Glink, executive director, Irving Harris Foundation
Rochelle Golliday, executive director, Cuddle Care
Rey Gonzalez, president and CEO, El Valor
Christina Hachikian, executive director, Rustandy Center for Social Sector Innovation, University of Chicago Booth School of Business
Grace Hou, secretary, Illinois Department of Human Services
Lori Longueville, director, Child Care Resource and Referral, John A Logan College
Cathy Mannen, union professional issues director, Illinois Federation of Teachers
Bela Mote, Chief Executive Officer, Carole Robertson Center
Evelyn Osorio, Child Care Field Coordinator, SEIU Healthcare
Aaron Ortiz, Illinois State Representative, D-Chicago
Elliot Regenstein, Partner, Foresight Law + Policy
Trish Rooney, Director of Early Childhood Initiatives, Fox Valley United Way
Jodi Scott, Regional Superintendent of Schools
Robin Steans, Executive Director, Advance Illinois
Jim Stelter, Superintendent, Bensenville School District 2

Chicago schools’ preschool chief steps down

2019-11-26T22:52:11+00:00

Four months after Chicago’s early learning chief stepped down, another top administrator is leaving, amid the city’s critical rollout of universal pre-kindergarten for 4-year-olds.

Michael Abello, the chief of early childhood education for Chicago Public Schools, is leaving this week for a new role outside of Illinois that will have a national focus, the school district confirmed to Chalkbeat.

The second-in-command of the department, Leslie McKinily, will oversee efforts to expand pre-K while Chicago Public Schools searches for a replacement.

The department chief heads a team of about 50 and serves as a liaison between the school system and City Hall. The school district and the city’s Department of Family and Support Services split early learning governance and the state and federal funds that largely undergird programs.

Chicago is in the second year of an ambitious effort to extend free pre-kindergarten to all 4-year-olds, initiated by former Mayor Rahm Emanuel as he was leaving office. At the same time, the city has redistributed funding among child care and preschools, pulling some funding from longstanding community-based preschool and child care programs.

Under the city’s plan, Chicago Public Schools is supposed to offer preschool for most 4-year-olds by 2021. Community providers, nonprofits, and small businesses — all overseen by the city — would run day care and preschool for children ages 3 and under.

But the city’s expansion into preschool has been messy on the ground, with parents expressing confusion about their options, community providers clinging to 4-year-old programs, and some public schools still offering half-day options for 3-year-olds — something the district has said it will all but phase out.

Thousands of families are also still enrolling their 4-year-olds in community programs, which typically offer extended hours that are more convenient for working families. Many non-profits that have been running programs for decades also offer established programs that are a draw, such as English classes, citizenship support, and job training.

Chicago Public Schools is rolling out its universal pre-K program in waves, targeting neighborhoods with the highest need first, it has said. This fall, new classrooms opened in Austin, Avondale, Logan Square, and South Lawndale, among other neighborhoods. In all, the district enrolled 1,421 more 4-year-olds to total 14,300, offsetting a similar-sized drop in the number of 3-year-olds.

You can find the district’s pre-K “roadmap” here.

Chicago parents have expressed confusion and consternation about applying to preschool, since early learning applications are split between two portals: the city’s early learning portal and GoCPS, which is run by Chicago Public Schools. The school district also still oversees several tuition-based programs at popular North Side schools, which it may begin to phase out as more universal pre-K classrooms come online. (Find some answers to common questions here.)

The district also operates four highly competitive magnet preschools that are free but accept families by lottery. Applications are due Dec. 13 through the school district’s GoCPS online portal for Suder, Inter-American, Mayer, and Drummond, all on the North Side.

Abello, a Teach for America alum who was formerly a principal at Piccolo Elementary on the city’s South Side, was promoted to run Chicago Public Schools’ early learning department in 2018.

Chicago Public Schools also announced last week it has hired a new chief portfolio officer to oversee enrollment and openings and closings. Prior to joining Chicago schools, Bing Howell managed school improvement efforts in both the Tennessee and New Jersey Departments of Education. Howell also served as chief external affairs officer for the Washington State Charter Schools Association and for Citizen Schools, where he focused on policy, advocacy, and community engagement efforts.

‘Hoping for a miracle’: Chicago parents express confusion, anxiety as preschools and day care centers lay off staff, threaten downsizing

2019-11-20T05:00:34+00:00

With her 3- and 4-year-old children quietly squirming beside her, Jessica Garcia sat for two hours Tuesday waiting for answers to why her Catholic preschool center will close next week.

Instead of clarity, she left a meeting Tuesday night with more questions. The town hall meeting has been billed as an opportunity for parents and preschool providers to ask questions about vast changes to the city’s early education system. But senior leaders from Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s office, who meeting organizers indicated would attend, did not appear.

At times, frustrated parents and providers lobbed questions at an empty table intended for city officials to answer questions.

Garcia sat quietly toward the back of the meeting.

“My kid was doing well in school — he wasn’t crying when I dropped him off, he was learning — and now we have to go to another school? Why do I have to do it again?” Garcia asked, before bundling up her children up and heading off unsatisfied into the night.

St. Joseph’s Day Care, where Garcia sends two of her four children, will close next week as part of a trifecta of closings by Catholic Charities. Those closings are not tied to the city redistributing grants for early education, according to a spokeswoman for Catholic Charities; instead, chronic state funding gaps and a drop in private money that helped subsidize operations prompted the closings.

But the questions raised, and fears and doubt sowed at Tuesday’s meeting underscored how parents feel underrepresented and unheard as sweeping changes in early education unspool at both the city and state level.

Chicago’s decision to expand universal preschool to all 4-year-olds and overhaul its early education system has upended the system. In awarding grants last summer, Chicago’s Department of Family and Support Services redistributed $200 million in early learning funding to several new providers and cutting funding requests from longtime centers.

Since hearing complaints that some centers that lost funding will cut classrooms or staff, the city has scrambled to extend current funding. A spokeswoman confirmed Tuesday that a second funding extension will infuse $5 million more into the program and offer providers 80% of their previous funding, through June 2020.

The state, meanwhile, has struggled to raise reimbursement rates that hover about $24 to $32 per child per day, depending on the program and its location. The state has cut back expansion plans for budgetary reasons.

But the need remains great. A recent report showed that only 1 in 4 Illinois children under age 5 is enrolled in any sort of state-subsidized early education program.

Tuesday’s town hall focused mainly on the city. Providers raised concerns about how the grant competition was structured, how applications were scored, and why new applicants without state ratings landed grants. Speakers repeatedly asked about the impact of a universal pre-K expansion in Chicago Public Schools and whether that was gobbling up resources. They also warned that being forced to close classrooms, trim staff, and cut critical features such as a parent voice committee will hurt their parents and families.

Christina Njoloma, a parent and teacher at Little Angels in Englewood, which is one of the centers that saw cuts, said beyond care for her own child, she is worried about her job and the impact on the families she has come to know at the center.

“It’s unfair,” she said. “It’s not just children. All these teachers — where do they go?”

Tuesday’s town hall at Antioch Baptist Church was organized by a new advocacy group called the Campaign for Equitable Early Education Funding.

Members of the group pressed the elected officials who were in attendance, among them Alderman Roderick Sawyer and State Senator Aaron Ortiz, about why the floundering early education system isn’t getting prioritized at either the city or state level.

Sawyer, who co-sponsored a City Council resolution that warned of the impact of cuts to neighborhoods such as Englewood, Austin, and Back of the Yards, said he was still working with Alderman Michael Scott, who co-chairs the city’s education committee, to organize a hearing about the grant recompetition. Other concerns, such as city budget hearings, had pushed hearings back.

“We were able to secure funding for the rest of the year,” he said, nodding to the extensions. “It’s something — but it’s not enough.”

Providers pressed Sawyer for more. “A budget cut by 20% still means layoffs at our place,” one woman said.

Parent Sandy Barrera said after the meeting that she was searching for a spot for her 4-year-old who will be displaced by the closing of St. Joseph’s. Asked if she would consider Chicago Public Schools’ universal pre-K, she demurred. “It’s because of the strike,” she said. “The strike showed how schools are understaffed.”

Asked what she plans to do with her child starting December, she’s not sure. “I’m hoping for a miracle to happen.”

Chicago finds more money to stave off closures, layoffs at child care centers

2019-11-20T01:51:13+00:00

Chicago will put $5 million more into care for infants, toddlers and preschoolers, to stave off the impending layoffs and closures of established child care centers.

After insisting that it would not revisit its August decision to yank some funds from some longtime and highly rated care providers, the city has scraped together $11 million, including the just-added $5 million, to temporarily save some centers.

The city threw the system of community child care providers into chaos earlier this year when it unexpectedly redistributed $200 million in state grants in a way that cut off some high-quality providers and favored newcomers with a scant track record.

A spokeswoman for Mayor Lori Lightfoot confirmed to Chalkbeat Chicago on Tuesday that the city will use funds that it saved by delaying the start date of its state grants program by several months. The city parceled out $200 million earlier this year through a recompetition for state grants for care for children under age 5.

After a public outcry, the city in September extended funding to 25 agencies that lost funding for early-care seats in the grant competition.

The second extension will ensure that more agencies that lost funding in the grant process will receive up to 80% of their funding through June 30, the mayor’s spokeswoman Jordan Troy said.

The city could not provide a count of how many more centers will receive funding in the second extension. A newly formed advocacy group, the Campaign for Equitable Early Learning Funding, said that before the funding extensions were announced, 102 classrooms and more than 350 jobs could potentially be cut.

The grants from the city’s Department of Family and Support Services, which oversees community-based early learning programs and administered the grant competition, are for five years. Providers who received the extensions will get, at best, 80% of their previous funding for one year when the latest grant cycle begins in December.

At a town hall Tuesday night at Antioch Baptist Church in Englewood, providers pointed out that cuts of 20% or more may still force them to lay off staff.

How the providers will sustain operations is still an open question. The confusion is ironic in a year when Chicago leaders pledged to boost support for the city’s youngest residents.

After widespread complaints about the grant process, the Department of Family and Support Services has retained a law firm, Baker McKenzie, to audit its grant competition and report back findings.

Should Illinois rewrite the way it funds early learning? The case starts to build.

2019-11-12T19:20:04+00:00

Chicago’s Catholic Charities is shuttering three longtime early childhood centers at the end of this month, leaving 450 Southwest Side children and their families searching for care. Nearly 100 staffers soon will be out of jobs.

The closures in neighborhoods rich with immigrants and their families are another disruption to the city’s fragile network of early education centers. And they spotlight how difficult it can be for organizations — even experienced ones — to cobble together enough funding to sustain full-day care for young children from various private and government pipelines.

A spokeswoman from Catholic Charities said the organization typically made up for funding shortfalls with private dollars — but this year, a structural deficit meant it couldn’t make ends meet, prompting a difficult decision.

“This is so very hard on our families,” said Brigid Murphy, a spokeswoman for Catholic Charities, who said the centers relied on federal Head Start funding, state preschool funding, and a state program that supplements the cost of child care for low-income working families.

But the three streams didn’t cover all of the complex costs of caring for children, a familiar scenario in both the for-profit and non-profit world of early education. How Illinois can fortify its system, which is recognized nationally for its high quality but only reimburses centers between $24 and $32 a day to care for preschoolers, is one of the questions facing the administration of Gov. J.B. Pritzker.

Pritzker, a longtime early education philanthropist before running for office, has said he would like to roll out a statewide universal pre-K system during his first term. Creating a new funding formula for early childhood education would be an important first step — and one that has the support of a growing number of policy makers.

To that end, the governor is expected to name a finance commission to study the issue by the end of the year. The group will comprise about 20 people, likely to include early education experts as well as legislators, Deputy Governor Jesse Ruiz told the executive committee of the state’s Early Learning Council last month. The commission would be tasked with making recommendations for action by the state legislature.

And it would have a loose blueprint to follow, policy makers say: a successful effort two years ago that led to an overhaul of Illinois’ system for funding K-12 schools. Even though many school districts, including Chicago, remain underfunded, the formula helped galvanize a movement to bridge the revenue gap between property tax-rich districts, such as on Chicago’s North Shore, and tax-starved districts.

Early educators have started laying the groundwork for a similar push. Their case is bolstered by a new report from Advance Illinois, which found that the state has backslid in the past decade in providing early education and higher education. Only one in four children under 4 is in any sort of publicly subsidized early childhood program, the Advance report showed.

“The theme from the report is that even when we’re seeing progress, that progress is not happening evenly. We are leaving behind too many kids who are low income or of color, and we’re seeing those gaps show up very early,” said Robin Steans, the executive director of Advance Illinois, which helped build a bipartisan case to revamp the K-12 funding formula in 2017.

“If we could solve the K-12 funding problem, we could solve anything,” Steans said. “Getting the funding and programming right in early childhood is a critical hurdle.”

Currently only one in four Illinois children shows up to kindergarten prepared, according to results of a state kindergarten readiness assessment. One reason: While the state has invested in quality programs, they reach too few children. A September analysis by the group Illinois Action for Children illustrated vast inequities in how preschool seats are distributed. Some communities have no seats for children from low-income families, while others have an overabundance. In a third of the communities studied, a child from a low-income household had less than a 50-50 chance of attending a publicly funded preschool.

A trove of research supports the value of increasing access to preschool programs. Findings released earlier this year from a seminal study showed that benefits from high-quality preschool extended not just to the students themselves, but correspond to higher earnings and stronger long-term achievement among their offspring — making a case that early childhood investments can pay multi-generational dividends.

But how to pay for quality programs, and expand them, is a question weighing on many states and municipalities, according to Harriet Dichter, a former secretary for the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services, who co-authored a new report on early childhood funding for the Build Initiative, a public-private partnership that guides states in policy creation, and several other groups.

She cites examples such as a sugary beverage tax in Philadelphia and a corporate activity tax in Oregon. In each place that successfully tapped into new tax-based revenue streams for early education, researchers observed that the “early learning agenda was sufficiently prioritized” and included a dedicated effort to make the case to voters.

Early education funding is complicated. In Illinois, money comes from the federal government and multiple state departments and funds a range of programs, obscuring a full picture.

Rough estimates put spending on early childhood care and education at around $1.5 billion statewide. Of that, Illinois spends $1.1 billion through a combination of the state education department, which funds preschool, and its human services department, which oversees a child care program that funds infant and toddler care for low-income working parents. The federal government spends $360 million on Head Start programs across the state.

Illinois is home to nearly 934,000 children under age 5, according to U.S. Census estimates.

In contrast, the state spends about five times that — some $7.2 billion — to educate the 2 million children in its public elementary and high schools.

The state funding conversation is starting to unfold as advocates in Chicago scrutinize the results of an August grant redistribution that has caused seismic shifts in the city’s own early learning system. Catholic Charities said the three Southwest Side closures were not impacted by the city’s grant reallocations. But many longtime Chicago providers with state quality ratings said they lost funding and are consolidating classrooms as a result, while newer for-profit providers that are licensed but do not have quality ratings picked up seats.

In area beset by violence and deportations, Chicago opens a mental health clinic for infants and toddlers

2019-09-10T22:42:55+00:00

Inside Chicago’s first stand-alone mental health center for young children, new therapy rooms come stuffed with play kitchens, toy police stations, and cuddly plush toys.

While the children play — sometimes in view of a two-way mirror that lets therapists observe how they interact with parents or caregivers — the youngsters might act out the stress of detainments and deportations or anguish over family members being shot or abused.

A free-standing mental health clinic for infants and toddlers is believed to be unique in Chicago, and it’s likely a rare find even nationally.

Erikson Institute, a Chicago-based early education policy and teacher training institute, raised money for the clinic here in a Little Village strip mall for a reason. The clinic, which has quietly been in operation this summer but had a grand opening Tuesday, sits in a neighborhood that boasts one of the highest concentrations of young children in Chicago.

The area is also impacted by many issues that cause young children stress: from deportations and crime to high poverty.

One of five therapy rooms inside the new Little Village clinic.

“We’ve struggled to find appropriate mental health services for young children in Little Village,” said Katya Nuques, the executive director of Enlace Chicago, a community organization with deep ties in the area. Her group, she said, recognized the critical need for such services when it started convening women and caregivers for group sessions years ago but then puzzled over finding expertise to help them.

For Erikson and the who’s who of Chicago early learning advocates who toured the clinic Tuesday, the site marks an important milestone: a growing recognition that Chicago can’t expand its early education system without combating some of the chronic issues that afflict families. Researchers have shown the impact of “toxic stress” — a term in early education for what happens during stressful events — on young brains.

Erikson released a report in July that showed 60 percent of Chicago children under 5 live in neighborhoods that have experienced multiple homicides.

“Toxic stress” can stunt brain development and lead to aggression, anxiety and depression in children. It can also stunt a child’s ability to learn.

A 2017 report from the policy group Zero to Three said barriers to services were “particularly pronounced” among young children, whose behaviors are often dismissed, even though more than 1 in 10 children under 5 undergo a trauma-related disturbance.

Chicago is undergoing a four-year expansion of its early learning system, but the road so far has been bumpy as city leaders split a limited pool of money between community groups and a public school pre-K expansion. But something practically everyone agrees on: The city needs better supports for children and families all-around.

“When there is a trauma in a community, or a home, it affects a child and their caretaker, but a child deals with it differently than an adult,” said Geoffrey Nagle, the CEO of Erikson. “Left unaddressed and unsupported, that trauma is never processed, and it affects a child’s development, it affects educational outcomes and their progression in school. We now have an opportunity to deal with it upfront.”

But, he said, the reality is that, nationwide as well as in Illinois, too few providers specialize in working with the youngest children.

“You can’t sit down and say, ‘tell me about this, or how did this made you feel?’” he said about working with young children, some of whom don’t yet speak. “The way a child under 5 experiences the world is through the relationships in their lives,” which is why the center’s approach involves adult-only sessions as well as observational sessions with parents and children together.

While research underscores the need, early educators in Illinois, and Chicago, have long struggled with how to make the case for more mental health services for the youngest children.

Beyond the dearth of qualified providers stressed by Nagle, there are other reasons why: from a lack of funding for early education overall, to a lack of understanding about the need, to poor communication between policymakers and providers about identifying problems in the classroom and knowing who to call for help.

Some agencies have reported calling practitioners and hearing they won’t venture into the neighborhoods with critical masses of families that need their services most.

“Parents come to us for many reasons, but before they take that step, they have usually tried everything,” said the clinic’s director, Marcy Safyer, a developmental psychologist who oversees clinical and community services for Erikson.

Lynette De Dios, one of two full-time bilingual clinicians there, said that referrals have so far come from schools, day cares, and doctors. Families can walk in or receive visits at home. All of the staff can speak Spanish and is credentialed in working with youngsters.

“For children, play is a bridge,” she said.

Erikson built and funded the clinic with philanthropic grants but hopes to soon begin underwriting some costs with Medicaid, based off a similar center in operation at its River North headquarters. It serves hundreds of families a year and runs a waitlist.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated Geoffrey Nagle’s credentials.

7 questions for the Chicago commissioner in charge of a game-changing early learning expansion

2019-09-06T21:38:10+00:00

Lisa Morrison Butler presides over half of the city’s early learning expansion — the half that doesn’t involve schools. As commissioner in charge of the city’s Department of Family and Support Services, she just oversaw the distribution of $200 million in awards for community-run preschools and child care centers, a process that is raising questions among advocates and some providers.

Chalkbeat sat down with Butler in her West Town office to ask about the grant renewal, impact from universal pre-K rollout in the schools, and her larger vision.

This transcript was lightly edited for clarity and length.

Several experienced nonprofits charge that they lost seats in a large-scale grant recompetition. What happened?

There had been so much discussion about 4-year-olds being welcomed inside Chicago Public Schools, so we were trying to get people to begin to think about how to evolve their model for more children under 3.

So I think people thought, there’s going to be a huge explosion in birth-to-3 slots, and also that the state of Illinois is going to throw in the full $100 million that we asked for.

Not all the state money came through. And there are more birth-to-3 slots — but not thousands more. Another thing that ate up the money was the increase in the per slot rate.

So rates for children in the Early Head Start programs, for example, went from about $8,700 per slot to $13,500 per slot. So there were significant increases in the per slot rate, as well as an increase in the number of slots.

Lisa Morrison Butler

Can you explain why some organizations or businesses rose to the top and and what role quality ratings played in scoring applicants?

We really tried to get at the quality piece. We talked about wanting to understand, for instance, how you would engage families. That’s very important in the early learning community. There were places where we talked about the credentialing with your teaching, and the rest of your staff. There were places in there where we talked about the curriculum, and one of the very different things this time … was we linked it to kindergarten readiness very clearly.

But did you adjust for center directors of smaller agencies who may be very good early childhood educators but who aren’t great grant writers?

We did a couple of things. For instance, we recruited external readers, many of whom came from local universities or colleges that had early learning programs. So we were looking for some expertise. And one of the things that we talked to the readers about was look for substance and not style. Don’t hold it against somebody if you didn’t like the way they wrote. Look for what they’re saying.

What we did was then try to look through many lenses we thought mattered. Community areas. Program models. Where people embraced the policy goals. Did they blend funding?

Is there any sort of appeals process?

Our decisions are final, there is not an appeals process for us.

There’s this perception that CPS is stealing all of the 4-year-olds. How do you respond to that?

It’s not an us-versus-CPS thing. We are really partnering with them closely.

We believe that Head Start and Early Head Start and our community-based programs offer something unique that CPS cannot offer. The supports for families are a thing that CPS cannot match us on. These are things that children need in order to thrive and grow. So we feel that we can make a point in the minds of parents that we should be their first choice. Having said that, parents still ultimately need to be able to determine where their kids go. If you are an upper-middle-class parent or a wealthier parent, that is a decision that you take for granted. We are bringing now that same ability to make that choice to working class parents and to people who may be living below the poverty line. And we think that’s a good thing.

Do you see enough parents taking advantage of those options? Mayor Lori Lightfoot said a few weeks ago that, between schools and community agencies, there were thousands of preschool vacancies.

Our families enroll late. So it’s always it’s always slow going for us until late August to September. We always worry about it. We do think that there are some parents that are waiting to see whether or not their kids can get into Chicago Public Schools.

Will you make adjustments after school enrollment data comes in?

We absolutely will have to look at that information and make some adjustments. I just don’t know yet what they are.

Chicago promised her a new preschool building — then cut funding for the children

2019-08-27T10:30:55+00:00

For 15 years, Nashone Greer-Adams has run a thriving preschool and infant center in the fellowship hall of an Englewood church. But in recent weeks, the city has targeted her business, Little Angels, for deep cuts.

It is among several community child care centers suddenly and inexplicably losing funding, despite a pledge by two successive Chicago mayors to invest more in early learning.

Greer-Adams said she was devastated to receive a letter earlier this month from Chicago Department of Family and Support Services Commissioner Lisa Morrison-Butler that the city would cut off her funding, worth about 35% of her annual budget. The letter said the city would help her families find other centers for their child care.

The cut is particularly odd and surprising given that a year ago, then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel and schools chief Janice Jackson crowded into Greer’s school to announce that the city would transform a nearby vacant lot into a $3.4 million new early learning center. The plan was part of a four-year effort to expand access to universal pre-K to every 4-year-old in the city by 2021.

“You used us as your poster child,” Greer-Adams said on Monday, sitting in front of a stack of signs she plans to use for a visit to City Hall later this week. “And you do this to your poster child?”

The 42 infants, toddlers, and preschoolers in her program face an uncertain few months, as her current contract ends Nov. 30. Scores of other children who currently are in the care of other Chicago community agencies also facing cuts, also could lose their day care.

According to a letter sent Monday to the Department of Family and Support Services from Dana Garner, the director of the Chicago Commission of Site Administered Child Care Programs, at least 30 early learning centers that serve more than 1,000 children across Chicago face deep cuts, according to a survey from her commission.

Cuts appeared to be concentrated in Englewood, Austin, and Back of the Yards, she said, and agencies reported losing seats for infants and toddlers as well as older children.

“How did this happen?” Garner asked on Monday. “There wasn’t any clear definition as to why this happened.”

As for who gained or lost seats, that’s not yet clear. NBC-5 reported Monday that the Archdiocese of Chicago, which operates several preschool sites, could lose some funding. The city’s Department of Family and Support Services told Chalkbeat that 101 early learning sites were funded through a combination of two back-to-back grant competitions. The department could not immediately provide Chalkbeat with a list of sites that were funded or cut.

In e-mail responses to questions from Chalkbeat, Morrison-Butler acknowledged that some communities lost funding in the grant competition, but others saw an increase.

“The movement up and down is due to many factors, including who was funded, where they wanted to serve, as well as who was not funded and how the loss of that agency impacted the community,” she wrote. “The reasons that organizations were unsuccessful are as unique as the organizations that applied.”

The determinations are not yet final, either. “Once the [Chicago Public Schools] final enrollment picture is clear, we will be able to see where true gaps exist. We will then work with our delegate agencies and with our partners [at Chicago Public Schools] to develop a strategy for addressing those gaps.”

Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s office directed queries back to the family services department.

$42 million more for early learning

Last spring, Chicago’s then-early learning chief said that the city planned to invest an additional $42 million into community-based care to help offset the loss of children as the city added preschool seats in its schools. The money was intended to help centers raise salaries to a $47,000 minimum across five years, invest in upgrades, and expand the number of seats for infants and toddlers, as more 4-year-olds headed off to preschool in area schools.

Both the Emanuel administration and Mayor Lori Lightfoot promised that Chicago’s universal pre-K expansion would not undercut community programs, which offer infant and toddler care in addition to preschool courses, often open early and offer later pickup than schools, and also provide critical wraparound classes and training for parents, many of whom are low-income.

The city was on track to launch its grant recompetition — which happens every few years — before Emanuel left office, part of a larger $200 million investment in universal pre-K that will guarantee every 4-year-old in Chicago a full-day education by 2021.

Then Lightfoot took office and the city’s early learning chief departed. Now, with the latest results of grant awards delivered in the past few weeks, several nonprofit groups have found themselves facing cuts.

Scott Perkins, an early childhood advocate familiar with the grant program, said that Lightfoot inherited a complex rollout.

“We all support the vision” of universal pre-K, he said. But by relying on a grant program to map out how and where to offer services, the city oversimplified a complicated task. “There were blind spots.”

“The slot allocations that were awarded to (community providers) through the (grant) has left most agencies in a state of crisis,” Garner wrote to the mayor on Monday, “and with no other option than to close centers and classrooms in high-need community areas, such as Englewood and Austin, within the next two weeks.”

While some caregivers received funding, she wrote, cutting off grants to others “would not only impact the city of Chicago financially, but more importantly, it will result in the lack of access for children and families to a 10-hour full day of high-quality, comprehensive early learning opportunities in the highest-need communities that are already in crisis.”

Back in Englewood

Asked how her department determined which programs were funded and which were cut, Morrison-Butler said in her e-mail to Chalkbeat that the family services department prioritized best practices in early learning, including kindergarten readiness, curriculum, teacher salary increases, and programs that blended federal and state funding.

“Proposals were reviewed with these criteria for quality, and with consideration of maintaining a broad community footprint, maximizing funding streams and child eligibility, program options, density-capacity, improved quality standards as well as embracing policy goals.”

As for Greer-Adams, she wants specific answers for why Little Angels lost funding. Particularly bizarre to her: That the city’s communications team invited her to attend a recent announcement that Lightfoot planned to invest $820 million more in school facility upgrades, including more than $100 million in early learning sites like hers.

“When we first got the notice that we were defunded, I thought it was an error,” she said. So she called the city and even met with Deputy Mayor Sybil Madison. She has other meetings lined up this week.

She’s armed with data: Her center has been certified gold by ExceleRate Illinois — the early learning rating program’s highest rating — for five consecutive years, and her record of student retention rate tops 95%. The official document that the school board must approve to fund construction of her future school described the facility as “an integral part of the city’s and CPS’ universal full day pre-school” programs.

Greer-Adams doesn’t know what will happen to her future 11,000-square foot center, which was intended to have a community space, too. The renderings for the yellow multi-tiered building with observation portals for parents wouldn’t look out of place in an architectural magazine. She could more than double her capacity, to more than 100 children.

“I don’t know if they have full working knowledge of everything we do here,” she said, describing a parent volunteer program that provides small stipends that help low-income families get on their feet, a family advocacy group that traveled to Springfield to argue for early learning funding during state budget cuts in 2015, a mental health counselor, and 14 full-time employees cultivated from among her parents.

“Why are we going to build a new school without the children for it?” she asked. “If we are looked at as a high-quality program — how are you going to take that away?”

Today we're in Englewood at the Little Angels Learning Center, an early childhood education site which serves children from birth through 6 years old. The Center is expanding through @ChicagoDPD’s Large Lots program. #PreK4Chicago pic.twitter.com/n3BahMDjH1
— Archive: Mayor Rahm Emanuel (@MayorRahm) July 17, 2018

A lovely song from the parents, children and staff of Little Angels Learning Center in Englewood on #ThanksgivingEve. 🎶👏🏽 #ChicagoEarlyLearning pic.twitter.com/hdhlcpTkTf
— Archive: Mayor Rahm Emanuel (@MayorRahm) November 21, 2018

In the second year of statewide assessment, three out of four Illinois children still aren’t kindergarten ready

2019-06-25T10:07:56+00:00

More than three-quarters of Illinois children are still falling short on kindergarten readiness, according to data released Tuesday and collected statewide last fall.

This is the second year Illinois has implemented the Kindergarten Individual Development Survey (KIDS) — an observational assessment by teachers who log developmental behaviors to gauge kindergarten readiness. Most of the data points saw slight increases of 1 to 5 percentage points from the previous year.

“On the face of it, not much has changed,” said Geoffrey Nagle, CEO of the Erikson Institute, a Chicago organization studying childhood development. “For this kind of data to change statewide, you would have to do a statewide intervention … if you want these numbers to change, we’re going to have to do something — invest in children, invest in supports for children and families.”

Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker pledged $100 million to early childhood education in his first budget, for 2019-20. However, Nagle said, given how comparatively little Illinois spends on preschoolers at the moment, it will take a more substantial investment to see results in an assessment like KIDS.

In 2017, Illinois spent an average of $15,337 per student in K-12 but only $3,306 for every Illinois child under age 6, according to the Risk and Reach Report from Nagle’s Erikson Institute; however, young children often cost more to educate because they need more adults in the room, Nagle said.

Teresa Ramos, vice president of policy and advocacy at Illinois Action for Children, an advocacy group connecting families and providers with funding, emphasized that KIDS is meant as a tool to illuminate the quality of early childhood more broadly, not judge kindergarten teachers or their districts.

“This is shining a flashlight on what is happening in the years before kindergarten,” Ramos said. “As we frame it in that way, it allows for teachers to see different things coming out of kids [in kindergarten] and be OK with that.”

Rather than an exam, KIDS records teachers’ observations when students perform tasks such as sharing materials, sorting objects, recognizing words, and raising a hand before speaking. Students were measured in three categories: social and emotional development, language and literacy development, and math. In order to be considered kindergarten ready, students had to demonstrate proficiency in all three, said Carisa Hurley, director of early childhood at the Illinois State Board of Education.

“Teachers are observing students, and they’re documenting their interactions and behaviors during the first 40 days of instruction,” Hurley said. “As children are going about their regular, everyday routines, they’re playing, they’re interacting with their peers, they’re doing schoolwork, and following directions. So they’re actually observing children in that environment so they can document what children’s abilities are.”

Hurley said the tool remained the same from last year to this year, but the state has provided more professional development and training for teachers to ensure accurate measurement.

Though Hurley cautioned against making year-to-year comparisons, she said districts can use KIDS data to recognize which communities need more support.

Low-income students receiving subsidized lunch were 16 percentage points behind their more affluent peers, demonstrating well-documented income disparities in access to early childhood education.

By race, only 19% of black students and 15% of Latinx students demonstrated kindergarten readiness, compared with 32% of their white peers. However, Nagle emphasized that all students need support at this point with such low numbers in all groups.

Across the state, 39% of kindergartners failed to demonstrate readiness in any category. Only 26% of students displayed behaviors across all three, considered kindergarten ready. More than half of students met the benchmarks in social and emotional learning, but in math, only one in three students were prepared, struggling to identify numbers, shapes and patterns.

“A large percentage of our kids are not ready for school,” Nagle said. “That should be completely unacceptable to everyone from any parent to every leader in the state… because this is an indicator of what the future of Illinois is, and right now the future is not looking bright.”

Almost 125,000 Illinois kindergartners, 89% of those enrolled in state kindergarten programs, were observed for the survey, developed by San Francisco-based WestEd, up from 81% last year. Nagle said both of these figures suggest the data provides a good snapshot of early learning in Illinois.

Still, only 30% of students are enrolled in state-funded preschool programs. In order to change access, Hurley said, the state needs to invest more funding in those programs.

For Ramos, the data highlights a lot of information she and other early childhood advocates already know — “We know there’s a lot of support that needs to happen in the earliest years of life… We know we need to focus on access to high-quality early childhood services from birth, and we know that we’re not investing enough as a state in those services.”

Ramos suggested districts connect with an array of early learning centers and childcare providers in their communities to help ease the transition to kindergarten, sharing KIDS data and doing joint training for early childhood educators and kindergarten teachers. Statewide, Nagle emphasized investing in home visiting, increased pay for child care workers, and paid parental leave.

But where these investments will come from is still unclear.

Greg Jacobs made a film about early learning. He met exhausted parents and underpaid providers.

2019-06-20T22:40:31+00:00

A new documentary from Chicago filmmaker Greg Jacobs takes a close look at early childhood education — highlighting the struggles of exhausted parents, underpaid providers, and traumatized children.

The film, “No Small Matter,” premieres Thursday in Chicago. It lands at a time when considerable attention is being paid to early learning: Illinois’ new governor, J.B. Pritzker, just signed a budget that gives more money to state early childhood programs. Pritzker, a billionaire philanthropist known for his support of such initiatives, is slated to speak at the premiere.

“No Small Matter” takes viewers into homes, daycares, and preschools in Chicago’s northern suburbs and in small-town Nevada and Virginia.

Jacobs, who wrote and co-directed the new documentary, had written a book that focused on school desegregation efforts in Ohio. But when his Chicago-based company, Siskel/Jacobs Productions, started working with Ounce of Prevention, a Chicago advocacy group for children birth to five, he wondered why he had never thought of early childhood education as a discrete idea, capable of changing students’ lives and those of everyone around them.

“These are huge issues that Chicago has and the whole country has, but early childhood is a place that everybody can agree on,” he said. “If we start with supporting families with children of that age, then the ripple effect will come out with all of the other challenges”

Jacobs spoke to Chalkbeat Chicago ahead of the screening. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Why do you think early education was a compelling issue for a documentary now?

I think the science is now so compelling that these early years are really, really fundamental in shaping our brains and bodies for a lifetime — but I’m not sure that everybody has caught up to it yet.

We realized we had to answer not just why is early learning so important, but why is it so important now? A huge piece of that is the demand for the workforce, that you need people who have different skills than in the past, and if we don’t start thinking about that early on, we’re not going to get that workforce.

In a certain way, there’s no natural constituency for this issue. If you don’t have kids yet, it’s certainly not going to be front and center. And then when you actually have kids that age, there’s no time for thinking about it as a political cause. Once the kids are out of that age, you’re like “oh yeah that was interesting, but now I care about this later time.” The only time that people really are dealing with it in an immediate sense is the one time when they are just too exhausted to deal with it in the political sense.

Also, we had one expert say people get into early childhood because they’re nice, so there isn’t the kind of anger that can drive political movement. The way things are going now, some of that anger is starting to build, and I think that will be very powerful.

In your film, you highlight the story of Rachel Giannini, a teacher in the northern Chicago suburb of Highland Park. Why did you choose to focus on her?

One of the things that people told us early on was that there has to be a level of quality that makes kids feel safe and secure and allows them to learn along the way. When we saw Rachel and [her team] at work in this incredibly diverse classroom and saw just the magic that they created, it was like, here is our ideal.

That thread through the film is such a source of joy for people and emotion, to see the incredible presence that Rachel has with those kids, that she’s never anything less than present, and to see this totally incredible environment that she creates.

One of the issues highlighted in your film is the tension between high-quality programs and the cost to deliver them. How did you show these forces in your documentary?

We tried to portray people in their everyday, real lives. You realize any parent, just about, is thinking, “We are paying way too much and nowhere near enough.” I think people have to realize that this issue is all about the people who are giving the care, whether it’s the parents or the neighbor or the childcare professional.

We don’t have the subsidies for families, especially in the middle [class]. And the salaries for the providers are on average $11.46, for an early learning provider, so incredibly small, with little hope of a significant raise.

You end up with this unsustainable problem: parents can’t pay for it and the workforce can’t afford to do the work, so somewhere there has to be an investment from the outside that will start to make it sustainable for families and sustainable for the workforce.

As citizenship question swirls, Illinois early childhood advocates gear up for another census challenge

2019-06-18T21:53:00+00:00

The U.S. Supreme Court is actively weighing a proposed change to the U.S. census that would likely result in immigrants going uncounted. In Illinois, early childhood advocates are also fretting over a different group that has long been undercounted: babies and toddlers.

If young children are not accurately counted, the state could end up with too little money to spend on nutrition, early education, health insurance, and Head Start programs for children. Plus, because census data is used to plan where schools and other facilities are built, undercounting children could lead to school capacity that does not match community needs.

The citizenship question that the Trump administration is trying to add to the census would likely deter immigrant families from completing the census. It’s less clear why young children — ages 0 to 4 — have long been the most undercounted group in the U.S.

At a meeting Monday of the state’s Early Learning Council, a group of early education leaders from across Illinois, advocates called on nonprofits, organizers, government, and early childhood educators to play an active role in getting families to complete the 2020 census.

Doing so would give the state its best shot at having an accurate tally of young children, the advocates said — and could prevent Illinois from losing yet another Congressional seat because of declining population.

Tracy Occomy Crowder, senior organizer at Community Organizing and Family Issues, a Chicago nonprofit working with low-income families, was at the meeting and said she came away wanting to use her organization’s resources and connections with families to prepare for the 2020 Census. But she said her team doesn’t yet know how to solve the census problem.

“Our first order of business is to understand why is this happening,” Crowder said. “What are we really dealing with here in terms of why the little ones are being undercounted? And then we can craft our strategy.”

In 2010, the census missed an estimated 10 percent of children ages 0 to 4, according to research from Count All Kids and Partnership for America’s Children, two groups working to improve census accuracy. Children are most likely to go uncounted when their primary caregiver isn’t a biological or adopted parent — a reality for many children in Illinois.

“Children are the most undercounted in the state which is why it’s important for ELC to pay attention,” Phyllis Glink, co-chair of the Early Learning Council, said at the meeting. “This is an issue that will affect us in dramatic ways. Think about how your networks and your avenues can get engaged.”