To prepare to teach financial literacy, Connecticut educators go back to school

Christian Sherrill was trying to capture the attention of 150 students who were finishing up a classroom activity and chatting among themselves about their results. Some were refilling water, others were checking their phones.

“If you can hear my voice, clap once,” Sherrill’s voice boomed. A few people clapped, and the room fell slightly silent. “If you can hear my voice, clap twice.” More eyes turned to the presentation screen. Most, but not all, conversations quieted down.

The activity was a personal budgeting exercise, and Sherrill’s lively students were all middle and high school teachers from Connecticut. They had gathered at a New Haven conference center on a sunny summer day to test lesson plans, ask questions and gain the confidence they would need to teach a new required course to their students: personal financial management and financial literacy.

Gov. Ned Lamont last year signed a law requiring the half-credit course to graduate from the state’s public schools. At the time, he called it “one of the most important educational tools we can give young people to achieve economic independence and stability throughout their lives.”

In testimony in support of the bill, state Treasurer Erick Russell noted that many high schools in the state already offered a personal finance course as an elective and that the state Board of Education had published curricula for the program. But none of the schools with courses already in place were in Connecticut’s largest cities, Russell noted, “which only serves to exacerbate the achievement and wealth gaps.”

In the year since the legislation was passed, those districts have been working to catch up.

They have received support from nonprofit groups like California-based Next Gen Personal Finance, which offers free lesson plans and professional development seminars for teachers, such as a recent one in New Haven. The organization held 15 such workshops, dubbed “FinCamp,” across the country this summer; the one in Connecticut was the largest.

About 60 teachers who attended received a $500 stipend to be there, funded by an independent nonprofit, Connecticut Financial Scholars. That organization, which started in Philadelphia, recently set up shop in Connecticut, where it is working to expand financial education offerings beyond the one-semester requirement, including things like summer enrichment and business training for students, as well as financial empowerment workshops for parents. The group focuses its efforts on lower-income, higher-need school districts.

“There are large school districts that have to teach this and their teachers have never done it before. It’s a huge access and equity issue,” said Nancy Kail, director of the CT Financial Scholars program. Her organization aims to fill that gap. Kail was on hand at Next Gen Personal Finance’s FinCamp to observe and offer support to teachers.

The personal budget exercise, a lesson NGPF calls “Budget Frenzy,” kicked off the day’s proceedings.

Each student was asked to imagine themselves at age 22, living with a roommate (some teachers audibly groaned). They were given a personal, somewhat arbitrary budget and asked to decide whether they would spend that money on a series of 30 items that appeared one after the other on the splash screen.

The items ranged from eating out with friends to buying a new smartphone or changing the oil in the engine. And some of them, like the oil change, had more costly consequences later in the game if the player had decided not to spend money on them.

“Budget decisions have consequences,” Sherrill sang as he moved on to the next slide.

After the activity, Sherrill passed the mic 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. She showed teachers where to find lesson plan materials on the NGPF website, along with other lessons from the budgeting module.

Cynthia Lisinicchia, a math teacher at Bridgeport Military Academy, said she was “really interested” in the financial literacy program because she doesn’t want her students to get off on the wrong foot, as she believes she did. Lisinicchia said she signed up for a credit card when she was in college without knowing much about how they worked and bought a new sports car after graduation without negotiating the price.

“All the things I didn’t know, gosh!” Lisinicchia said. “That’s why I always tell my students that the key is not how much money you make, but what you do with the money you have. You have to start without making mistakes.”

Lisinicchia and his fellow teachers had the opportunity to try out another lesson, focused specifically on how credit cards work, later that morning.

NGPF instructor Amanda Volz asked teachers to put themselves in the shoes of one of their students and think of “a big-ticket item” they wanted to purchase with a credit card, then search the Internet to find out how much that item generally cost. Then, using a free online tool, they were asked to enter the price, the credit card’s 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 price.

In the case of the $900 iPhone Volz used as an example, the interest amounted to $421. “I’ve heard some reactions to that,” he said, smiling. “And I hope your students have some reactions to that, too.” Volz then adjusted the monthly payment to $50, and the interest dropped to $177. “It was an eye-opening moment,” he said.

Gwen Rice, a math teacher at West Haven High School, picked out a $350 pair of Beats by Dre headphones (which she says are popular with her students) and crunched the numbers: It would take 17 months to pay off the loan, with an additional $51 in interest.

Rice said he has used the tool in his classes before. He is now developing an “Introduction to Investing” course and is exploring additional curricula to integrate into that program.

At a reception following the FinCamp seminar, state Treasurer Russell made an appearance and thanked teachers for their work. He said that, for him, the new state requirement was “personal.”

“There are a lot of things I look back on that I wish I would have known a little bit sooner. I wish I had had courses like this when I was in high school so I wouldn’t make some of the dumb mistakes a lot of people make. I wish I would have known that about compound interest. I wish I would have known about different ways to fund my future education,” she said.

“In school, you learn many things that, once you finish the subject, you never think about again,” she said. “The tools you learn about financial education are things that we all use and develop every day.”

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