The state of affordable child care is an issue facing families across the country and was recently under the microscope at Chicago City Council.

Advocates in Illinois are pushing for higher wages and better benefits in an effort to retain child care workers. The effort comes after a center in Bronzeville recently shut its doors, the CEO says, due to a lack of staff. 

Centers For New Horizons, an organization with multiple funding streams, has experienced improvements but not enough to keep their community-based organization running in the way they would like. 

“When I don’t have the adequate amount of staff, I really can’t maximize my budget in a way that makes it feasible for us to continue to operate, because I don’t have those people in place,” said Lakisha McFadden, CEO and executive director. 

The state has plans to invest in Smart Start compensation grants and the Illinois Department of Human Services has allocated federal COVID-19 funding, which officials say needs to be allocated by the end of this year and spent by the end of 2026. The lack of those federal dollars could add to the already growing crisis. 

“Due to limited funding, they’re unable to invest in a robust way. There are limits to what providers can actually access,” said Shauna Ejeh, senior vice President at Illinois Action for Children. “And that means, particularly in the city of Chicago, where programs blend and braid their funding with other sources, because it’s so expensive to provide care here in Cook County, they will not be eligible for this funding stream if they have preschool for all dollars. 

The city also receives an early childhood education block grant but those funds are shared between community child care organizations and Chicago Public Schools. Recently CPS expanded to create universal pre-k throughout the district. 

“I appreciate the more eyes and more resources coming to early childhood education, however unintentionally, our staff, for the most part, opted to go work there instead because the pay is more,” said McFadden. 

Better compensation and benefits was the theme during the City Hall meeting last Wednesday, a request child care providers, like Beata Skorusa, have been making for years. She has been a worker advocate since 2015 and is the director of Montessori Foundations of Chicago. 

“If we can compete effectively with the teachers at public schools, at traditional schools, we can certainly keep our workers,” said Skorusa. “My staff are not leaving because they feel that CPS is necessarily a better place to work. They’re leaving for the pay.” 

Community based organizations will never be able to compete with CPS because the state and city do not provide enough funding, Skorusa expressed. 

Workers at those organizations oftent have to leave their jobs and work at other corporations like Walmart or Starbucks to receive adequate pay to support themselves and their families. 

The is currently facing a budget deficit close to $1 billion, and without a clear path on how to address the deficit, additional funding for child care could be a tall order. But advocates are not giving up. 

“They’re already investing, as we mentioned before, the city of Chicago gets a block grant from the state of Illinois, but they distribute it to CPS first, and look at community based organizations second,” said Skorusa. “So the way they distribute that block grant needs to be revisited to help support child care in addition to CPS.