The Aurora City Council approved a contract Tuesday night that will help to launch a new program to give the city’s kindergarten students an educational savings account with a starting balance of $50.
The previously-announced program, called Aurora Promise, is set to start as a pilot just in West Aurora School District 129 and East Aurora School District 131, but it will eventually expand to all public school kindergarten students in Aurora by partnering with all six school districts in the city, officials have said. Parts of Oswego-based School District 308, Indian Prairie School District 204, Batavia School District 101 and Kaneland School District 302 are also in Aurora, and only the kindergarten students from those districts living in the city of Aurora would get the savings accounts.
Mayor Richard Irvin said at Tuesday’s meeting that partnering “with our educational institutions and ensuring that our young people, from a young age, have a chance for a successful future is not only something that local government should be doing, it’s our responsibility because it helps our future.”
Parents will need to opt-in to the program at first to give the city and its partner, Operation Hope, time to market the program and get it running smoothly, according to Aurora Chief Community Services Officer Viviana Ramirez.
She said if everything goes smoothly, the program will switch to parents needing to opt-out and all six school districts will be brought in after 18 months. At that time, the city will also bring in all the former kindergarten students who didn’t opt-in to the program after it was launched.
The savings accounts, which will be seeded with a $50 starting balance by the city of Aurora, can be used for any education after high school, including college or trade school, according to past reporting. The goal is for parents to contribute to the savings over the years, and the city is also planning to look for corporate sponsors to help.
The contract approved by the Aurora City Council on Tuesday is with Operation Hope, which will manage the program. That contract is for 20 years at a price of around $1.96 million.
Operation Hope already manages a similar program in Atlanta and was the only organization to respond to the city’s request for proposals to manage the program, officials have said.
Irvin said the city has spent the past year working on setting this project up and looking at other communities that are also doing similar programs. The program is based on a similar one that has been going in San Francisco for 18 years, but there are similar ones in New York City, Boston and Los Angeles, according to officials.
Aurora Promise would be the first municipal child savings program in Illinois.
However, not all City Council members were on board with the plan. Two voted against the contract with Operation Hope: Alds. John Laesch, at large, and Ted Mesiacos, 3rd Ward.
Laesch said he thought the concept was good but that it also “somewhat skirts the boundaries of what city government should be doing and would be something that would be better taken up by our school districts to pursue as it deals with education.”
Mesiacos also said he thought it was a good program, but he questioned why the city was starting its own educational savings program when the state already has a similar initiative called Bright Start.
“The entire city of Aurora, all of our schools, every kid that’s entering kindergarten can get $50 seed money from the state of Illinois,” he said.
If the city simply contributed to that program, then students could instead start with $100 in their Bright Start account, Mesiacos said.
However, Ramirez said that similar state programs require the student signing up for the program and a parent to provide either a Social Security number or an individual taxpayer identification number.
The goal of Aurora Promise is to be inclusive of all students, so does not require either of those numbers, and accounts are instead linked to a school ID number, she said.
“We purposely found a program that all of our children could benefit from regardless of their status,” Ramirez said.
Also, Bright Start programs are disproportionately used by white, educated, suburban, middle-aged men who earn a high income, according to Ramirez. Specifically, Black and Latino residents in the state are underrepresented in the program, she said.
Having an Aurora Promise account would not stop someone from also getting an account through Bright Start, according to past reporting.
