After half of the seniors went bankrupt due to a sudden stock market crash of Boba stocks and sport betting, a new elective has been decided for the next school year; financial literacy. SFUSD superintendent Dr. Matt Wayne elected to have schools from thereon out have financial literacy as an elective.
The financial literacy course will be composed of 2 subjects per semester, 4 subjects in a year. The first half of the elective would give us the basic rundown about financial literacy, a consent form would need to be signed before the elective could be taught. If the form is not signed, then counselors will put students in a new elective.
The second half would be taught the concept of money. Every Saturday and Sunday, students will be employed at Galileo to work minimum wage for 8 hours, but would have their money be put in their bank account to prevent them from accessing it. In the next school year, for the first half of the semester. Then, every Saturday, students will be put on a plane to Las Vegas and gamble away their entire paychecks that they earned while working at Galileo.
During the last half of the semester, students will have to pay back their debts that they owned from gambling or the loans they took to fuel their gambling. They would be left at their own devices during the final second half of the semester. Through this elective, students are able to see the consequences of not having financial literacy and would stay away from making bad financial decisions.
10th grader Loren I. said, “I think it is important for students to learn about financial literacy as it would help us navigate expenses that we would make like taking out a loan or borrowing money but to also not end up like the seniors who went bankrupt”.
The idea of having an elective of financial literacy has been in the making for awhile, but it was never truly considered to be made into an elective considering the number of elective and AP classes that we offer now. But now with over half of the seniors ending up in bankruptcy at the tender age of 18. It’s now the utmost urgency to introduce financial literacy for the juniors to freshmen so as to make sure that they would not follow the footsteps of these seniors.
When asked why financial literacy was chosen, interim principal Mr. Panjabi said, “I think having financial literacy can help a student go a long way as it could help them avoid bad financial choices that could impact them for the rest of their life. A single bad financial mistake could plunge somebody into a financial crisis and have them be stuck there for decades until they could crawl out of there. Look at the seniors, they already filed for bankruptcy before entering society. It’s life-ruining, so if we can help students avoid it, we will.”
