Summary as Introduced
Supports home-visiting and Early Intervention programs as an essential component of our State's multifaceted approach to the opioid crisis, helping remediate many of its corrosive impacts on young children, their parents, and families, while also assisting efforts at preventing children from future struggles with substance use disorders of their own. Affirms these vital birth-to-3 services are a top priority for increased public resources, to strengthen their quality and extend their reach to more of the children, parents, and families who could benefit from them, particularly in communities of greatest need and those hit hardest by the opioid epidemic. Affirms home-visiting and Early Intervention services are an appropriate and necessary use for some of the hundreds of millions of funding coming to Illinois from the settlement of lawsuits against opioid makers and distributors, initiatives that can help meet the settlements' stated aims of boosting opioid remediation, treatment, and prevention.