Junior Achievement is launching an intensive demonstration program aimed at boosting personal financial literacy for students in four Denver-area school districts, the group announced Tuesday.
The program, “Igniting the American Spirit,” hopes to improve graduation rates in lower-income students.
Starting this fall, the program will be provided to 25,000 students in grades K-12 at 39 schools in the Adams 12, Aurora, Denver and Sheridan districts.
“We will saturate the kids over three years,” said Robin Wise, chief executive of Junior Achievement’s Rocky Mountain division. “Not only will trained volunteers show students how to protect themselves from things such as predatory lending and payday loans that get people in trouble, but also how do they build wealth and how do they get out of a cycle of poverty.”
The program could serve as a national model for expanding students’ knowledge of free enterprise, work readiness and personal financial literacy.
Wise said the program assists schools wrestling with how to implement personal financial literacy standards signed into state law in 2008.
The law specifies that math assessments in the Colorado Student Assessment Program include questions that measure financial literacy, such as how to balance a checkbook.
“But it is an unfunded mandate,” Wise said, “and teachers don’t know how they are going to teach this; they haven’t been trained. And with unprecedented cuts in education, how can they afford new textbooks?”
“Igniting the American Spirit” builds on programs that Junior Achievement has offered in Colorado for 60 years.
The Adolph Coors Foundation committed $500,000 to launch the program.
Ann Schrader: 303-954-1967 or aschrader@denverpost.com
Igniting the program
Roughly $1.7 million has been raised for “Igniting the American Spirit.” The donors are:
• Adolph Coors Foundation
• Daniels Fund
• Anschutz Family Foundation
• Newmont Mining
• Qwest Foundation
• Bradley Foundation
