My two kids are at an age where they’re starting to earn more than just pocket money from babysitting or the odd job. So it’s time for those life lessons about budgeting and saving that we hope will form a foundation for independent living.
But when dealing with adolescents, I’ve found that sometimes it’s better if those lessons come from someone else, someone who can offer advice without being judgmental. No matter how hard I try, I keep finding myself saying things like: “Think how much money you’d have if you didn’t waste $4 at Starbucks every day” or “Really? You want to pay $80 for a pair of jeans?”
Learning the basic skills of financial literacy—from the ability to balance a checkbook to budgeting for expenses—are just as important as the academics that our kids are studying in school.
That’s why it’s exciting to learn that Montgomery County Public Schools and Junior Achievement of Greater Washington are exploring the idea of offering a comprehensive financial literacy program for middle schoolers.
Based on a model that Junior Achievement offers in Fairfax County public schools, the program would include several weeks of classroom instruction and culminate in a visit to a mall-like “finance park,” where students would spend a day practicing their new money management skills.
“We are very much in the early stages, but MCPS is very excited” about offering the program, said Erick Lang, MCPS associate superintendent of curriculum and instructional programs. He said Thursday that MCPS is expected to make a decision about whether to move ahead within the coming months.
“Both Junior Achievement and MCPS are eager to figure out how to make it happen,” added Edward Grenier, president and CEO of Junior Achievement of Greater Washington.
The financial literacy program would offer much more in-depth instruction that MCPS students currently receive through a short course that Junior Achievement provides to sixth-graders, Grenier said.
The proposed program’s curriculum would include lessons on how to build a personal budget based on income and expenses, balance a checkbook and chart stocks, among other things. Other lessons would explain the concepts of taxes and compound interest.
In Fairfax, the program is open to eighth-graders. MCPS is likely to offer its program to seventh-graders, Lang said. Every student would participate, much like every sixth-grader now attends MCPS’s three-day Outdoor Education program.
MCPS and Junior Achievement are looking into creating a public/private partnership to build a finance park at Thomas Edison High School of Technology as part of the modernization of the Silver Spring school, scheduled to be completed in 2017.
Locating the finance park at Thomas Edison would have the added benefit of exposing students to the 18 career and technology programs available to high school students, Lang said. “What we’ve heard through the years is that people don’t know what’s available there,” he said.
The finance park would be modeled after a state-of-the-art, 20,000-square-foot facility on the campus of a Fairfax County public school. Designed like a shopping mall, the facility consists of 18 “storefronts” offering services and goods such as food, insurance, housing, transportation, health care, utilities, entertainment and banking.
Students who participate in the financial literacy program would spend a day at the finance park after finishing the classroom instruction. There they would “pool all the knowledge from the classroom” to figure out how to maintain a realistic personal budget based on a given set of circumstances, according to Grenier. For example, a student may be assigned a “life situation” in which she is a 42-year-old mother of three making a certain income.
“It really becomes an experience in making decisions and setting priorities,” with the goal that students come away “understanding that they need to spend less than they make,” Grenier said. “Fundamentally, that’s the outcome we’re looking for.”
That’s a goal we all can applaud.
