Ohio
just became the largest state to require personal finance education in schools
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine has signed a
bill mandating all high-schoolers in the state take a half-credit, standalone
personal finance course before they graduate.
With the signing of the measure on Oct. 28 by
its Republican governor, Ohio is now the 10th state in the U.S. that requires
personal finance education at the high school level. So far, it’s also the
largest, with the legislation spanning more than 600 school districts in the
Buckeye State.
“I was a banker for 41 years and I saw the
results of us not teaching our children financial literacy,” said Ohio state
Sen. Steve Wilson, chair of the Ohio Senate’s Financial Institutions and
Technology Committee and a primary sponsor of the bill. “I wanted to do
something about it.”
In the last two years, five states — Ohio,
Mississippi, North Carolina, Nebraska and Rhode Island
— passed legislation requiring that students take a full semester standalone
personal finance education course in high school, doubling the total number of
states with such a mandate.
Such a course is considered the gold standard
by Next Gen Personal Finance, a national financial literacy organization.
Ohio’s bill will go into effect in the 2024-25 school year and cover personal
finance topics from basic budgeting to opening a bank account, managing student
loan debt and more.
“Without that kind of education, we’re
thrusting kids into a world to learn to manage money through the school of hard
knocks,” said Brian Page, senior director of partnerships and advocacy at Next
Gen Personal Finance who was previously a teacher at Reading High School in
Reading, Ohio.
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He added
that high schoolers need personal finance education now, as many are already
making decisions around money that willmpact their
futures.
The Ohio
bill also allows for teachers not currently licensed to teach the class to
receive a special certification to teach a personal finance course. That will
be paid for by the school district and reimbursed through a financial literacy
fund, created through the legislation with money from local businesses such as
banks and credit unions.
Including
the financial literacy fund as a part of the bill ensures that adding these
courses won’t burden educator’s budgets, according to Wilson.
Students,
who played a major role in convincing legislators to take up the bill, are glad
to see that personal finance education will be available to every child in Ohio
going forward.
“The best
part of my course was the empowerment factor,” said Kristen Cain, now a college
sophomore at Ohio State University, who took a personal finance class in high
school with Page. She added that learning that she is capable of investing,
saving and otherwise managing her money well at a young age was just as
important as the hard skills covered in the course.
Kylie
Schmidt, a college sophomore at the University of Cincinnati who also took
classes with Page in high school, learned to save and invest for the future.
“There’s a
lot of things this bill gives to kids, and I think one big thing is security,”
she said.
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The push for
more state personal finance education mandates continues across the country.
This year alone, 26 states and Washington, D.C., introduced legislation around
personal finance education in high schools, according to data from Next Gen
Personal Finance.
For
advocates in other states that are working on similar legislation, the group in
Ohio has some advice.
The first is
to find a legislator to champion the bill, as Sen. Wilson did in Ohio.
“It was
because of his leadership that it was a pleasure to go through the process,”
said Page of the Republican legislator.
Next, they
should be ready to overcome any opposition that’s sure to come as they try to
move the bill forward. This will take reworking parts of the legislation and
thinking outside of the box.
“They had to
go back to the drawing board and be ready to creative problem solve time and
time again,” said Yanely Espinal, director of educational
outreach at Next Gen Personal Finance.
Lastly,
people need to be ready to stay the course. Ohio’s bill took about five years
to pass.
“I was not
going to give up,” said Sen. Wilson. “It’s going to make such an incredible
difference in the state of Ohio.”
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