Illinois Opens a New Agency Handling Services for Kids Under 5. Here’s What it Means for Families
July 1, 2026
Original coverage in Chalkbeat Chicago by Mayika Seminera.
Illinoisans raising young children now have a one-stop shop to get assistance for most of their needs — including childcare, early intervention, and preschool — thanks to a new state agency that opened Wednesday.
Three years after its inception, the Illinois Department of Early Childhood officially launches today, marking the start of its mission to streamline services for families. Instead of splitting programs across three state agencies, the Department of Early Childhood will house most of the services Illinois’ youngest children have relied on for decades.
Illinois now joins a growing list of other states that have opened their own agencies dedicated to providing early childhood services. But unlike most of its peer departments across the country, the Illinois Department of Early Childhood is entering its inaugural year amid a much more unpredictable federal landscape, especially in regard to Head Start and childcare subsidies.
The agency is headed by Secretary Teresa Ramos, who will oversee more than 500 staffers. Those include about 340 employees who will transfer from the state’s Department of Human Services, the Department of Children and Family Services, and the State Board of Education.
While Wednesday’s launch marks a milestone for state officials, who have a $86 million operating budget to work with, progress on improving historically labyrinthine services won’t happen overnight. In the coming months, the department will continue to roll out new initiatives — meaning families and providers will need to stay up-to-date on changes that could affect them.
Still, understanding the role of the new agency might feel overwhelming for families and providers unaware of the change. Here’s what we do — and don’t — know about the Illinois Department of Early Childhood so far.
Why is Illinois creating a new department for early learning and care?
Magda Zalewska, a mother to three young children from Romeoville, has wanted the intricacies of Illinois’ fragmented early childhood services to be simplified for a while. She’s become all too familiar with waiting on the phone for hours trying to get an answer about one of her children’s benefits while working a full-time job.
“I’ve been dealing with the system for half a decade, and it’s just very treacherous from a parental perspective,” she said. “Hearing that there’s change coming to the system is very relieving.”
Experiences like Zalewska’s are largely what prompted the formation of the Illinois Department of Early Childhood. Policymakers had long known how “bewildering” parents found the early childhood system in Illinois, but the state had always lacked a “whole system approach” to address those concerns, said Elliot Regenstein, a Foresight Law + Policy firm partner who specializes in early education.
Then came the pandemic, which only made it clearer that the state’s approach to early childhood was “never as coherent as it needs to be,” Regenstein said.
Edna Navarro Vidaurre is a regional council manager for Birth to Five Illinois’ Region 1-A, which encompasses Chicago and is a part of a broader network of 39 regions that provides community feedback for the state’s early childhood policymaking process. In her role, she often speaks with families, who she said often describe the tangle of early childhood services as a “spaghetti noodle.”
“It’s like a spider web, and so all of it is so complicated,” she said. “At the end of the day, the parents don’t really care where the money’s coming from. They just want to get into a program.”
In 2023, Pritzker announced his intent to create the Illinois Department of Early Childhood, which was shortly followed by a bill from state lawmakers codifying it into law in 2024. That legislation kickstarted the multi-year process to build the department, which opened up opportunities for community input on what people wanted out of the agency, said Bela Moté, president of the Carole Robertson Center for Learning in Chicago and chair of the department’s transition advisory committee.
“Historically, we as a state came to providers and parents and community members at the end of a design process,” Moté said. “This kind of flipped it to say, we actually need to design it with them.”
What programs will be under the Illinois Department of Early Childhood?
The Illinois Department of Early Childhood, or IDEC for short, is consolidating programs from ISBE, DHS, and DCFS — as well as the Governor’s Office for Early Childhood Development.
That means several vital early childhood services will no longer fall under those departments’ jurisdiction, and will instead move to IDEC. The total budget for implementing those programs totals $4.4 billion, according to the department. These include:
Childcare grants
Early intervention
Head Start and Migrant & Seasonal Head Start
Home visiting programs
Preschool for All
Early Childhood block grant system
Childcare licensing
Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health aid
The unification of services may be especially helpful in Chicago, where families have a diverse array of childcare and preschool options available to them, Navarro Vidaurre said. Some children receive money from a couple funding streams to get a slot at a local center. By housing the different programs under one department, Navarro Vidaurre said it should hopefully ease the process in Chicago.
Will state services for my child be disrupted or delayed?
Ideally not. The department has repeatedly assured families that there should be no noticeable change to the way they access services for their child.
But major updates are still under development, which Moté said is an intentional feature of the agency’s incremental opening to avoid significant interruptions to care.
“There is a danger to flipping every light switch on and saying ‘We’re going to do this this way, and this way, and this way,’ and not having people be able to process the change and catch up with the expectations,” Moté said. “Taking it in bite-sized pieces, I actually think will go a long way.”
Zalewska, who also works as a developmental therapist in early intervention, has attended meetings to inform providers like her, as well as discussions catered to the public. But she said she still doesn’t have a clear idea on when to expect shifts that affect her profession. Most answers she said she receives include one qualifying phrase: “for now.”
“‘For now’ means there’s change to come, right?” Zalewska said. “But no one’s addressing that change to come, no one’s addressing any timelines.”
What about impacts to childcare providers?
Not much should be different for providers right away, either. Providers will still be paid through the current payment systems they have used before, according to the department. Ratios and teacher qualifications will also remain the same for childcare center licensing.
The only big change the department has flagged for providers is a shift to unify grants under one management system called EUNA. That system will be used to distribute all of the department’s grants for the next fiscal year, such as the Early Childhood Block Grants.
Where can I ask questions or give input?
All questions on early childhood programs in Illinois can be directed to the department’s customer service team by emailing Questions.IDEC@illinois.gov.
The agency’s bottom-up approach to creating policy and informing its decisions is also expected to continue. By the end of the year, the department’s transition advisory committee will submit a set of recommendations to the governor’s office and the early childhood department based in part on community members’ feedback on what issues they need fixed in the space.