Aurora’s child savings account program, announced with fanfare two years ago and launched last year, has been quietly shuttered.
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Aurora’s Promise, as it was called, was planned to one day give all of the city’s kindergarten students a savings account with a starting contribution of $50 from the city. Once a student grew up, the account holding that starting contribution and any additional funds their family contributed could have been used to help pay for education after high school, including college or trade school.
It was the first city-sponsored child savings program in Illinois, following other cities from across the country like San Francisco, New York City, Boston and Los Angeles, officials previously said. The state of Illinois has a similar program called Bright Start, but unlike others, children are not automatically enrolled.
Less than a year after the program launched, Aurora Mayor John Laesch has confirmed to The Beacon-News that it is no longer running, citing budget constraints and issues with the program itself. It was not included in the 2026 budget, he said, and the city recently ended its contract with the nonprofit that managed the program.
In 2024, then-Mayor Richard Irvin formally unveiled the Aurora’s Promise program during the third of four State of the City addresses he held that year. Children to be grandfathered into the program were brought up onto the stage of Aurora University’s Crimi Auditorium and given giant $50 bills as the crowd cheered.
Later that year, the Aurora City Council approved a 20-year, $1.96 million contract with Operation Hope, a non-profit that was to manage the program.
Aurora’s Promise was officially launched in April 2025 with a press conference that, similar to the State of the City address, featured children receiving giant $50 bills alongside piggy banks and backpacks filled with educational materials and play money
The initiative began as a pilot just with West Aurora School District 129 and East Aurora School District 131, with the plan to later expand to the city’s other school districts. It also started as an opt-in program, meaning parents needed to sign their children up for it, but after the pilot was planned to change to be opt-out, meaning every student would be covered unless their parents specifically pulled their child out.
Former city officials, when discussing the Aurora’s Promise program, have pointed to research showing that students enrolled in automatic children’s savings account programs are more likely to enroll in post-secondary education like college, along with other positive outcomes.
But when the idea came before the Aurora City Council, it drew some criticism — including from Laesch, who was at the time an alderman at-large. He voted against the city’s contract with Operation Hope, saying that the concept was good but that it “somewhat skirts the boundaries of what city government should be doing.”
The program has now been “paused” and city staff are “continuing to explore the potential for having a sustainable Child Savings Account program,” according to a statement from the city of Aurora. However, within the same statement, city officials said that it is much more efficient to direct interested families to the state’s Bright Start initiative rather than maintaining a separate city-run program.
In 2024, Ald. Ted Mesiacos, 3rd Ward, voted against the program after similarly questioning why the city was starting its own when the state already had a similar initiative.
At the time, city officials said that similar state programs require the student signing up for the program and one of their parents to provide either a Social Security number or an individual taxpayer identification number. The goal of Aurora’s Promise was to be inclusive of all students, officials previously said, so it didn’t require either of those numbers.
Plus, Black and Latino residents are underrepresented in the state’s program, city officials said at the time.
The 109 families who enrolled in the Aurora’s Promise pilot program, of which there were 41 students from West Aurora School District 129 and 68 students from East Aurora School District 131, will have their Aurora’s Promise accounts transferred into Bright Start accounts, according to the city’s statement.
The city is still “in the process of identifying the logistics” of telling enrolled families that the program has been ended, and of transferring their accounts, Aurora officials said in the statement. At the time of reporting, the city’s webpage about the program was still up, as was the online form to join the program.
Both West Aurora and East Aurora school districts recently told The Beacon-News that they were unaware of the program being discontinued.
In an interview last week, Laesch gave several reasons the program was canceled. First, he said it would have taken “enormous” levels of administrative work, either by city staff or school district staff, which he said wasn’t “thoroughly plotted out.”
Plus, it was a nearly $2 million line item in the city’s budget that, as the city went through a difficult budget cycle last year, was “an easy decision to discontinue,” Laesch said. The city’s budget for 2026 included cuts to funding across city departments, including the loss of around 140 positions.
In general, Laesch said, the city has gotten out of “a lot” of contracts since he took office.
It also had “very low participation,” he said, referring to the opt-in pilot program. To grow the program, the city would have needed to add more staff, he said.
Finally, there wasn’t much benefit to the parents who participated because the accounts didn’t earn interest, according to Laesch.
The city’s statement focused on the budget and the state’s existing Bright Start initiative as reasons for Aurora Promise’s “pause.”
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The funding model wasn’t yet sustainable long-term, despite some seed money committed from a local business, officials said in the statement. In total, the contract with Operation Hope has cost the city nearly $130,000, according to the statement.
Despite the Aurora’s Promise program being ended, city officials said that financial literacy, reducing barriers to post-secondary education and supporting career development continue to be a priority for Aurora. This can be seen, the city’s statement said, through the Financial Empowerment Center’s collaborations with local organizations for youth-focused programs and through a partnership with the Valley Education For Employment System for a career exploration event this past fall.
But former Aurora Director of Innovation and Strategy Martha Paschke recently told The Beacon-News that Aurora’s Promise was part of the city’s overall plan to improve upward economic mobility for marginalized people. The research is pretty clear on the benefits, she said, and pointed to research from San Francisco’s program showing it helped shrink certain gaps and aided marginalized people.
Specifically, research from the first class of students to have graduated high school under San Francisco’s universal, automatic children’s savings account program showed that the students were 6% more likely to enroll in college, with a 12% increase among those who are typically underrepresented in higher education, according to the city’s webpage dedicated to the research.
Underrepresented students also saw a 7% higher on-time graduation rate, the research showed.
Through interviews with students and families, researchers learned that San Francisco’s program also helped foster dreams of college, made it easier to save for future education and made paying for college feel less overwhelming, the city’s webpage said.
In 2024, city officials said that Aurora’s Promise was based on San Francisco’s program.
While the goal was to get families to save an amount of money that would meaningfully help pay for a child’s post-secondary education, it isn’t the amount of money in the account that matters, Paschke said — it is the intention and promise behind it that is impactful to children. Studies show that even those with a small amount of money saved, she said, are significantly more likely to seek out further education after high school.
“What we had created was so solid, and it was solidly based in evidence,” Paschke said. “I feel like its turned into a political thing, where it was rejected out of political spite.”
City officials also wanted the program to help address the issue of banking, according to Paschke. She said that many marginalized people rely on things like payday loans and don’t use traditional banking systems that benefit others, but that this program hopefully would have given those people a way to learn about banking.
But, it didn’t single out marginalized people since it was designed to one day include all children within the city automatically, Paschke said.
Plus, the program really wouldn’t have cost the city that much, she said. It may seem like the city is spending more to operate the program than each individual child receives, she said, but there are long-term significant benefits to marginalized populations.
A lot of resources and research went into the creation of the program, Paschke said, and a lot of personal time was spent working on it. It took over two years to develop the program, she said.
“It’s honestly kind of a gut punch to have worked on something that had so much potential to help so many people and to be something good coming out of the city, and to see it just shut down without a whole lot of thought,” Paschke said. “It’s not a good feeling, that’s for sure.”