Related Early Learning Initiatives in Illinois

The Illinois Early Learning Council will consider a broad range of issues related to quality, evaluation and assessment, expansion, linkage and integration, and workforce development. In addition, the following city and statewide initiatives are currently underway that relate to and complement the work of the Early Learning Council.

Public Initiatives

Born Learning: Mayor Daley's Early Childhood Initiative

Chicago's strategies to strengthen children's health and education include:

• Postpartum visits to at-risk mothers by the Chicago Department of Public Health at three hospitals
• Perinatal services to at-risk teen mothers
• New preschool slots for children through partnerships with community-based providers and 300 new tuition-based preschool slots
• Uniform learning standards across all city-funded early education classrooms
• Literacy screening in every kindergarten classroom
• Public library literacy programs
• Improved quality of early childhood teacher education by strengthening the City Colleges' child development degree programs
• Hotline that provides information on public and private early childhood learning programs for parents
• Citywide conference and workshops for caregivers and parents of infants and toddlers in Spring 2004
• Citywide public awareness campaign to help parents understand how to cultivate their child's learning through daily activities, including distributing resource and child development materials to all new parents
• Born Learning Advisory Council

Financing Universal Early Care and Education Project (Kagan Brandon)

The project's objectives are to:

• Specify the hourly costs per child of a high-quality system of early care and education.
• Incorporate parental responses in cost estimates, including changes in type and amount of care and levels of maternal employment.
• Produce comparisons of alternative financing approaches that apply lessons from other U.S. social benefit programs and systems (e.g., K-12 and higher education, health, retirement, transportation, housing) that show costs and impacts on the use of care and employment.

Illinois Children's Mental Health Partnership

The Task Force report includes early childhood recommendations that address social and emotional health within the context of early learning and school readiness, including:

• Use national standards to develop statewide benchmarks for the social and emotional development of children under six and require government-administered programs to (1) review program requirements and policies, (2) integrate explicit social and emotional service components and (3) track outcomes related to statewide benchmarks.
• Identify and incorporate research-based curricula, materials and approaches that enhance children's social and emotional development into programs serving at-risk populations.
• Fund consultation and training to programs around strategies for promoting children's healthy social and emotional development and to build capacity.
• Ensure that programs have a mechanism and clear protocol in place for identifying and referring children and families to the appropriate program or system when further evaluation or mental health treatment services are needed.
• Develop clear referral guidelines and procedures, as well as interagency agreements as appropriate, to ensure that children needing diagnostic evaluations or mental health treatment services are referred to the appropriate system and that providers making the referral receive necessary feedback.
• Work with colleges, universities, professional associations and state agencies to increase opportunities and requirements for training related to young children's social and emotional development and relationship-based practices through pre-service, in-service and on-going professional development.

Healthcare and Family Services [Formerly known as Public Aid, Dept. of] Perinatal Task Force

Recognizing that a healthy birth outcome is one predictive factor for children’s school readiness, Governor Blagojevich signed into law an act that requires IDPA to create a plan to improve birth outcomes, reduce the need for neonatal intensive care services and promote perinatal health among Medicaid-eligible women and children by maximizing the use of perinatal health care services. The Department has convened a Task Force including government agency staff, researchers, clinical service providers and advocates to create recommendations to be included in the plan. IDPA will present the plan to the General Assembly in early 2004 and provide reports every two years thereafter that compare expenditures for treating infants with poor birth outcomes with expenditures for preventive investments to promote healthy births in communities throughout Illinois.

Healthcare and Family Services' [Formerly known as Public Aid, Dept. of] Assuring Better Child Health and Development Initiative

Illinois has identified the following three overarching goals:

• Increase Illinois primary care providers' ability to provide more comprehensive care to Medicaid-eligible families with young children, including identification of social emotional health issues.
• Improve the provision of mental health related intervention services to Medicaid-eligible women and their children under age three identified by primary health care providers.
• Provide lessons learned to inform future efforts that will lead to changes in statewide policy and practice in Illinois and in Medicaid programs in other states.

Illinois Department of Human Services (IDHS) Child Care and Development Advisory Council

The vision and guiding principles developed for the plan include:

• Illinois families will have multiple options for quality child care and early education.
• Child care and early education will offer all children the opportunity to grow, learn, and be cared for in safe, nurturing, culturally and developmentally appropriate settings.
• The system will provide assistance that enables all working families to have access to quality care.

The Advisory Council is currently working with IDHS to phase in the strategic plan through three working committees: Program Administration and Accessibility, Program Quality and Program Planning, and Systems Integration. The five major goals of the plan include:

• Fully implement a child care subsidy system that enables all Illinois families to access quality care.
• Support quality child care through a system of adequate base rates and financial incentives for implementing progressively higher quality standards.
• Support development of a child care workforce dedicated to providing the highest quality care.
• Encourage collaboration and blending of funds to provide the best possible early care and education system.
• Implement planning and management tools that increase the system's responsiveness to providers and families and accountability to the public.

Illinois Interagency Council on Early Intervention

Current priorities of IDHS and the Council include:

• Implement the Early Intervention Strategic Plan recommendations.
• Implement the social-emotional component in all Child and Family Connection agencies statewide.
• Increase the number of children under one who receive Early Intervention services.
• Smooth the transition for children who move from the Early Intervention system to prekindergarten or special education.
• Increase the number of children receiving services in natural environments.
• Increase child care providers' knowledge of Early Intervention services.
• Implement the Autism pilot project.

Illinois Task Force on Universal Access to Preschool

Major recommendations included:

• Create the Illinois Preschool program to give all Illinois families a choice of high quality preschool options that are part of a seamless web of support from the birth of a child into and including elementary school.
• Phase in Illinois Preschool.
• Build on the strengths of current early care and education resources.
• Build the infrastructure support systems necessary to prepare children for success and to assess program results and quality.
• Maximize resources and coordination to enhance program quality, expand services, improve children's continuity of education and care, and increase collaboration.

Private Initiatives

Birth to Five Project

Efforts of the Project complementary to the Early Learning Council include:

• Convening the Government Interagency Team - a regular working team of senior-level representatives from city, state, and federal government agencies and divisions that engage in cross-agency joint planning of programs and services for expecting families and families with children under five.
• Creation of a web-based database and geographic information system (GIS) of early learning programs and demographic information on children 0-5 in Illinois communities.
• Development of statewide indicators to measure the progress of Illinois' early learning system and status of children birth to age five.
• Reduction of duplication in services through cross-agency efforts.
• Increased efforts to conduct developmental and social emotional screening and referral services across agencies and programs.
• Advising and assisting with efforts to address early childhood mental health.
• Enhancing the delivery and financing of preventive health and developmental services in primary health care settings for Illinois children under the age of three, including training for providers.
• Linking early learning programs and pediatric and perinatal health care services and providers.
• Increasing access to and availability of comprehensive, quality perinatal services offered to expectant families and families with infants.

Chicago Partners for Children

The goals of Chicago Partners for Children include:

• Identify gaps in services and barriers to early care and education for families in Chicago.
• Develop and test new collaborative models for providing high-quality, educationally- enriched child care that meets families' needs.
• Improve service coordination and collaboration between the three largest systems of early care and education in the City of Chicago (Head Start, PreKindergarten and Child Care).

Enhancing Developmentally Oriented Primary Care

The partners are focusing on the following:

• Identify elements of quality preventive health and developmental services including: core competencies for primary care providers, practice enhancements that promote a developmentally oriented practice and a set of indicators that have proven successful in assessing developmental orientation practice.
• Offer training and technical assistance and disseminating information to (a) physicians involved in the delivery of primary care to children and to (b) physicians in pediatric and family practice residency to address the developmental needs of children under three and their families.
• Identify opportunities for policy, funding and programmatic changes to support the delivery of developmentally oriented services to children under three in primary health care settings.
• Link primary health care providers with community-based programs that provide services to expectant parents and families with young children under three.
• Strengthen parents' expectations for comprehensive developmentally primary care services.

Professional Development Advisory Committee

As a framework for a coordinated professional development system across all early childhood programs, the career lattice will address such barriers by accomplishing four important goals:

• Develop an early childhood Core Curriculum that will transfer to any associate or baccalaureate degree program in Illinois.
• Provide consistent training opportunities based on core competencies that are relevant and available to practitioners working in a variety of settings.
• Award credentials to practitioners who reach specific training or educational milestones to certify that they have attained a specific level of knowledge and skills in early childhood.
• Improve career advising so that everyone will understand the variety of early childhood career options and the educational requirements for each option. Make career and professional development information available on an easy-to-use, searchable web site.

For more information, contact the Governor's office at (217) 782-0244 or Ounce of Prevention Fund at earlylearningcouncil@ounceofprevention.org