The number of children who died between July 1, 2018 and June 30, 2019 after having prior contact with the Department of Children and Family Services rose 25 percent, according to a new report published Wednesday by the agency’s inspector general. 

The decennial Census in 2020 has already made news in Illinois for at least the last two years — especially given dismal predictions that the state stands to lose one, or even two, Congressional seats as the state continues to lose population.

But it’s what happens in 2021 with that Census data that will alter the course of Illinois politics for the next decade, as officials divvy up the state into voting districts.

Video gaming magnate Rick Heidner Thursday accused the Illinois Gaming Board of participating in an orchestrated smear campaign after officials moved to revoke his license to operate in Illinois.

A settlement agreement between the family of an inmate who died of cancer while serving time in an Illinois state prison and company accused of failing to treat the prisoner is subject to Illinois’ Freedom of Information Act, the Illinois Supreme Court ruled on Thursday. 

The Illinois Gaming Board on Thursday will release rules governing Illinois’ nascent sports betting industry, along with applications for companies who want a sports betting license. 

Gov. JB Pritzker on Wednesday made a final legislative win for 2019 official, signing a bill he pushed for that will partially consolidate Illinois’ 649 downstate and suburban public safety pension systems into two statewide funds, with the promise that pooling investment resources will mean bigger returns.

The Department of Children and Family Services and Chicago’s Lakeshore Hospital “turned a blind eye” to the sexual and physical abuse of children who were long-term patients at the hospital, according to a federal lawsuit filed this week. 

After months of revelations about energy giant Exelon and its subsidiary ComEd’s lobbying activities in Springfield, the company was hit with a class action lawsuit in federal court this week, alleging the company made false statements and that it engaged in “unlawful lobbying activities.”

Exelon shareholder Joshua Flynn filed the federal securities lawsuit in Chicago on Monday. The complaint lays out a timeline of unflattering headlines about Exelon and its associates this summer and fall. The energy giant admitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission that it’s been hit with two grand jury subpoenas this year. Flynn’s lawsuit links the revelation of the probes to falls in the firm’s stock prices.

By Cassie Walker Burke, Chalkbeat Chicago

After spending much of his first year in office trying to stamp out Illinois’ chronic budget fires, Gov. J.B. Pritzker is moving toward rebuilding the state’s fragmented early education system.

On Monday, the governor named a 29-person commission tasked with tackling the billion-dollar question in state education: How to have the biggest impact with limited funds. Illinois spends an estimated $1.5 billion in state and federal money on children under 5, but those dollars are not spent evenly around the state and reach only a fraction of babies, toddlers, and preschoolers.

Pritzker also said Monday he plans to raise reimbursement rates by 5 percent for a child care program used by low-income working families to subsidize the cost of infant care, day care, and some extended after-school programs for older children. The program lost providers and children during the administration of his predecessor, Bruce Rauner.

Pritzker plans to direct even more dollars — to total a 20% rate increase — to providers downstate who’ve been hit with a staffing crisis and have closed classrooms.

The financing commission has its work cut out for it. The issue of early childhood financing will likely prove a tough question to answer in a state that spends $1 on infants, toddlers, and preschoolers for every $5 it spends on K-12. How to streamline the disbursement of state and federal dollars to reach more children — and, more important, to ramp up child care spending in a state grasping for revenue — is the central question facing the group.

Dominated by state senators and representatives whose buy-in would ultimately be needed to legislate significant changes, the commission also includes providers, advocates, district superintendents, and policymakers. The four co-chairs are Barbara Flynn Currie, the former state House Democratic majority leader; George Davis, the former executive director of Rockford Human Services Department; Andy Manar, a state senator who helped lead the charge to revamp the state’s funding formula for K-12 in 2017; and Jesse Ruiz, the deputy governor for education and a former vice president of Chicago’s school board.

Pritzker told Chalkbeat in March that, despite encountering a significant structural deficit when taking office, he still planned to pave a path to statewide universal pre-K in his first term, a pledge he made during his campaign.

Illinois has long been recognized for its emphasis on quality early education. But it has struggled to build a system that reaches enough low-income children and even backslid in recent years with how many families it serves. A report released in October from the policy group Advance Illinois showed that only about half of low-income children under age 5 in Illinois were enrolled in any sort of publicly funded early education program, and some pockets of the state had no programs at all.

A similar sobering statistic has become a cri de coeur among early childhood advocates since Illinois began tracking kindergarten readiness. Only 1 in 4 children showed up in 2019 for kindergarten prepared for school, based on three critical benchmarks.

“Illinois will become the best state in the nation for families raising young children, with the nation’s best early childhood education and child care,” the governor said Monday in a statement. “My promise is this: our work won’t be complete until every child in this state enters kindergarten with the cognitive skills to think, learn, read, remember, pay attention, and solve problems, but also the social emotional skills to communicate, connect with others, resolve conflict, self-regulate, display kindness and cope with challenges.”

“These are the skills that high-quality early learning programs help young children develop, and I’m proud to say that many of the modern standards and model programs were conceived and developed right here in Illinois.”

One thing to watch will be whether the commission addresses the universal pre-K rollout happening now in Chicago. The state spends slightly more than a third of its early childhood dollars on Chicago’s early childhood programs. The city recently changed how it distributes those dollars, and several longtime providers who lost funding have criticized the process. 

In addition to the co-chairs, here are the other commission members named Monday.

• Emma Ahiable, prekindergarten teacher, Springfield District 186


• Carmen Ayala, superintendent, Illinois State Board of Education


• Christopher Belt, Illinois state senator, D-Centreville


• Thomas Bennett, Illinois state representative, R-Gibson City


• Kristin Bernhard, senior vice president, Ounce of Prevention Fund


• Patricia Chamberlain, retired educator


• Will Davis, Illinois state representative, D-Homewood


• Donald DeWitte, Illinois state senator, R-St. Charles


• Shauna Ejeh, senior vice president for programs, Illinois Action for Children


• Craig Esko, senior vice president, PNC Bank


• Phyllis Glink, executive director, Irving Harris Foundation


• Rochelle Golliday, executive director, Cuddle Care


• Rey Gonzalez, president and CEO, El Valor


• Christina Hachikian, executive director, Rustandy Center for Social Innovation, University of Chicago Booth School of Business


• Grace Hou, secretary, Illinois Department of Human Services


• Lori Longueville, director, Child Care Resource and Referral, John A Logan College


• Cathy Mannen, union professional issues director, Illinois Federation of Teachers


• Bela Mote, Chief Executive Officer, Carole Robertson Center


• Evelyn Osorio, Child Care Field Coordinator, SEIU Healthcare


• Aaron Ortiz, Illinois State Representative, D-Chicago


• Elliot Regenstein, Partner, Foresight Law + Policy


• Trish Rooney, Director of Early Childhood Initiatives, Fox Valley United Way


• Jodi Scott, Regional Superintendent of Schools


• Robin Steans, Executive Director, Advance Illinois


• Jim Stelter, Superintendent, Bensenville School District 2

The attorney whose lawsuits ended years of patronage hiring systems in Chicago and Illinois suffered a defeat in state appellate court Friday, when the panel rejected his claim that state officials illegally taxed his private plane twice.