Improving financial literacy with Junior Achievement

Junior Achievement of Tennessee has launched a new school-based financial literacy course to help combat the state's financial literacy crisis. Here to tell us more about this initiative by Junior Achievement is Callie Archer. Good morning. Good morning. Thank you for having me today. First of all, before we get into the new initiative, tell us what financial literacy is. I mean, I think our viewers, that may be a term that a lot of folks don't know. Sure. So financial literacy is really the skills that we all know as adults that our young people really need to be learning. And so, you know, it's anything from budgeting to paying bills, how to use credit effectively and not get into some of those downfalls that a lot of adults often get into. So just being more prepared for those things. It's really a foundational skill for life. And Tennessee as a state has an issue with financial literacy. Yeah, and so, you know, let me give you a little history first. Over a decade ago, Tennessee, the Tennessee legislature put into place a financial literacy mandate, which was an amazing effort and definitely a step in the right direction. So that's exciting. However, that has not translated into all of the positive outcomes that we want as a state. And so I think that that's really what policymakers and educators and you know junior achievement is looking at now is how can we do better right because it just hasn't translated into what we want and in fact even over a decade of this mandate being in place what we're hearing from educators is that it's still something that they're not they don't have all the right tools and resources that they need and so they're kind of piecing it together and so that That inconsistency in the classroom hasn't translated into a more financially literate populace here. So Tennessee currently ranks 40th in the country for financial literacy, so not the ranking we want. And then we're actually the third highest. for personal bankruptcies per capita in the country. Definitely not a list we want to be high on. We're not heading in the right direction. So I think these really good intentions and really good policy has just not translated into what we want for everyday Tennesseans. So y'all are taking this to the classroom. This is a classroom-based initiative that you all got going on. Sure, there's a lot of curriculum, there's a lot of support out there, but what Junior Achievement has done is we came to the table with a solution that's turnkey, ready for educators to use. It's fully funded by Governor Lee and the General Assembly, which we're really excited to be able to roll that out, fully funded for every school system across the state. We provide all the curriculum, all of the educator training and support, all of the classroom tools that they need. And really we do this with two things in mind. One, we wanted it to meet all of the standards and the mandate, and so it does that. And then the second thing that we really wanted was to keep the student as the end user in mind. And so this is not a check the box solution. This is really how do we get kids to see the relevance from what they're learning in the classroom to how they're gonna apply it in the real world. And that hands-on experience, that problem solving. Really making sure that it's a good in-depth experience for them that then they can translate into a 10-year financial plan for themselves. What a fantastic way to address this problem. Thank you so much. Thanks for stopping by today sharing this with us. Well thank you. And how can folks if they want to get involved how do they get involved? Sure, jatennessee.org is the website that educators or folks would go to to sign up and get information and then one of our team members will come on and or you know answer Answer all your questions, get you a curriculum demo, and get you signed up, so. Kelly, thank you so much. Thank you. Folks, jatennessee.org for more information. We'll be back with more daytime coming up.