Anchorage School District puts focus on teaching students financial literacy in the classroom

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (KTUU) - The Anchorage School District is making a push for more of its students to learn about financial literacy in the classroom before they graduate.

During the goal monitoring portion of Tuesday night’s Anchorage School Board meeting, Superintendent Deena Bishop outlined a financial literacy update to the district’s existing economics courses.

Even though the district does offer a financial literacy math class for students, it’s taken as an elective while economic courses are required for graduation.

“The economics course does touch on financial literacy, but not in-depth enough to meet the standards that we added to this financial literacy update,” Bishop said during the meeting. “Those six things are earning income, spending, saving, investing, managing credit, and managing risk.”

Bishop added the literacy update would align their economic classes with the national standard for personal financial literacy.

The district has a group of teachers revising academic plans for the literacy update, and this fall those plans are scheduled to be revised based on feedback. The district’s timeline said training for teachers will happen in November on an in-service day and will be launched district-wide in January of 2023.

“The teachers that are working on this build them out so that the standards for specifically financial literacy are taught in the economics course, not just touched on,” Bishop said.

The school board took action during Tuesday night’s meeting and unanimously approved the adoption of the English language arts literacy program for ninth and 10th graders.

Copyright 2022 KTUU. All rights reserved.