Christian Sherrill was trying to corral the attention of 150 students wrapping up a classroom activity and chatting with each other about their results. A handful were getting water refills, others were checking their phones.
“If you can hear my voice, clap once,” Sherrill’s voice boomed. A few people clapped, the room quieted slightly. “If you can hear my voice, clap twice.” More eyes turned toward the presentation screen. Most — not all — of the conversations subsided.
The activity was a personal budgeting exercise, and Sherrill’s lively pupils were all teachers themselves, from middle schools and high schools around Connecticut. They’d gathered in a New Haven conference center on a sunny summer day to try out lesson plans, ask questions and gain the confidence they’d need to teach a newly required course to their students: personal financial management and financial literacy.
Gov. Ned Lamont signed legislation last year requiring the half-credit course in order to graduate from the state’s public schools. At the time, he called it “one of the most important instructional tools that we can give young people to achieve economic independence and stability throughout their lives.”
[RELATED: CT high schoolers now need a financial literacy course to graduate]
In testimony supporting the bill, state Treasurer Erick Russell noted that many high schools in the state already offered a personal finance course as an elective, and the state Board of Education had published curricula for the program. But none of the schools with courses already on the books were in Connecticut’s largest cities, Russell pointed out, “which only serves to exacerbate gaps in achievement and wealth.”
In the year since the legislation passed, those districts have been working to catch up.
They’ve received support from nonprofit groups like California-based Next Gen Personal Finance, which offers free lesson plans and professional development seminars for teachers — like the one in New Haven last week. The organization held 15 such workshops, dubbed “FinCamp,” around the country this summer; Connecticut’s was the largest.
Roughly 60 teachers in attendance received a $500 stipend to be there, funded by a separate nonprofit, Connecticut Financial Scholars. That organization, which started in Philadelphia, recently set up shop in Connecticut, where it’s working to expand financial education offerings beyond the semester-long requirement — including things like summer enrichment and entrepreneurship training for students, as well as financial empowerment workshops for parents. The group targets its efforts in lower-income, higher-need school districts.
“You have big school districts who have to teach this, and their teachers have never taught this before. That’s a huge access and equity issue,” Nancy Kail, program director for CT Financial Scholars, said. Her organization aims to fill that gap. Kail was on site at the Next Gen Personal Finance “FinCamp” last week to observe and offer teacher support.
The personal budgeting exercise, a lesson NGPF calls “Budget Frenzy,” kicked off the day’s proceedings.
Each student was told to imagine themself at 22, living with a roommate (some teachers groaned audibly). They were given a personal budget, somewhat arbitrarily, and instructed to decide whether they’d spend that money on a series of 30 items that appeared one after the other on the presentation screen.
The items ranged from going out to lunch with friends to buying a new smartphone to getting an oil change. And some of them, like the oil change, had more expensive consequences later on in the game if the player had chosen not to spend money on them.
“Budgeting decisions have consequences,” Sherrill sing-songed as he clicked to the next slide.
After the activity, Sherrill passed the mic around to a few teachers who had ideas about how to customize the game for their students — adding things like streaming subscriptions or going to the nail salon. He showed the teachers where to find materials for the lesson plan on NGPF’s website, along with other lessons in the budgeting module.
Cynthia Lisinicchia, a math teacher at Bridgeport Military Academy, said she was “really interested” in the financial literacy curriculum because she doesn’t want her students to start off on the wrong foot — like she feels she did. Lisinicchia said she signed up for a credit card when she was in college not knowing much about how they worked, and she bought a brand new sports car after graduating without negotiating on the price.
“All the things I did not know, oh my gosh!” Lisinicchia said. “So I’m always telling my students the key isn’t how much money you make, it’s what you do with the money that you have. You’ve got to start out not making mistakes.”
Lisinicchia and her fellow teachers had the chance to try out another lesson, focused specifically on how credit cards work, later that morning.
NGPF instructor Amanda Volz told the teachers to put themselves in the mindset of one of their students and think of “a big-ticket item” they might want to buy with a credit card, then search the internet to figure out what that item generally costs. Next, using a free online tool, they were told to enter the price, the credit card interest rate (Volz suggested 19.9%) and a minimum monthly payment (either 3% of the purchase price or $25, whichever was higher). The tool calculated how much it would cost to pay off that purchase, as well as the difference between that total and the item’s original pricetag.
In the case of the $900 iPhone Volz used as an example, the interest added up to $421. “I hear some reactions to that,” she said, smiling. “And hopefully, maybe your students would have some reactions to that.” Volz then adjusted the monthly payment to $50 and interest dropped to $177. “A little aha moment,” she said.
Gwen Rice, a math teacher at West Haven High School, chose a pair of $350 Beats by Dre headphones — which she said are popular with her students — and ran the numbers. They would take 17 months to pay off, with $51 in additional interest.
Rice said she has used the tool in her classes before. She’s now developing an “Intro to Investing” course and she’s exploring additional curriculum to integrate into that program.
At a reception following the FinCamp seminar, Treasurer Erick Russell made an appearance and thanked the teachers for their work. He said, for him, the new state requirement was “personal.”
“There are a lot of things I look back on and wish I knew a little earlier. I wish I had courses like this when I was in high school so I didn’t make some of the silly mistakes that many people do. I wish I knew that about compounding interest. I wish I knew about different ways to finance my future education,” he said.
“There’s a lot that you learn about in school that you kind of finish your class and you’ll never think about it again,” he said. “The tools that you learn around financial education are things that we all use and build on every single day.”