Here at ILDOCC, we love to hear from you. Most of the time you are telling us the impact we’re making, or cheering us on, or asking if we can troubleshoot a problem for you. We absolutely LOVE communication from our members.
Even if we get a negative letter – it helps us grow. If we’ve done something wrong, it helps us correct an error. If it looks like we’ve done something wrong, but we haven’t, that’s valuable too. Maybe others feel the same way, and we need to explain what we did and why we did the right thing.
So one reader wrote in to tell us that holding candidate forums for GOP gubernatorial candidate Jesse Sullivan, Darren Bailey, and Paul Schimpf shows that we favor the GOP. Not at all. So let us explain. CCAU approached ILDOCC about holding candidate forums so we could ask the childcare questions you would want asked. We said sure! So CCAU, ILDOCC, and SIECAT are working together to invite all of the Democrat and Republican candidates for governor to our forums.
The Democrat and Republican challengers to Gov. Pritzker were invited for the first round – Sullivan, Bailey, and Schimpf all RSVP’ed yes. The rest didn’t (including Democrat Beverly Miles challenging Pritzker in the primary).
After these conclude, we’ll invite Gov. JB Pritzker. He’ll get the same time and coverage.
All of us in the childcare field deserve to know where they stand on childcare issues BEFORE the election. ILDOCC is a non-partisan group. In fact, we have to be. We usually have an equal number of Democrats and Republicans sponsoring our legislation. We’ve had a Democrat Chief Sponsor for several years for our legislation. When we did pass legislation in committee, all Democrats and Republicans unanimously voted for our measure. Childcare issues are not Democrat vs Republican like some issues are. They can’t be. The issues are about serving our parents and kids in our centers who come from all backgrounds and political persuasions.
Having said that, we appreciate the reader writing us, because if she saw something a certain way, maybe others did too. And childcare is too important for us not to be all on the same page, right?
Thanks for letting us explain!