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When Stephanie Martinez Anaya was a senior at Hamilton High in Anza in 2023, her college success coach told her about scholarship money for college or career training.
The money — between $500 and $1,500 automatically deposited and waiting in an interest-bearing savings account — is from the California Kids Investment and Development Savings program (CalKIDS), a state initiative for eligible low-income students and English learners enrolled in the public school system.
Launched in 2022, CalKIDS is intended to help families save for and lower the costs of college or career training.
“Even if expenses come up,” Martinez Anaya said, “I won’t have to worry about that.”
And unexpected expenses did arise once in college. She ended up using her $530, $30 of which was interest, to purchase homework access for her classes at the University of California Riverside.
Now, Martinez Anaya promotes CalKIDS as a coach for the California Student Opportunity and Access Program, or Cal-SOAP, assisting high schoolers with college and scholarship applications.
The Cal-SOAP-CalKIDS partnership illustrates how the state can raise awareness about CalKIDS by using personal, relatable stories in local communities, said Libby Schaaf, co-author of Advancing CalKIDS, a research report on strategies to increase the college participation rate for low-income families.
Her research reinforces that CalKIDS must increase, incorporate and integrate community partnerships into each aspect of its outreach to expand access among eligible students.
Schaaf, former mayor of Oakland and co-founder of Oakland Promise, a nationally recognized cradle-to-career program, conducted the research while a fellow at The EdRedesign Lab at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Who’s eligible?
Low-income public school students and English learners, identified by the California Department of Education, are automatically awarded $500 if they:
- Were in grades 1-12 during the 2021-22 school year
- Were enrolled in first grade during the 2022-23 school year, or
- Are first graders in subsequent school years, meaning the number of eligible student accounts grows each year.
An additional $500 is deposited for students identified as foster youth and another $500 for students classified as homeless.
Children born in California, regardless of their parents’ income, are now granted $100 in an account. More than 1 million newborn accounts are currently eligible.
Over 3.9 million school-aged children now qualify for at least $500 in free money with CalKIDS.
As of March 31, only 12% of students had registered for their CalKIDS account, up by nearly 4 percentage points since last year but still far from reaching most of the state’s students.
Not quite 3 years old, “CalKIDS is still in its early development stage, so now is an impactful time to explore potential refinements and additions to its operational and programmatic approaches,” Schaaf said in her report.
Schaaf’s research recommends strategic actions to increase the number of claimed accounts.
“A lot of the challenges are going to require other people to step up,” she said. “Some might require counties or school districts to take more actions.”
The CalKIDS team has started implementing some of those strategies.
“My dad didn’t finish college, himself,” Schaaf said, reflecting on the personal experience that led to her work. “He was a traveling shoe salesman, and he made this big point of how important education was. He started investing and built up these little funds for me and my sister to go to college.”
As the mayor of Oakland from 2015 to 2023,Schaaf built Oakland Promise, a cradle-to-career and savings account program that features personalized financial coaching and other resources and is now a national model for its comprehensive system.
Schaaf’s research, conducted over the past year, is based on her experience with Oakland Promise as well as a literature review; work with the CalKIDS Institute at UCLA; in-depth interviews with 14 CalKIDS partners and 15 college and career savings account experts and leaders of governmental groups, nonprofit organizations and school systems; an on-site community event; and parent focus groups.
Schaaf is also a 2026 candidate for state treasurer, whose office oversees the CalKIDS program. She announced her candidacy in January 2024, after being selected for the Harvard fellowship in 2023. Current State Treasurer Fiona Ma is running for lieutenant governor in 2026.
“One of the reasons I actually got excited about running for state treasurer is the fact that the Treasurer’s office runs this program,” she said. “I’m somebody who doesn’t want to take on a job without feeling like I am the most competent person to do it.”
Her research and recommendations, she said, educated her about the program and have empowered her to run for the position. But regardless of whether she wins the electon, she said “this work needs to happen.”
Advancing CalKIDS
Leverage community partnerships
Schaaf’s report stated that automatically establishing the accounts at birth and at first grade minimizes barriers. But that doesn’t prevent or eliminate problems, because families must claim the accounts by registering online.
CalKIDS’ letters, notifying eligible students about accessing their accounts, are mailed out after students finish first grade, and letters for newborns are mailed within a few months of their birth.
Schaaf recommended that notifications be more aligned, for example, sending the award letter with newborns’ birth certificates, like Pennsylvania does for its Keystone Scholars program.
Advocates told EdSource last year that many people in low-income communities ignore the mailers because they question its credibility, even if it has an official letterhead.
Schaaf’s research revealed two seemingly contradictory points: that families take action when encouraged by a government entity and that messages from community organizations are more effective in spurring action among families.
Parents said aspects of both concepts make programs trustworthy. For instance, they trusted the local, community-based Oakland Promise, which was set up by the city and involved the county.
“She (a parent) said, ‘These are the programs we trust, the ones where the government is involved,’” Schaaf said about realizing it’s not one way or the other.
Recommendation: CalKIDS ambassadors
In fact, Schaaf recommends creating a certification for community-based partners to be CalKIDS ambassadors.
“The fact that they (would be) certified by the state of California or by the treasurer’s office gives them the formality effect of government’s gravitas, but their community voice – their cultural competency – is the winning combination,” she said.
“That’s what really made me realize both of these bodies of research are true. Where we are most effective is when we combine them.”
Embodying that collaboration, recent partnerships with community organizations have spread the word about CalKIDS and provided other benefits to families, such as:
- EverFi, which launched a financial literacy program in Los Angeles County
- Golden 1 Credit Union, which held four educational community events in April in Northern California and the Central San Joaquin Valley for families to learn about the bank’s financial services and claim their CalKIDS accounts. In all, 125 accounts were claimed
- Covered California, which has tied well-child exams and immunizations to the ability to earn up to $1,000 in the newborn accounts until March 2026.
Leveraging the community partnerships will remain imperative for the four-member CalKIDS team.
“Rather than trying to be everywhere all the time, all at once and feeling spread thin, we are being very intentional in how we do outreach,” the program’s new director, Cassandra DiBenedetto, said about a different approach to outreach.
According to the California Child Savings Account Coalition, as of February, there are 15 local child savings account programs, serving 180,000 youth with over $26 million.
California’s local child savings accounts
The 15 local programs are:
In places where there are local programs, claim rates were, at one time, much lower than the state percentage, perhaps because of a lack of clarity about CalKIDS. For example, in December 2023, 4.8% of eligible students in San Joaquin County and 7.3% in Los Angeles County had claimed their accounts.
However, partnerships between CalKIDS and local programs, joint promotion and branding of materials with both logos have nearly doubled the claim rates to 8.6% in San Joaquin County and 12.2% in Los Angeles County, as of March 31.
Hardest part about CalKIDS outreach: A number
To check student eligibility and claim the CalKIDS account, families must enter students’ Statewide Student Identifier (SSID), a 10-digit number that appears on student transcripts. EdSource found that many families are unsure where to find the ID numbers.
To alleviate this concern, the updated CalKIDS website instructs families to locate the ID number on a student’s transcript, school portal, or report card or to contact their child’s school directly.
Schaaf suggested that school districts provide the student identification information at back-to-school events.
Fresno Unified officials at a Golden 1-CalKIDS event provided the ID numbers to make account registration easy, said a parent who registered her children in April.
Oakland Unified has granted Oakland Promise permission to access students’ ID numbers for CalKIDS enrollment events, Schaaf said.
Once aware, families must understand and trust information
Within the last year, to address language and literacy barriers, CalKIDS has created materials in other languages and used more accessible words, moving from terms such as “savings accounts” to “scholarships” or “free money.”
But Schaaf and others warned that the term “free money” can cause fear and distrust among some cultures and communities. For example, Thanh-Truc “April” Hoang, a second-year UC Riverside student of Vietnamese background, who claimed her CalKIDS funds and helped her younger cousins claim theirs, said one of the greatest obstacles was skepticism about the “free money.” Her grandparents, aunts and uncles learned English as a second language, and she had to carefully explain what CalKIDS was before she could convince them.
“I said, ‘It was an aid. It wasn’t just free money for no reason; it’s there specifically to help them with college,” she said about how she eased their concerns about having to pay the money back or dealing with stipulations for use.
CalKIDS recipients advocating for and about the program
Tapping the actual experiences of students who’ve registered for the accounts and used the funds is the best tool for convincing families about the potential of CalKIDS, Martinez Anaya, the UC Riverside student, said, echoing a sentiment Schaaf shared with EdSource.
The CalKIDS program has even started collecting student testimonials, such as those of UC Davis student Chloe Cota, who said the money helped relieve some of the financial stress of school, “allowing me to focus more on my classes.”
Rossalee Mina used her scholarship funds to fill the financial gap of transferring from the four-year Cal State Fullerton to Mt. San Jacinto College.
Also a Cal-SOAP coach, Mina takes pride in helping high schoolers access their accounts.
“It’s just really rewarding — coming from having CalKIDS too — that I can also help show these students, who are stressing out about how to pay for everything, that they do have this amount of money to use that’s available for them,” Mina said. “I’m always saying, ‘Congrats, you can use this towards college.’ They’re like,’Oh wow, it’s a lot of money.’”
As of December, 81,232 students enrolled in college or career programs have received their share of over $43 million in CalKIDS funds.
“This money,” DiBenedetto said, “is making an impact in real time with every single semester that goes by.”
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