Personal finance course to be required in high school

Recent college graduates looking to pay off student loans and impulsive shop-a-holics holding mountains of credit card debt are not the only people who need a lesson on personal finance.

Nancy Headrick, assistant commissioner of the Division of Career Education in the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, said high school students who are opening checking accounts with money from part-time jobs also need help managing their money. Fortunately, the state now requires all high school students, beginning with this year’s freshmen class, to take a half-unit course in personal finance before graduation.

The course, which will be offered to 10th-, 11th- and 12th-graders in all Missouri public high schools, has been organized into four information areas: income and taxes, money management, spending and credit, and saving and investing.

While it may seem logical that personal finance courses are taught as part of math curricula, Chip Sharp, the Columbia Public School District’s math coordinator for secondary education, said that adding another half-credit not tied to a particular course sequence was not realistic. Therefore, business programs in Columbia high schools will incorporate this course into their curricula.

This makes sense, according to David Heath, the district’s practical arts coordinator.

The district has had classes in the past that hit on many of the above topics, said Heath. However, those courses were probably just a bit more thorough and included more of a focus on being a wiser buyer, he said.

When the state Board of Education announced the subject material included in the personal finance courses, teachers in Columbia started looking at how those subjects fit into what they are already teaching.

“We started looking at what things we needed to pull out of our courses because they were already a year long,” Heath said. “We also looked into how we could work in what the state wanted.”

Headrick said that learning money management skills early in life is important, especially considering the amount of debt that college students are incurring. The debt isn’t necessarily related to the cost of college, Headrick said, but seems to be related to credit card issues.

“I think we need to make sure that we’re preparing students who know how to manage money, how to spend and use credit wisely and how to save and invest,” she said.

Heath seconds Headrick’s concerns about credit card debt. He said the district will be enhancing and perfecting the personal finance course so that it is as exciting as possible before it goes into effect — probably in the 2008-09 school year.

“The more they’re engaged, the more they will remember it and apply it to their lives,” Heath said. “We’re trying to find out ways to make them remember these things so that when they graduate from high school they won’t end up in debt.”