Our very own Mr. Christopher Jackson (College & Career Readiness / Financial Literacy Teacher) and Sebastian Torres (DVC Alumnus, Class of 2022) were featured in the New York Times on Friday, 12/1! The article was about financial literacy courses in high school. You can check out the article here: More States Now Require Financial Literacy Classes in High Schools – New York Times and read an excerpt below. We are so proud of both Mr. Jackson and Sebastian!
From the article:
Christopher Jackson, who teaches a personal finance course to seniors at Da Vinci Communications high school, a socioeconomically and racially diverse public charter school in El Segundo, Calif., said he found that students were enthusiastic about saving in Roth individual retirement accounts once they understood the concept of compound interest and how investments grow over time.
He advises them to open Roth I.R.A.s at 18, rather than waiting until they graduate from college and start a career. One of his students has already saved $14,000, he said.
Mr. Jackson uses a curriculum from Next Gen Personal Finance, a nonprofit that pushes for teaching universal personal finance in high school, as a base for his instruction and supplements it with books on relevant topics, he said.
“You can’t play the money game if you don’t know the rules,” Mr. Jackson said. “I teach them the rules of the game.”
Sebastian Torres, 19, a 2022 graduate of Da Vinci Communications, said Mr. Jackson’s class, which includes a unit on the psychology of financial decision-making, helped him plan for both college and retirement.
“I really didn’t know about 401(k)s before Mr. Jackson spoke about it,” he said. “I 100 percent think it was worthwhile,” he said of the high school course.