When selecting courses each spring, high school students often consider classes that can give them immediate benefits in their lives. The high school offers many life-skill classes like Personal Finance and Lifeguarding to help students develop expertise that they can use right away for success in daily life as well as potentially leading to employment.
Personal Finance
Mr. Levin, the teacher and creator of the Personal Finance course, focuses on four things in his class. “The first one is budgeting and responsible financial behavior, making sure you’re budgeting and you’re saving, and you’re aware of your day to day expenses.” The second focus is credit and loans. Mr. Levin points out, “We all at some point or another have to borrow money.” The third part is saving and investing. “We learn about banks, how they work, how you save money, and also what to think about when you’re investing with the importance of investing over the course of your life.” Lastly, Mr. Levin teaches career development, which “gives the students the tools they need to be able to research different career options” including career paths and requirements, resume building and interview skills.
Bella McGuigan, a student in the class, said she has learned “how I can lower my financial risk in the future and what I can do to make sure I’ll be financially stable.”
Ella DePasquale highlighted how the class “lets me start planning how to invest my money in the future.”
Camille Evans explained it taught her “what to spend money on and what not to and how to make sure you’re putting some away into savings.”
Mr. Levin believes the aspects of the Personal Finance course are important because “the current state of our country in financial literacy is probably a C to a D level” and “growing up, we adults never learned these skills. So we’ve had to teach ourselves, right? How does a loan work? How do you calculate it? What do I invest in? What are all these different investment options?” He continues, “We never learned how to really use the tools that are available to do it.” He believes that if “we can equip our kids with these skills at a young age, they have a massive advantage over what we had when we were growing up.”
Lifeguarding
Mr. Picknally is the teacher of the Lifeguarding class at the high school. He explains the importance of what he teaches: “We teach skills to prepare students to take the lifeguard certification from the American Red Cross and those skills include being able to rescue any distressed swimmers or drowning swimmers. It also prepares students to administer CPR and first aid in the case of an emergency.”
Lifeguarding also helps students be eligible for employment. Mr. Picknally explains, “The course is geared towards employment as it prepares students to be good lifeguards in order for them to obtain employment, either at a pool in the summertime or at another facility like here at the high school. We have a pool that employs students, as well as the YMCA, Lifetime Fitness, etc.” He further explains lifeguards are “a very high demand job” and “It feels like there’s less and less lifeguards available. This course is set up perfectly for students to get a certification that they can take with them really anywhere, because it’s the American Red Cross, so it’s recognized across the nation.”
A student in the class, Josh Joseph, explains how the Lifeguarding course can help in the real world “because of how it can get you a job at a local pool and you’d be able to save lives and protect people from drowning.”
