New Department of Early Childhood launches full operations

SPRINGFIELD — As Illinois enters a new fiscal year Wednesday, a new state agency is officially taking charge of a wide range of programs for infants, toddlers and their families.

The Illinois Department of Early Childhood officially takes over Wednesday as the agency in charge of programs ranging from in-home visits for newborns and their mothers to licensing and regulating childcare facilities and funding preschools.

“It’s incredibly exciting because it’s something that we haven’t done before in Illinois,” IDEC Secretary Teresa Ramos said in an interview Tuesday, on the eve of the agency’s full launch. “Other states have done it and we have been really intentional about connecting and learning from them.”

Gov. JB Pritzker called for creating the new agency in 2023 as a way of streamlining those programs and making it easier for families to find the services they need. At the time, programs were divided between the Department of Human Services, the Illinois State Board of Education and the Department of Children and Family Services.

Lawmakers followed up the next year with legislation formally establishing the new agency. But the agency was given two years to hire staff and get organized in preparation for the official transfer of responsibilities.

Ramos, who previously served as first assistant deputy governor for education in Pritzker’s office, was named the agency’s first permanent secretary in December 2024.

During that time, lawmakers have also worked to update dozens of statutes dealing with preschools and childcare facilities. On Friday, June 26, Pritzker signed legislation that overhauls the childcare licensing process and clarifying what types of providers are exempt from licensing.

House Bill 3595 also updates some terminology, changing the term “day care” wherever it appears in statutes to “early care and education,” and replacing the word “facility” with “provider.”

“Because we’ve heard for a long time from providers that they care for children and not days,” Ramos said.

Now, with a staff of more than 500 individuals and a budget of $4.4 billion — most of which is money that previously went to other agencies — Ramos says the agency is open for business.

“The work to think through and bring coherence to early childhood services for families and supports for providers has been years in the making,” Ramos said. “And the last several years has been really working to understand current program operations, to listen to parents and providers about what is and isn’t working so that way we can really lead with ensuring that we have a simpler, better, fairer system for them.”

New functions

Among the functions the new agency administers starting Wednesday are licensing and regulating childcare facilities as well as preschools and other early childhood education programs. The agency’s budget for the new fiscal year includes a $55 million increase for the Child Care Assistance Program which subsidizes the cost of childcare for low-income families.

Those are the kinds of services, Ramos said, that are critical to many working families because they make it possible for parents to earn a living to provide for their children.

“Early childhood education is so important on so many broad levels,” she said. “Ninety percent of brain development happens before the age of five, and the early childhood workforce supports all the other workforces, allowing parents to go and families to go to work, ensuring that they’re cared for by a trained workforce.”

As the new agency was getting off the ground, some lawmakers expressed hope that consolidating multiple programs under one roof would result in administrative savings and that the total budget of the new agency would be less than what the state had been spending before.

But Ramos said IDEC’s current focus is on completing a smooth transition of programs to the new agency and trying to prevent any disruption of services.

“The goal of the new agency is really to deliver effective services for the families with young children who want them across the rich racial, regional, cultural, and linguistic diversity of the state,” she said, “And that’s how we’re going to really track our success over time.”

Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.