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Dist. 155 to teach students smart money management

Teaching students college and career skills is a top priority for school districts.

But yet another critical skill for high school students looking to land a job, buy their first car or take out student loans is money management - which few schools teach.

Crystal Lake High School District 155 officials want to help students develop money smarts with an $84,000 grant from Riverwoods-based Discover Financial Services.

The grant is part of Discover's Pathway to Financial Success, a five-year, $10 million commitment to bring financial education curriculum into public high schools.

District 155 will use the money to improve its financial education curriculum, including upgrading technology and buying textbooks for new courses.

The district's four high schools serving nearly 7,000 students are equipped with 1,600 Google Chromebooks - 400 each - used by students and teachers. Officials plan to add 30 Chromebooks per school, buy online financial literacy software, and provide teacher training with the grant funding.

"Our teachers and our building administrators have been working hard to provide a better understanding of financial supports for our students so they become better consumers," District 155 Superintendent Johnnie Thomas said.

With the funding, the district also will offer new Advanced Placement micro and macro economics courses, and a consumer education course.

"This will allow for us to have our students go deeper into understanding their own personal economics as it relates to their community ... and how economics plays in the larger society as well," Thomas said. "These funds help to make it a comprehensive program to address a number of financial issues that are going to be facing our students as they enter the real world."

Since 2012, the Pathway program has awarded more than $1.6 million to Illinois public high schools. High schools must measure student success with the program through testing, Discover spokesman Matt Towson said.

"We actually put our trust in the schools and teachers to figure out what curriculum best works with their students," Towson said. "If you take an average of all the grants that we've given across the country, we've seen about a 30 percent improvement in financial literacy knowledge."

Towson said Discover started the program as a result of the 2008 financial crisis.

"A lot of people lack basic money skills and knowledge, and we felt that we needed to make a difference here," he said. "We realized that there was all kinds of financial education type curriculum and information out there, (but) we weren't seeing it taught."

Schools often lacked the resources or qualified teachers to provide such education, he added.

"These are life skills that you are going to need going into college," Towson said. "We really believe that financial education is just as important to be taught in high school as math, science and reading."

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