Bill Text: IL SR0116 | 2025-2026 | 104th General Assembly | Introduced

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Bill Title: States 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. Additionally states 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. Finally states 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.

Spectrum: Partisan Bill (Democrat 3-0)

Status: (Introduced) 2025-02-19 - Added as Co-Sponsor Sen. Meg Loughran Cappel [SR0116 Detail]

Download: Illinois-2025-SR0116-Introduced.html

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.