To understand how families engage with its early childhood programs, Illinois seeks to connect records across agencies that have historically operated in silos.

Illinois has several programs for young children—including child care subsidies, Head Start, district-based preschool, home visiting, and Early Intervention—administered by different agencies at every level of government. Each program tracks participation in its own system. As a result, the same child may appear in multiple program counts, and the state lacks a clear longitudinal record of how a given child or family engages with multiple publicly-funded services over time.

This makes it difficult for policymakers and administrators to answer basic operational questions: Where are the gaps in access? Which communities have low uptake relative to eligibility? How do children move between programs? In a state with nearly 900,000 children under five, and significant public and private spending on infant care, these questions bear directly on how effectively public investments reach the families they are designed to serve.

NORC has built data infrastructure connecting Illinois’ fragmented early childhood program records into integrated, analyzable datasets.

NORC partners with the University of Illinois and Northern Illinois University as part of the Illinois Longitudinal Data System (ILDS), a state-mandated initiative to link education and workforce data from birth through career. NORC’s role focuses on the early childhood component: integrating administrative records from child care subsidies, Early Intervention, Head Start, and other programs into unified analytic datasets that allow researchers and state agencies to track an individual child’s participation across programs over time.

A central methodological challenge is producing reliable local estimates of how many children are eligible for programs versus how many actually participate. NORC researchers developed the Estimating Local Populations Eligible for Programs (ELPEP) methodology, an open-source statistical approach that uses Census microdata to generate quarterly eligibility estimates at the county and regional level. These estimates feed into the IECAM Data Hub, where they are presented alongside monthly enrollment figures so that researchers, agency staff, and other users can compare eligibility to participation by geography, age, and race/ethnicity.

NORC also created a crosswalk of child care provider sites across data sources and supports ongoing data preparation and disclosure review to ensure that integrated records meet the privacy and quality standards required for public release.