SR0116 104TH GENERAL ASSEMBLY

SR0116 LRB104 12177 MST 22279 r

SENATE RESOLUTION

WHEREAS, Decades of research demonstrate that high-quality early care and education programs are effective in supporting the learning and development of young children, increasing their likelihood of success in school and in later life; and

WHEREAS, Studies similarly reflect the substantial contributions that early childhood services make in strengthening the well-being of communities, the stability of our workforce, and the quality of our economy, as well as public safety and national security; and

WHEREAS, The quality of early childhood services depends largely upon the quality of their infrastructure, ranging from well-qualified teachers to supportive data systems; and

WHEREAS, Such infrastructure also includes safe, developmentally appropriate classrooms and related physical space for young children's care and learning; and

WHEREAS, The availability and quality of early childhood facilities are an equitability concern for many underserved populations of Illinois, including communities of color, areas of pronounced socio-economic pressure, and rural regions; and

WHEREAS, The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis has stated that high-quality environments not only help keep children safe and healthy but also facilitate concentration, ease of play, and more positive child-teacher and child-child interactions; providing a high-quality environment includes ensuring such conditions as adequate space, ventilation, thermal comfort, and lighting; and

WHEREAS, The national Bipartisan Policy Center has reported that investments in early care and learning facilities should be an element of federal, state, and local economic-development strategies; and

WHEREAS, The State of Illinois reflected these realities in establishing the Early Childhood Construction Grants (ECCG) initiative in 2009 and growing the grant's resources to $100 million in 2019, with approximately $40 million of that amount still remaining to be awarded to qualified building-and-repair projects; and

WHEREAS, Owing to resource limitations, the number of ECCG grant applications and the needs they represent have vastly outpaced the number of actual grant awards that could be made to early childhood providers over the years; and

WHEREAS, In Illinois' mixed-delivery system of early childhood services, community-based providers play an important role by helping relieve capacity pressures on maxed-out school facilities while also meeting the specific needs and choices of many parents in their own localities; and

WHEREAS, Community-based service providers typically have far less access to capital, including the technical assistance required to seek building resources, than do schools; and

WHEREAS, The vast scope of the State's construction-and-renovation needs is also evidenced by Early Childhood Regional Needs Assessments produced in 2023 by Birth to Five Illinois in which stakeholders from approximately one-fifth of Illinois counties, ranging from Jo Daviess to Kankakee to Pope and beyond, expressly named capital matters among their most pressing concerns; and

WHEREAS, School districts participating in the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) 2024 Capital Needs Assessment Survey identified the need for building 269 additional school-based preK classrooms statewide; and

WHEREAS, ISBE's biennial Capital Needs Assessment Survey captures only a portion of Illinois' early childhood facilities needs, considering that fewer than half of elementary and unit districts took part in the most recent assessment and that the assessment does not extend to community-based service providers; and

WHEREAS, A national report from the Reinvestment Fund and National Children's Facilities Network declared that "limited supply of licensable facilities, cramped spaces, and deferred maintenance have been common features of child care infrastructure for decades," adding that their findings "suggest a significant remaining need for funding for facilities infrastructure, from maintaining and repairing facilities, expanding existing programs, to developing new high-quality learning environments; and

WHEREAS, In 2019, the Governor appointed a bipartisan Illinois Commission on Equitable Early Childhood Education and Care Funding (Early Childhood Funding Commission) that, after a year of research and expert deliberation, issued recommendations for making the State's system of birth-to-five services "simpler, better, fairer" for children and families; and

WHEREAS, The Funding Commission's report expressly acknowledged the significance of Illinois' urgent bricks-and-mortar needs, stating that future studies must assess the costs of facility footprint expansion across the mixed delivery system to help adjust projections of future funding needs; and

WHEREAS, The Funding Commission recommended substantial increases in birth-to-five programmatic resources that Illinois has begun to pursue through the Governor's multi-year Smart Start Illinois initiative, representing important and desperately needed growth in early childhood program capacity that will understandably increase physical-infrastructure needs even further, over time, as more families are helped to access the services they seek; and

WHEREAS, The Commission and the Governor also recommended the creation of a single State agency to streamline, improve, and assume responsibility for the administration of core birth-to-five services that historically have been spread across multiple other departments; and

WHEREAS, By an overwhelmingly bipartisan vote, the General Assembly accordingly authorized the establishment of the State's new Department of Early Childhood via Public Act 103-0594, which also launched a two-year planning process for development of the new agency; therefore, be it

RESOLVED, BY THE SENATE OF THE ONE HUNDRED FOURTH GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE STATE OF ILLINOIS, that the new Department of Early Childhood and its planning process should prioritize appropriate attention to the facilities needs of our State's mixed-delivery system of early care and education; and be it further

RESOLVED, That such prioritization should include development of a biennial measure of physical-infrastructure needs among community-based providers of child care, preschool, and other core early childhood services for children from birth to age five, as well as continue to assess the capital needs of school-based providers of such programs, to better inform state policy decision-making, and reflect the Funding Commission's call for deliberate assessment of facility-expansion costs; and be it further

RESOLVED, That the State should move expeditiously to award its remaining Early Childhood Construction Grant monies to qualified applicants, to assist providers of critical birth-to-five programs in meeting their growing building-and-repair demands; and be it further

RESOLVED, That the State should also move as quickly as feasible to replenish Early Childhood Construction Grant resources to help Illinois achieve the long-term vision of the bipartisan Funding Commission for making services "simpler, better, fairer" for young children, their families, and communities statewide; and be it further

RESOLVED, That suitable copies of this resolution be delivered to the offices of the Governor, the Illinois Department of Early Childhood, the Illinois State Board of Education, the Illinois Department of Human Services, the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, and the Capital Development Board.