Chicago listings have been removed
Shortlist no longer shows childcare providers in Chicago. The listings that were here have been taken down, and the underlying records deleted, because Shortlist could not trace them to an authoritative source.
Every other city on Shortlist is anchored to its state’s official childcare licensing dataset. Each provider we show exists in that dataset, and the facts we publish about them — license status, capacity, address — come from it, or from the provider’s own published material. Illinois is the one state where that is not currently possible.
Why
Illinois publishes no machine-readable roster of licensed childcare providers and no stable public provider ID. Licensing authority moved from the Department of Children and Family Services to the new Illinois Department of Early Childhood on July 1, 2026, and a replacement system has not yet been stood up. The one public interface, the DCFS Sunshine provider lookup, is search-only.
Without an official roster, Shortlist could not confirm that the providers it listed were currently licensed, could not tell when one closed, and could not know which providers it was missing entirely. Showing a parent a daycare we cannot confirm is still operating is worse than showing nothing. So we are showing nothing.
What we have done about it
On July 11, 2026, Shortlist filed a public records request under the Illinois Freedom of Information Act for the state’s licensed childcare roster, including the license numbers that would let us anchor each provider to the state’s own record. It went first to the Department of Children and Family Services, which declined it on July 16, 2026 on the ground that all licensing records had transferred to the new Department of Early Childhood on July 1, 2026 and that it would not forward the request. Shortlist re-filed the identical request directly with the Department of Early Childhood the same day.
- Request filed
- July 16, 2026 — Illinois Department of Early Childhood (re-filed after the Department of Children and Family Services declined on jurisdiction)
- Statutory response due
- July 23, 2026 — five business days, 5 ILCS 140
If the request returns a roster with license numbers, Chicago comes back — rebuilt from the state’s own data, on the same footing as every other city here. If it does not, this page will say so, and will say what we are trying next.
In the meantime
For childcare in Chicago, the state’s own DCFS Sunshine provider lookup is the authoritative search, and its monitoring reports carry inspection and violation history back to 2010.