At Next Gen we’ve been hearing rumblings from Vermont all semester. Students and teachers have been rallying to get the State Board of Education to adopt more comprehensive personal finance standards there, and Vermont’s progress is encouraging!

Central to this statewide advocacy effort is Business Teacher Courtney Poquette, who successfully advocated for a required course at Winooski High School in Winooski, VT.

I called Courtney to learn more.

CS: What was the original reason you chose teaching?

CP: This is my 12th year teaching. I’ve been at Winooski High School for my whole teaching career. But to back up a little bit, I went to college and earned a degree in business. While in college I was interning in a government job. I went away on an amazing work detail, and when I returned to my cubicle, I thought, “there has to be a career that’s more fun, rewarding and challenging than this.” So I started to look for jobs teaching business and landed in Winooski. Teaching turned out to be exactly what I was looking for in a career.

CS: Tell me about your school!

CP: Winooski is Vermont’s smallest school district - it’s 1 square mile. In our Pre-K to 12th grade building there are 800 students who speak over 27 different languages.

CS: Wow! And what drew you to teaching personal finance specifically?

CP: When I started, I took over the previous business teacher’s classes and curriculum. As a new teacher, I wanted to learn as much as I could about current best practices while listening to my students interests. I started looking into other curriculum and resources that could be current and engaging for this group of students. Professional development opportunities allowed me to connect with other business teachers. I attended a local Jump$tart conference, and some of the financial literacy aspects of business started to click into place. Someone mentioned that it’s odd that we teach students about business before personal finance and that resonated with me. After that conference, I returned to Winooski and developed curriculum originally based on my own experience.

When I was a teenager, I was disengaged by courses that didn’t feel immediately relevant to my life. I had this amazing history teacher when I was a high school student. He was a new teacher at the time, and I remember he told us that he might get in trouble for focusing on something so far outside the history standards, but he was going to teach us about personal finance. His whole philosophy was that personal finance skills were something we should know before we graduated. It was immediately relevant for us. I loved it. It was the only assignment I kept from high school and still look back at it with my students. My personal finance course has gone through many transitions while I pull in new material and adapt to changes in our school’s graduation requirements. The one thing that has remained consistent though is that it is relevant and personal and students can apply each topic to the choices they want to make in their own lives. Every student understands the “why” they are in the course and how this will apply to them.

CS: What was one financial lesson you wish you learned in high school?

CP: I was fortunate to learn a lot about finance while working as a teller at a local bank my senior year. However, I wish I had learned more about investing at the time. I sort of learned about investing on my own after the fact, missing out on that valuable compound interest! So I always teach about matching options and setting up IRAs early. With so many small businesses in Vermont, employer-sponsored retirement plans are often hard to come by, so it’s really important that kids start harnessing compound interest in their favor early. A lot of students are really curious about investing. I have students using Robinhood to trade and find that they are explaining the idea behind it to their friends and family, too.

CS: Currently how many sections of PF are you teaching and how did you get to that level?

CP: Right now I teach seven different semester courses, with two sections of personal finance. We’re moving right now towards more personalized and proficiency-based learning, and I’m helping develop the financial literacy standards for the school. Two years ago, we made personal finance a graduation requirement for all freshmen starting with the class of 2021. So the number of personal finance courses on my docket will increase over time.

CS: Did you have to step on anybody’s toes to get there?

CP: Mostly I just had to adapt the courses that I offered. Instead of focusing on technology courses, I built in technology components to my other courses.

What was really helpful was the administration and school board have always pushed to offer courses that respond to student demand and needs. When Act 77 passed in Vermont in 2013, encouraging flexible pathways and proficiency-based learning, our school began to look at what a high school graduate should be able to do and know. All of the stakeholders in our community took part in the brainstorming process. I prioritized financial literacy, putting the other business content I taught to the side, as I felt strongly that this is something every student should know. Since we already had the content in place, this course tied in with a financial literacy proficiency as well as a critical thinking course.  

One of the other unique parts of our personal finance course is that we offer it for dual enrollment credit in high school and a local community college!

CS: Nice! Can you tell me what else is going on in Vermont more broadly, and how you and your students have gotten involved?

CP: Yeah, it’s pretty exciting! Having the graduation requirement at Winooski is huge. Not only do students need to pass the course, but they also have to demonstrate proficiency on the personal finance standards to graduate.

Currently there are 14 schools in Vermont that require Personal Finance for graduation. There are 25 schools that offer this as a stand alone elective, but it isn't required. This accounts for about 75% of the schools in Vermont. There is also a virtual high school option available to all Vermont students. It appears the capacity is there to teach this to all students in the state.

But up until this point, the standards have been very modest. Students were expected to touch on Careers and Income, and another standard had something to do with banking. We definitely needed to do more.

I’ve been volunteering as the K-12 Rep on the State’s Financial Literacy Commission. So far we’ve compiled reports and data on what’s happening with financial literacy around Vermont. We presented our findings to the State Board of Education a few months back, and recently presented to the House Legislature Committee on Education.

At each meeting I went to, I brought photos of my students holding up posters showing some of the crucial skills they learned in personal finance. I have a whole photo book of them that I bring with me everywhere. It’s really powerful to see the personal side of this issue after you look at all the data. What was amazing about those posters is that I asked my students to come up with one lesson they had learned and they couldn’t—they had learned so much that just one lesson was impossible to highlight! Some students were even interested in taxes. Taxes.

After all of our pitches to the various committees, the State Board of Education voted to adopt national Jump$tart financial literacy standards, which is a huge step up.

My next idea to push the needle further: the #iwishilearned campaign on social media!

CS: If I could ask for advice on behalf of teachers who’re looking for inspiration, what steps would you take to move a Personal Finance standard at your school?

CP:

1. Start by introducing the topic to your students in whatever way possible. For me, this was working more financial literacy into business courses and moving technology to a more supplemental role.
2. Word gets out that way. Students have big voices, and they’ll help you make your case.
3. Find an opportunity in which your course is a solution to a problem your district is already trying to solve. For example, the doors opened for me when the school started to redesign graduation requirements to better reflect what skills we wanted students to graduate with.
4. Through your voice, and the voices of your students, Financial Literacy can be the anchor for proficiency-based learning pushes at your school.
5. Find good resources and data to support your case. You can get these at ngpf.org/finhero & Next Gen’s homepage, ngpf.org. You can also pick up resources and relationships at local conferences!

About the Author

Christian Sherrill

Former teacher, forever financial education nerd. As NGPF's Director of Growth & Advocacy, Christian is laser-focused on our mission to guarantee all students a rigorous personal finance course before crossing the high school graduation stage. Having paid down over $40k in student loans in the span of 3 years - while living in the Bay Area on an entry level teacher's salary - he's eager to help the next generation avoid financial pitfalls one semester at a time.