Start Early Is Advocating For Increase In Wages For Early Childhood Services

Photo provided by Start Early/Mekky Media.
Photo provided by Start Early/Mekky Media.

Start Early Is Advocating For Increase In Wages For Early Childhood Services

By Tia Carol Jones

Nonprofit organization Start Early has been working to promote early childhood education in underresourced communities since it began more than 40 years ago in Chicago as The Ounce of Prevention Fund. The goal of the organization is to give children the best start in life by providing resources and support to families. 

For the Fiscal Year 2026 budget, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker proposed two investments in early childhood care. The first is an overall increase of $160 million for the Child Care Assistance Program (CCAP), which would ensure working families can access affordable child care. 

The increase includes a $75 million supplemental appropriation for the current fiscal year (FY25) combined, with an increase of $85 million for FY26 to support the ability to serve additional families in the program and increasing contractually established rates for home-based providers.

The second is an increase of $90 million for Smart Start Child Care to sustain the Smart Start Workforce Grants (SSWG) program. This increase has resulted in a bump in compensation for 18,500 child care professionals, who care for 110,000 children throughout the state. 

Ireta Gasner, Vice President of Illinois Policy at Start Early, said that even with a proposed increase in funding to child care services in the state budget, the services are still underresourced. She said the early childhood system was built without enough funding, and it often plays out in having programs that provide early childhood education and services not being able to pay their workforce enough. She said it is a huge issue and crisis point across the country.

“You hear about teacher shortages and other kind of staffing shortages, it is acutely a program in the early childhood space, where often the wages are struggling to be competitive in the minimum wage space,” she said.

Early childhood education requires training, experience and education, because it is a very skilled job. Gasner said there is acknowledgment that there is a need for improvement in the funding and wage space. 

In 2023, Pritzker announced plans for Smart Start Illinois, an initiative that would increase funding for childcare providers. The initiative was also meant to increase wages for childcare workers and enable providers to reach more families. Another part of the initiative was the Smart Start Workforce grants, which was meant to look at the early childcare compensation issues. Gasner said while it will enable Start Early to continue that program for their workers, it doesn’t reach all the people they would like it to, nor does it raise wages as much as they would like it to. 

“It’s really important that we stay the course and don’t lose any ground on that, even in a sort of a challenging budget year,” she said.

Gasner said while there was an increase in childcare assistance, programs like Early Intervention and the Early Childhood Block Grant, were level funded, which means those programs won’t receive additional funding in that 2026 budget. She said it will be part of Start Early’s advocacy during the Spring 2025 Legislative Session.

Gasner said that for the past couple of years, the number of families waiting to receive early intervention services has reached historic highs. Waiting for those much needed services can impact the families, as well as those who are providing those services. She said the reason for the wait is that the rate paid to those therapists haven’t kept up with market rate or inflation, and many of those therapists have moved to working in doctor’s offices, hospitals or other systems. She said there is a lot of work ahead.

“We’re just going to continue to talk to lawmakers. The Governor’s budget is just the first step in the process. The conversation now moves to the legislature and (we have to) make sure they hear these stories,” she said. She added that it is critical to look at how to increase wages in order to stabilize the workforce.

For more information about Start Early, visit www.startearly.


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