A New One Stop Shop For Early Childhood Services

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Sasha-Ann Simons** (0:34)
Hey Chicago, I'm Sasha-Ann Simons and this is In the Loop.
For parents of young children, navigating the childcare journey can sometimes feel like a full-time job. There's one office handling one service, another agency overseeing something else. And simply figuring out where to start isn't easy. Well, a brand new state agency is consolidating programs and services previously offered by three different organizations into just one place. But what does that actually mean for families, providers and educators? Will it make getting help any easier? In this episode of the pod, we'll learn more about what the transition has looked like so far.
At the table with me was Alison Baulos, Executive Director of the Center for the Economics of Human Development at the University of Chicago, and Elliot Regenstein, who's a lawyer, author and Illinois Department of Early Childhood Transition Facilitator. I wanted to get a sense of what the landscape looked like for parents before Illinois' new Department of Early Childhood was created a month ago. So Elliot filled us in.

**Elliot Regenstein** (1:41)
One of the challenges, as you said, that parents face is that there are different kinds of services that are all related to each other, but administered by different agencies. So for example, if you have a three-year-old and you're looking for them to have a good educational experience over the course of the day while you're at work, you might be looking for a Head Start program, which is funded by the federal government and administered by different agencies locally. You might be looking for a preschool program, the Illinois State Board of Education funded preschool, that was administered by both school districts and private providers. Or you could end up looking for subsidized child care, which was provided by private providers in both center and home-based settings. And each of those was administered separately.
And Head Start, because it's federal, will continue to be, but that now you have a number of programs, including, but not limited to preschool and child care, that are being housed at the Department of Early Childhood. And that allows the department to develop systems for enrolling, determining eligibility, and measuring quality that cut across all of those and make it easier for families.

**Sasha-Ann Simons** (2:55)
So overall, that made for a more complicated process, you would say, Alison, up until a month ago?

**Alison Baulos** (2:59)
Indeed. So there's impacts on equity when things are segmented in that way. So the families in need, really those that need the most services, are facing the biggest hurdles. So the idea of having a centralized place means there's really an open door and a one-stop entry point for any family in need that can get connected to the various agencies.

**Sasha-Ann Simons** (3:21)
And you've been working, Elliot, in collaboration with this new agency. So tell us exactly what your role has been.

**Elliot Regenstein** (3:27)
So my role has been supporting stakeholder engagement and the advisory function. One of the things that's really important about a new agency like this is that it has a new kind of authority over the early childhood system. And in order to use that authority to really help families and providers, you've got to talk to families and providers and listen to them. So the world did not magically change on July 1st.
There's a lot of work ahead to actually build the systems that integrate all of the different pieces. And so in that, the agency wants to be really thoughtful about how is it hearing from all of those key constituencies. And I want to clarify, I'm a contractor to the agency and don't speak for it. But I think that commitment that the agency has made is a really important one. And a lot of people have contributed to that process in a meaningful way.

**Sasha-Ann Simons** (4:23)
Yeah, I mean, to your point, this consolidation didn't just happen overnight, right? A month ago, it happened in stages, right? Back in 2019, there was an Early Childhood Funding Commission, which you were appointed to.
Years later, we saw that 2024 law signed by the governor to create such a new agency. So it took some steps to get here.

**Elliot Regenstein** (4:44)
It took a long time to get here, and even getting to the commission took some number of years. I think that in some ways, the pandemic slowed down the mechanics of the process, because people were focused on just managing the pandemic, but that it accelerated the vision and the need, because in many states, the early childhood system, it sort of limped along with this diverse management, and that when the pandemic hit, and that that forced states to react in a way that they had never reacted before, they realized this is not okay. And so you've seen a wave of states across the country. There were a few pioneers that had made the change before the pandemic, but since then, the pace has really picked up.