Julie
From downhill skiing instructor to financial literacy educator? After a variety of professional endeavors, Julie Giglia is an educator for the business and technology department at Whitman-Hanson Regional High School in Whitman, Massachusetts. Over the course of her 11-year teaching career, she has taught personal finance to more than 1,000 students.
Technology plays a significant role in Julie's financial literacy classes, which take place in a computer lab. "Using technology makes personal finance exciting to learn," Julie explains. "It's stimulating and current, helping students grasp the concepts more naturally." The topics she discusses in class include credit history, budgeting, financing a car and insurance costs.
One of her more popular classroom activities is the Roommate Budget Project, which Julie created to help students understand budgeting in a real-world context. In this activity, two students work together to research the monthly costs of their their future lives, like an apartment, job, salary, transportation, groceries, utilities and more. To restrict them to a tighter budget, their career choices must be relatively entry level, as opposed to those that require further education like lawyers and doctors. The students then create a budget in an Excel spreadsheet and present a PowerPoint presentation with their findings.
Practical Money Skills' resources such as Financial Football and the Plan'it Prom app are used to bring concepts to life. "Students – especially boys – get really excited to play Financial Football and Financial Soccer in the classroom," she said. This past spring, students explored their prom budgets using the Plan'it Prom app, which lets users make a realistic, detailed prom budget and then helps them stick to that budget by tracking their spending as they shop.
Opportunities to improve financial literacy skills do not end when students leave the classroom. In 2008, Julie and a group of other business educators at Whitman-Hanson Regional High School initiated a partnership with Junior Achievement. As a result, students participate in JA Skills to Achieve, a one-day program during which a small group can visit a corporate location to learn what it's like working at that company. They have the opportunity to ask about required skills and salaries. Additionally, in 2012, more than 70 financial literacy students taught by three business educators at Whitman-Hanson Regional High School participated in the U.S. Department of Education's National Financial Capability Challenge. Sixty-three – or 88 percent – of those students scored above the national average.
Julie also teaches an Investing Your Money course, which introduces students to saving and investing in stocks, bonds, mutual funds and real estate. In 2013, she took three teams of Whitman-Hanson students to the Junior Achievement/State Street Bank high school stock market competition in Boston, Massachusetts. One of her teams finished in third place out of 42 teams.
Julie actively seeks to network with other financial literacy educators. She is a member of the National Business Education Association and the Massachusetts Business Education Association. In the fall of 2013, she attended the Massachusetts Financial Education Collaborative Summit conference, which is dedicated to making financial literacy a required course for every student in the state of Massachusetts. The following year, she attended the Massachusetts Jump$tart Coalition's teacher training event held at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. The three-day conference provided high school and college educators with the opportunity to network and earn a W!SE Certification in Personal Finance. "These events allow me to connect with coworkers who are doing the same thing," says Julie. "Financial literacy is dynamic. At conferences, I can find cutting-edge resources and bring them back to my students and other business educators."
The main challenge Julie has encountered teaching financial literacy to high school students is lack of time – and financial resources. "We are on a trimester schedule and sometimes, especially in the winter when school is closed for the holidays and snow days, it's difficult to fit in the entire curriculum," she says. The fact that field trips are not funded by the school adds another financial challenge. Students have to pay out of pocket or find an external organization like Junior Achievement to sponsor their costs.
"I hope my students learn life skills that will help them become fiscally responsible citizens and make good financial decisions," Julie explains. Like many educators around the country, she believes financial literacy should be a graduation requirement.
In her own life, Julie practices good finance by saving money and taking advantage of her 401(k) and 403(b) retirement plans. When she got her first job at Dunkin Donuts at the age of 16, she put half of her paycheck away to save. The habit has continued into adulthood, when she saves and budgets for passions like traveling, biking, skiing and playing tennis.
Practical Money Skills would like to commend Julie Giglia for her ongoing efforts and commitment to financial literacy at Whitman-Hanson Regional High School in Whitman, Massachusetts.
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