Iola High School Career and Technical Education (CTE) Coordinator Dana Daugharthy has found a unique avenue to address the absence of a business curriculum at the school.
The school offers only one option — an online Consumer and Personal Finance class.
It has been over five years since the school has employed a full-time business teacher, and nearly 10 years since it had more than one. The lack of teachers is due to an effort by the district to raise teacher salaries. When the business teachers left, they were not replaced and the money saved from those positions helped increase wages for the remaining teachers in the district.
“I knew our students were missing some key elements about their financial literacy and was hoping to find options that would fit into the parameters of the school,” Daugharthy said. The solution? RealityU.
“RealityU is something that I have wanted to bring to Iola since the beginning of the year,” said Daugharthy. He noted he was “blown away” when he saw director of RealityU Patrick Sehl Jr. give a presentation at the annual CTE conference in February. Sehl connects to students across the state in middle and high schools by championing the idea that their effort in school really does matter.
RealityU is a 75-minute interactive personal finance simulation where students imagine their life as 26-year-olds and complete a survey of questions about their career, level of education, number of kids, and whether they want to be married.
This information is then entered into RealityU trademarked software, along with the student’s current grade point average, to create an individualized future scenario. Each scenario includes the student’s monthly income, credit card debt, and family status.
“Their income will be dictated by their career and level of education,” Daugharthy added. “The bills they have to pay vary depending a little bit on their answers.”
Students are given a checkbook register during the simulation to track their monthly purchases from a dozen tables representing services or products that adults typically must purchase or consider each month — insurance, utilities, taxes, rent, car payments, and more.
The current plan is to have students in the district go through RealityU twice — in eighth grade and then in 10th grade.
“The reason for this is so they can use the first time to experience what it is like, and then they can actually change some of the choices they make so that they can be more successful in the simulation,” Daugharthy explained. The district will also have 11th- graders participating during this first year of implementation.
RealityU will provide students with the opportunity to learn and practice personal finance skills.
In addition, it mobilizes the community to become involved stakeholders in education, particularly financial literacy education in their local schools.
The program has been utilized by 100 schools in Kansas, with 14,000 students served, and hopes to teach teens that their performance in school today can affect their financial future.
The event will be from 8:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., Friday, Feb. 23, in the IHS gymnasium. Daugharthy has expressed a need for 24 community volunteers to help in the RealityU experience by running the tables. There will two community members stationed at each table. Those interested in volunteering can email Daugharthy at [email protected].
