Birth to Five Illinois Group Hoping to Build a Future of Equity for Parents, Children in Towns Large and Small
September 9, 2023
Original coverage by David C.L. Bauer for My Journal Courier.
In a literary tome, the construction mere feet from the Birth to Five Illinois office in Jacksonville would be known as foreshadowing.
It's inside the comfortably quiet building at 608 E. State St. — almost beyond the din of backup alarms and the hydraulic whir of backhoes — that a framework is being built.
For children. For families. For community.
Keppen Clanton and Bridget English are there, ready to talk about the Early Childhood Regional Needs Assessments that set the foundation for the yeoman's work that lies ahead. Both are regional council managers for Birth to Five Illinois — English for Region 1 that covers Morgan, Brown, Cass, Pike, Scott and Adams counties; Clanton for Region 40, which consists of Greene, Jersey, Macoupin and Calhoun counties.
Their missions run parallel, sometimes intertwining. They will pore through the assessments and volumes of data, statistics and identified needs to help construct a better and more equitable statewide system for early childhood education and care.
"We’re working with families in the state to figure out why families are not able to access early childhood education and care and to tell decision-makers about early childhood services families say their children need to thrive," English said. "We’re working to ensure all communities have a local platform for families and professionals in the field, as well as community members, to say what they think is best for their children’s futures and we are striving for full and equitable access to the services they need. Equity is really important to us."
They will do it not by languishing on the challenges — and there are plenty — but by harnessing myriad opportunities.
Defining changes needed
Illinois long has funded Early Childhood Education & Care programs through such things as home visits, preschool and center- and home-based child care, providing public funds to Head Start/Early Head Start, Early Intervention, Early Childhood Special Education and a more expansive system of services and supports for families.
Time and growth in needs sometimes meant long wait lists for services or a network that was difficult, at best, to navigate.
"While programs and services for families and children exist across the state of Illinois, they are not accessed equitably," according to an overview in the needs assessment. "Families in rural areas oftentimes live in child care deserts and are forced to travel long distances to place their child in any program, regardless of its quality. Another example is families who speak a language other than English who may live in an area without programming in their home language, making it difficult to find educational options."
That led Gov. J.B. Pritzker's administration to create the Illinois Commission on Equitable Early Childhood Education and Care Funding to make recommendations on what should change.
Those findings were published in March 2021. Among them were the need to:
Increase public investment to help better subsidize the cost families pay out of pocket.
Create a coordinated funding approach by centralizing state and federal funding and distribute funding in new, more targeted ways.
Provide a single source for information and funding for Early Childhood Education and Care with designated regional structures to make the system easier for families and providers.
A movement is born
The recommendations prompted the Illinois Department of Human Services to form the Division of Early Childhood to streamline programs. It also urged even more direct connections with families and parents and partnered with the Illinois Network of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies to develop Birth to Five Illinois and give families a voice while ensuring racial equity and building a community-driven system "that harnesses knowledge directly from families and providers and encourages decision-makers to ensure new or expanded services are created to meet community needs."
That summer, Cicely L. Fleming was named director of the Birth to Five Illinois initiative that was launched in February 2022.
The group would spend more than a year conducting meetings, talking to parents and stakeholders and looking beyond the surface of community demographics to craft individual assessments.
With the completion of those assessments, the work now is in its infancy.
"While our work is not perfect, it is genuine and ever-evolving, and I am proud of the effort our team has made to bring the vision of this equity-focused infrastructure to life. ... Our team has gone above and beyond to make meaningful community partnerships and create space for the prioritization of family voices," Fleming said. "These Early Childhood Regional Needs Assessments are a compilation of community members’ experiences; not ours. We thank them for sharing and hope we have represented them well."
Not-so-baby steps
Each of the 39 Early Childhood Regional Needs Assessments released last month takes an in-depth look at a region largely defined by the state's regional offices of education.
Those tasked with developing the Birth to Five Illinois program recognized that, while the mission is the same — to make Illinois “the best state in the nation for families raising young children” — there were nuances among communities that meant a cookie-cutter approach would not work.
In other words, counties like Scott and Greene might be separated just by mere miles, but their specific needs can be widely divergent.
"I think our systems are set up to support that," English said. "Through these reports, we are working to identify the commonalities across regions, across the state, but then as we move the work forward, we’re going to be fine-tuning the local recommendations specific to what community members told us."
There are certainly a few "universals, such as improving outreach to families about services that are available, especially in rural areas, and creating more accessible and affordable child care.
"We were set up to look at and listen to local people and what they needed versus what the state has always said about ‘this is what we think people need’ to kind of reverse that," Clanton said. "They thought the best way to do that was to open up 39 regional offices and to hire people within those regions who know their regions and that way we were able to get out and hear what our region’s needs are in early childhood education and child care."
The task now at hand is to get the word out about the reports and findings. Work on implementing some of the needed changes will come after the first of the year.
A Closer Look - Region 1 (see article for links to the report and infographic)
The key findings suggest a need to connect families and caretakers with existing resources and expanding services in some areas.
"Region 1 has a solid foundation, with multiple innovative program models in the [Early Childhood Education and Care] field to build the infrastructure needed to serve working families and young children. However, knowledge of and access to services are limited by the rurality of the region," according to the assessment. "Increased collaboration between current service providers and opportunities to establish more public-private partnerships are areas for potential growth."
That will help, but there remain roadblocks: Child care, for example. Beyond the primary issue of cost lie such concerns as availability and access.
"With only two child care centers in the region ... currently accepting new families, the lack of availability leaves many parents feeling they do not have choices in terms of quality and cost indicators," the group discovered. "The cost and perception of quality in the current childcare system is prohibitive to enrollment for some families who opt out of working altogether to stay home with their children."
One Scott County resident explained to the group that "due to the lack of day care in my community, I drive my boys 20 miles to my parents' house. I then turn around, drive back through the community we live in, and another 20 miles past that to go to work. If there were more daycare availability in my community, my drive would only be 20 minutes."
It's a double-edged sword. As the workforce has changed, especially post-pandemic, those who provide services like day care are in that soup of occupations that have more needs than people to fill them. It's even tougher to sate the demand for specialized workers to provide services for children with developmental delays, those with emotional or mental health needs or multilingual learners.
And while there are public dollars available for families and children from age 3 to age 5, the funding is not as free-flowing for those ages birth to 3.
Both English and Clanton quickly point out this is not "more money will fix things" thinking. Rather, balancing the sometimes-disproportionate funding would help to start a sea change.
The primary recommendations for the region are:
Link Early Childhood Education and Care programs to systems that connect families to the services they need.
Fund initiatives to allow providers to expand current capacity and spur new growth in the field.
Increase compensation through more equitable pay scales and reduce compensation disparities among programs and providers.
Reduce family co-pays and increase provider reimbursement rates.
Region 40 (see article for links to the report and infographic)
Read through any of the individual 40- to 50-page assessment reports and a word sticks out: Systemic. Most recognize there are plenty of changes that could be made, but that giving priority to the real game-changers will have more of the long-term impact that is critical to the mission.
For Region 40, that will mean pushing past "significant economic challenges."
"While there are areas with high numbers of Early Childhood Education and Care programs and services, the majority of the region has little to no access to high-quality, affordable [programs]," according to its assessment. "Findings suggest that Region 40’s Early Childhood Education and Care directors, educators, families and communities are working hard to serve the area’s youngest generation and value many assets in the region, including the school districts, Head Start and child care. However, the need for increased awareness of [such] programs and how it impacts Region 40 rural communities was strongly prevalent."
The largest gaps are seen in child care accessibility, viable transportation, specialized services, mental health resources, and awareness of regional Early Childhood Education and Care services, which "exist across the region but are not consistently available for families."
As one parent explained, "I recently completed my bachelor's degree; however I am unable to utilize it due to the reality of no child care."
More accessible and affordable child care for all families and affordable and viable transportation for Early Childhood Education and Care programs were key among the needs the group identified.
The primary recommendations for the region are:
Form a way to attract, prepare, support and retain staff in the Early Childhood Education and Care workforce.
Secure accessible, affordable and viable transportation for all children in public and private programs. Transportation should include services outside of the Early Childhood Education and Care sector, such as to doctor appointments, therapies, court hearings, etc.
Access to local specialized services. Children that have been identified or need to be identified by professionals for specialized services should have access to affordable services within their community.
The region should have early childhood mental health counselors and consultants readily available for both children and families.
Encourage local community collaborations to branch out and form whole-region collaborations. These would promote increased awareness of the positive impact of Early Childhood Education and Care programs, as well as available programs and services.
"It is our hope that local and state leaders will use this information to advance Early Childhood Education and Care services in the region," the group said in its assessment. "We will continue our community engagement efforts to expand our understanding of the ECEC needs of local families and providers."
Building on strengths
Both English and Clanton enthusiastically acknowledge there are plenty of Early Childhood Education and Care strengths in their region, and some of what is needed is simply education about those offerings and finding ways to connect groups toward a common goal.
Region One, for example, has a foundation of strong community partnerships and an existing network in all but one of its counties of community agencies that share information and resources.
There also is a strong model for how public and private collaborations can help businesses and communities in what the Brown County Early Childhood Collaboration and The Tracy Family Foundation — a charitable arm of Dot Foods in Mount Sterling — have accomplished after identifying the need for child care for its employees.
In Jacksonville, the Jacksonville School District 117 Early Years Program is able to maximize services through grants and is a model of what other school districts could do.
The infrastructure for offering training and educational opportunities for the workforce is expanding, according to the assessment, through such opportunities as:
The Early Childhood Access Consortium for Equity program at John Wood Community College and Lincoln Land Community College that provide scholarships/support resources to current Early Childhood Education and Care workforce members to advance education and training.
The Early Childhood Education Professional Educator License program at Quincy University, which provides licensing coursework for certified teachers in early childhood.
English as a Second Language endorsement at Illinois College that offers teacher candidates and educators with a professional educator license the opportunity to gain language and cultural skills for multilingual learners.
In Region 40, there is enthusiasm about being able to remold the Early Childhood Education and Care system.
Two new centers, one in Greenfield and one in Jerseyville, have applied for licensing with the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services. The Tracy Family Foundation also is providing grant funding for Greene and Calhoun counties to support Early Childhood Education and Care programs.
Blackburn College in Carlinville is offering an accelerated teacher licensing program in Macoupin County, and Lewis and Clark Community College is offering an early childhood development program that includes a class to assist graduates in navigating the business side of child care.
Equally as important, the assessment said, people are starting to communicate more about Early Childhood Education and Care and starting to recognize and support the need for related programs.
Beyond childhood
The importance of accessibility to child care and early education programs is not necessarily new.
"But what we have found is that it goes a lot deeper than that," Clanton said.
More and more studies are showing that children who are ready at a younger age or provided early childhood education and childhood programs are more likely to thrive later in life.
"Their social lives are better, they learn quicker, they retain things better throughout life. At the other end of that, by high school, they’re more ready for that, more ready to go into the workforce or to go on to college, so that’s part of this role," Clanton said.
The idea of quality child care and education impacts the entire workforce in the state, English said.
Although some of the concerns existed well-before the word COVID became a household name, it "exacerbated them and highlighted them," she said.
"The impetus for addressing these now makes sense," English said. "We learned some important lessons coming out of COVID and now we’re not just looking at these two critical pieces of access and availability, we’re looking at equitable access and availability. And those inequities have been inherent in this system for many years."