More local districts are considering to add personal finance to their students’ curriculum.
CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — A recent survey showed 88 percent of adults in this country feel they weren’t prepared to handle their own finances when they left high school.
3NEWS brought you a story back in February on how few local high school students were being taught personal finance.
Since that time, nine schools in the Coastal Bend are considering the Ramsey Education Foundation’s Personal Finance curriculum and two local schools are already using it.
Many people feel this subject has long been needed in high schools because parents have trouble teaching their children how to handle their money.
Students are also poorly prepared to do something as simple as their own taxes after graduation.
One of the schools using the Ramsey curriculum is Flour Bluff High School.
Learning the advantage of saving is one of the biggest realizations for student Kairee Tomlinson who’s taking personal finance at the school taught by Ryan Cervantes.
“Buying used things and saving more money overall and then later on in life getting to buy something more expensive because you can sell the used item and I get to keep more money,” Tomlinson said.
Cervantes teaches financial literacy and economics. What surprises him most about his students is how unaware they were of their own money.
“The most shocking thing was about budgeting,” Cervantes said. “Just having a budget. Knowing how much you’re spending, where your money’s going and the importance it is to save money. As far as what the Ramsey Foundation says, They don’t want anybody paying anything or having any debt. You need to pay cash for everything and it’s impossible to know how much you have if you don’t know where your money’s going.”
The Ramsey personal finance curriculum is designed to get kids ready to handle their own lives.
George Kamel, who is the co-host of the Dave Ramsey radio show, also designs the curriculum and is an online teacher in the course.
“What does it look like when you actually get that pay check? What are all these taxes that are taking out? That’s the kind of stuff that helps students understand the basics and then they can take the next step as they step into adulthood with confidence,” he said
Kamel said the course is taught in two local districts including Ingleside and Flour Bluff and is being considered now at nine other local schools.
As this is the tail end of tax season, teaching personal finance may have come just in time for many first time filers.
“Try to teach a teenager who’s just started making money how this all works and how to file and it can really hurt your brain, so what we do in the curriculum is we just keep it simple,” Kamel said. “We tell them exactly what they need to know.”
You can contact Ramsey Education by clicking here.