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.

The private management company that oversees Illinois’ lottery is counting on a 10 percent boost in sales in the 2020 fiscal year, according to a new report published earlier this month by the Illinois Lottery. 

Illinois is the latest state to sue e-cigarette giant Juul after Attorney General Kwame Raoul sued the company in Cook County Court on Thursday. Meanwhile, the four political committees controlled by House Speaker Mike Madigan (D-Chicago) have raked in $1 million in the last week, signaling that primary season is underway in earnest.

In the wake of revelations that Chicago-based utility company ComEd and its parent company, nuclear giant Exelon, are at the center of multiple federal probes surrounding Chicago and Illinois politics, a bipartisan pair of lawmakers are seeking to reverse the state subsidies given to Exelon in the 2016 Future Energy Jobs Act. 

The city of Peoria did not have the right to intervene in a decision to grant one of its former firefighters an early pension he requested because of a knee injury, a Third District Appellate Court panel ruled this week.

A few lucky candidates in crowded races were assigned first and last positions on the March 17 primary ballot Wednesday after State Board of Elections officials conducted a lottery for ballot placement.

In an alternate timeline, former 13th Ward Democratic Organization employee Alaina Hampton would be gearing up for depositions this month, as would the Democratic heavy hitters she sued in her March 2018 lawsuit claiming retaliation for reporting sexual harassment from former senior colleague Kevin Quinn.

But Hampton settled the case with the four campaign organizations controlled by House Speaker Mike Madigan (D-Chicago) late last month, the news breaking late on Friday evening the day after Thanksgiving. Hampton won $275,000 in the settlement, though she only will pocket $75,000, the rest going to attorney’s fees. 

Hampton’s lead attorney, Shelly Kulwin of Chicago-based litigation firm Kulwin, Masciopinto & Kulwin LLP, sat down with The Daily Line recently to talk about Hampton’s case now that it’s settled, and what lessons can be learned from the experience.