Investments in early care and education (ECE) are critical to ensuring our city’s youngest learners are healthy, developmentally on track, and arrive at kindergarten ready to learn and thrive. Start Early and its advocate partners are calling on Mayor Johnson’s administration to make key investments in Chicago’s ECE system to strengthen the governance structure of Chicago’s mixed-delivery system, build and sustain the full spectrum of the early childhood workforce and modernize our shared early childhood data infrastructure.
Strengthen the governance and infrastructure of Chicago’s mixed-delivery ECE system
Invest in the City’s capacity to lead ECE initiatives by increasing funds for ECE-focused staff in the Mayor’s Office and dedicating city funds to the implementation of the Every Child Ready Chicago strategic framework.
Meeting the needs of both families and the whole child through a unified prenatal-to-five system requires coordination across multiple city departments, community–based organizations and community stakeholders. We recommend investing city funds to support additional roles in the Mayor’s Office that can focus on key areas of coordination—family engagement and outreach, workforce, public-private partnerships and data—staffed with subject matter experts representing communities facing historical disinvestment.
Strengthen the existing Chicago Early Learning referral system to address inequities and improve efficiency by increasing funding for outreach and improved data use for the hotline and centralized application.
Part of the Chicago Early Learning infrastructure, the hotline assists tens of thousands of families in navigating the array of available early learning options that they can apply to using a centralized application. Adequate funding coupled with consistent ongoing data and information on all available options between CPS and community-based ECE providers will aid in filling empty slots, reducing waitlists and addressing inequities.
Increase investments in community collaborations conducting outreach on the ground to understand families’ needs and desires and match them with appropriate programs and services.
We recommend increasing support for the two existing community collaborations and funding additional collaborations in communities identified with under-enrollment in early learning programs. The focus on the community-level ensures the outreach is tailored and accessible to its families’ needs, including those with language barriers and cultural differences like many of the newly arrived migrants, and that community-identified challenges, such as lack of slots for 3 year olds, can be surfaced and addressed.
