Can you change a kid's life with $25? Fund My Future Milwaukee thinks so.
Can you change a kid's life with $25? Fund My Future Milwaukee thinks so.
By Ashley Luthern, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, September 29, 2021
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Ask Melody Lewis what she wants to be when she grows up and the first-grader rattles off a variety of jobs as she bounces on her toes.
A chef. A doctor. A mom.
Her mother, Sanquaita Lewis, expects those answers will change as her daughter grows and has new experiences.
“I'm really big on education, providing choices for my children to know that they have options, that they're able to explore different things,” she said.
So last year, when she heard about Fund My Future Milwaukee, a city-led effort to open college savings accounts for kindergarteners, she recognized an opportunity for her daughter.
“She has a choice in what she wants to do,” Lewis said. “This is a chance to also help her to understand financial responsibility and that it is not always Mommy and Daddy's decision, it's not always some outside influence’s decision, that you have a voice.”
Research backs up what Lewis already knew instinctively as a parent: Providing those savings accounts boosts educational aspirations and offers a financial pathway to get to college.
Fund My Future is part of a growing movement to use the accounts to change educational outcomes, invest in the future workforce, build generational wealth and narrow inequities in opportunity.
Nationwide, state treasurer's offices and local governments have used a mix of public and private money to automatically open accounts with initial deposits. Most programs are universal, meaning all children are included, and have been found to have outsized benefits for low-income families.
Multiple states — including Maine, Pennsylvania, Nebraska, California, Rhode Island, Nevada and Illinois — open college savings accounts for every newborn. Wisconsin does not, leaving local communities to push ahead on their own.
Fund My Future pays the $25 initial deposit to open an account for each student through Edvest, the state-administered 529 plan. The seed money comes from the United Way of Greater Milwaukee and Waukesha Counties, which has contributed $521,000 since 2018.
The 529 program, named for the section of the tax code that governs them, invests the money so it grows over time, turning that $25 into more than $100 by the time a child is ready for college.
It might not seem like much given the high cost of college — an average of $35,720 per year and rising — but studies have found having an account with any amount makes it more likely that a child will pursue further education.
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Wisconsin’s economy is changing and the number of jobs requiring higher education will continue to grow. The most recent data available show Milwaukee Public Schools’ four-year graduation rate is about 67% and about one-third of MPS graduates had entered college the fall after commencement.
Sharon Robinson, director of Milwaukee's Department of Administration
It's an investment that's going to benefit everyone. Not only is it the right thing to do, it's also an economic imperative.
These college savings accounts set expectations early, sometimes providing the first message to a child or their family that higher education is possible.
And for a city like Milwaukee, known for stark racial disparities in income, homeownership and educational attainment, there also is this: Having a savings account was a better predictor of whether a child with college expectations would attend than race or parents’ net worth.
"It's an investment that's going to benefit everyone," said Sharon Robinson, director of Milwaukee's Department of Administration. "Not only is it the right thing to do, it's also an economic imperative."
Fund My Future had opened accounts for 330 children across 17 public and private schools by the start of the 2020-21 school year, offering financial literacy lessons to a total of 750 students in those schools. That's a fraction of the roughly 5,500 5-year-old children who start kindergarten in Milwaukee Public Schools each year.
The program is slowly making progress, but few people outside the participating schools and existing funders know it exists. Sharing student data has been difficult. The city has dedicated a single full-time employee to manage the program and coordinate with more than a dozen schools and hundreds of parents.
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Still, outside experts and city officials say Fund My Future has the potential to make a real difference in the lives of Milwaukee's children.
"These things build a community with a college-going identity, that we're investing in our kids and in this place," said William Elliott, a University of Michigan professor, who has spent his career studying children’s savings accounts.
Ashleigh Edgerson, right, manager for Fund My Future Milwaukee, meets Brandi Allen and her 5-year-old son, Javier Tucker, during an open house at Javier's school, Next Door in Milwaukee. Fund My Future wants to open 529 college saving accounts for all K5 students in the city.MIKE DE SISTI / MILWAUKEE JOURNAL SENTINEL
The challenges of making sure the money follows the student
City officials launched Fund My Future in 2018 after four years of study and planning.
They announced an ambitious goal: Open a children's savings account for every 5-year-old kindergartener in Milwaukee in three years, reaching more than 26,000 students by the 2020-21 academic year.
But the program ran into bureaucratic headwinds early. Instead of fully automatic enrollment for all students, Fund My Future had to retool its approach after a data-sharing agreement with MPS stalled.
Why is such a data-sharing agreement important? Fund My Future has an “omnibus” Edvest account — a single pot of money with students’ accounts earmarked within it. The money needs to follow the student from kindergarten to graduation. Along the way, Fund My Future offers incentives. The first one comes in fourth grade when students who reach attendance benchmarks get an extra $10 in their account.
In Wisconsin, each student has a unique ID number from the state Department of Public Instruction. The number enables the department to know when students have moved up in grade level, switched school districts or stopped enrolling.
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Right now, Fund My Future does not have direct access to that unique ID from the school district, despite three years of trying to hammer out a deal with MPS. A spokesman for the district did not respond to questions about the agreement.
As a work-around, the program's manager drafted a consent form for parents to sign allowing the school to share the ID. Getting the signatures is a time-consuming process, and one that would be impossible to do for tens of thousands of students with the program’s current staff of a full-time employee, an intern and a volunteer.
Once the MPS data-sharing agreement is reached, the city's program manager, Ashleigh Edgerson, believes it can serve as a template for other schools. For now, she goes school by school to get buy-in from staff and parents. City leaders also decided to open the program to all elementary schools, not just public ones.
“Nothing changed with our mission and our objectives and what we wanted to do,” Edgerson said. “We could really be more intentional about the decisions that we made, and it actually helped us make better and quicker adaptations than if we had a larger group.”
In the meantime, Edgerson has forged strong partnerships with teachers and staff at participating schools, including one principal who knows what it’s like to come from an immigrant family and be the first to go to college.
Why a principal believes Fund My Future is ‘equally important’ as education for college
Marko Radmanović wants everyone to see the mural that stretches across the outside of Escuela Vieau, a bilingual MPS elementary school with about 750 students in Walker’s Point.
He points out the faces of a dozen smiling children, their skin different hues. A girl in a graduation cap flanked by her parents. Sepia tone houses, swirling blue water and pink coneflowers. The word welcome in eight languages on the right side and on the left, a message: Escuela Vieau, A safe harbor for all.
Radmanović, the principal, has been at the school for eight years and leading it for the past three. When his regional superintendent explained Fund My Future, he immediately recognized an opportunity for his students.
“It’s equally as important as the educational aspect because you can get prepared, but if you don't have a financial pathway, that’s a huge obstacle,” he said.
Most students and families do not begin thinking about vocational school or college and how to pay for it until high school, which doesn’t leave a lot of time to save or strategize about scholarships, grants and loans. It’s a process that can be even harder to navigate if parents do not speak or understand English well or have never gone to college.
Radmanović knows the feeling well. His father came to the United States after World War II as a refugee from the former Yugoslavia.
“He was not college-bound, but he wanted to be,” Radmanović said.
His father could not get past the language barrier, nor could he pay for higher education. His parents focused on his schooling and Radmanović credits his mother, in particular, with figuring out how to access and complete federal forms for student aid and scholarships, leading to his graduation from Marquette University.
Shaped by that experience, Radmanović praises the “structure and ease” of Fund My Future. In the fall, Edgerson, the program manager, attends one of the school’s regular parent breakfasts. She explains the program, hands out the consent forms and gets parents signed up on the spot.
Edgerson answers question after question. Are there any fees? No. Can parents contribute to the city-run account? No, they should open their own Edvest account, and if they do, the city will add another $25 to their child’s city-run plan.
Radmanović, the kindergarten teachers and the school’s parent coordinator help Edgerson follow up with those who do not complete the forms right away.
Last year, the pandemic and virtual schooling canceled events like the breakfast and made securing the forms more difficult. Of the roughly 75 kindergarten students who were eligible, only 17 were enrolled.
The city is allowing those families with students now in first grade to enroll this fall, along with the new crop of kindergarteners — a decision that applies to all participating schools.
It helps to have a partner like Radmanović. Not only does he relate to his students’ background, he also knows the power of 529 college savings plans. He learned of the concept early in his career from a benefits adviser and opened accounts for his children, all of whom now have advanced degrees.
“My parents aren’t alive to see it, but my kids are doing better than me,” he said.
More than an account: Fund My Future includes financial literacy lessons
Like Melody Lewis, most kids have an answer for what they want to be when they grow up. Their answers often are a reflection of what they see in their community: teachers, firefighters, police officers, doctors, veterinarians.
Jessica Borkowski remembers one of her kindergarten students who wanted to be a philanthropist, only he didn’t put it that way.
“He said: ‘I want to take other people’s money and go do good things,’” she said, chuckling at the memory.
Borkowski teaches at Northwest Catholic School, part of the Seton Catholic Schools network, and her student gave the answer during a Fund My Future class activity. Her class was one of the first cohorts in the city program, and Borkowski said she has found the classroom component to be just as important as opening the 529 accounts.
Jessica Borkowski, Northwest Catholic School teacher
By having the program here, we're clearly establishing a message. In kindergarten, we see all of our students as potential college graduates.
She and Edgerson, the city’s program manager, led classroom sessions where students made graduation caps, drew piggybanks while learning about savings, read books about going to college and talked about their experiences in college.
Borkowski later incorporated those activities into math lessons when she taught counting and adding and subtracting. It’s not too early to have those discussions with 5-year-olds, she added.
“They know what money is, they see their parents paying for things,” Borkowski said.
As Fund My Future continues to add schools, the city is partnering with education students at Marquette University and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee to lead classroom activities, so it does not all fall to Edgerson and individual teachers.
The program has been at Northwest Catholic School for four years, and the school promotes the partnership to incoming families.
“By having the program here, we're clearly establishing a message,” Borkowski said. “In kindergarten, we see all of our students as potential college graduates.”
What it would take to grow Fund My Future
Nicole Angresano views Fund My Future as a starting point in a pipeline of success that moves Milwaukee’s young people from early education through college and beyond.
“It is absolutely first and foremost an issue of racial equity,” Angresano said, United Way's vice president of community impact. “It is an issue of all kids having the same opportunities.”
About 62% of white MPS high-school seniors had plans to attend a four-year college, compared with 39% of Black seniors and 44.5% of Hispanic/Latino seniors, according to the latest survey results available from the state Department of Public Instruction.
“I’m not naïve,” Angresano added. “It's not so simple to say, ‘Well, now we all have college savings accounts so the work is done.’ I think it's an important step. I think it's an important message.”
A large body of academic research supports her.
Elliott, the University of Michigan professor, co-wrote a book about children's savings accounts called “Making Education Work for the Poor.” In some programs, like Milwaukee’s, the accounts are administered as a 529 plan. He draws the distinction because studies have found 529 plans on their own primarily benefit wealthy families.
“You have small-dollar accounts with $25. What can you expect from that? It can change things like parental depression, kids’ social-emotional development, and parental and children's expectations about the future,” Elliott said.
But the real potential, he said, is in the program’s omnibus account, which allows for anyone to make a contribution.
“Beyond the initial deposits, beyond streamlining paperwork and beyond matching money, these provide a way for third-party investments, whether they be employers or community members or foundations,” Elliott said. “That’s when they take on wealth-building.”
Fund My Future has enough money to continue adding a few schools each year with continuing support from United Way, the Greater Milwaukee Foundation and Marquette University, according to Edgerson. That covers the $25 seed deposit, the $25 incentive when parents open their own 529 account and the $10 fourth-grade attendance incentive.
Fund My Future is housed in the city’s Department of Administration, which has contributed by hiring Edgerson. A spokesman said Mayor Tom Barrett was unavailable for an interview about the program.
Reaching the original goal of opening accounts for all kindergarten students will take more money, and Edgerson dreams of boosting the initial deposit to $100 and adding more incentives as students age. Statewide programs in Connecticut, Nevada, Rhode Island and Maine give initial deposits ranging from $50 to $500.
To give every K5 student in MPS a $100 deposit, the city would need to raise an estimated $550,000 each year — about $30,000 more than it has raised in the past three years total. Robinson, Edgerson's boss, said the long-term goal is to raise more than $1 million annually to open accounts for more students, give bigger deposits and hire more program staff.
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The amount might sound like a lot, but it is achievable. The United Way raises about $50 million annually during its fundraising campaign to support numerous projects. Philanthropists and foundations in Milwaukee have donated millions for projects promoting family well-being, student achievement and racial equity.
There are barriers beyond money: the data-sharing agreements with schools, the understandable distrust some parents have of government and banking institutions and some parents who do not believe the account will make a difference.
Edgerson often thinks back to what one boy told her during a Fund My Future classroom activity.
“He said, ‘My mom told me I'm not going to college because she can't afford it’” she said.
“The immediate thought between me and his teachers was that if he can articulate that, and understand what that meant, then we have time to rewrite that mindset.”
How to get involved
Fund My Future is a public-private effort to open children's savings accounts for every K5 student in Milwaukee. The program currently is in 25 schools in the city.
For educators: If you are an educator and want Fund My Future to come to your school, email program manager Ashleigh Edgerson at ashleigh.edgerson@employmilwaukee.org.
For parents: The city encourages parents of any student, or any age, to sign up for an Edvest account, the state-administered 529 plan, at edvest.com and start saving for vocational school or college.
Parents of kindergarten students at Fund My Future participating schools can sign up for the program this fall.
For community members: Those who want to donate to Fund My Future can do so through the United Way by clicking here. Many employers offer matching funds for donations.
For businesses and foundations: If you want to support the program, or grow its capacity by contributing to the fund, email program manager Ashleigh Edgerson at ashleigh.edgerson@employmilwaukee.org or Nicole Angresano of the United Way at nangresano@unitedwaygmwc.org.
