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9/15/2006: FCS Teachers Attend Governor's Institute for Personal Finance and Entrepreneurship Education

Lyndell Auchenbach, Michele Neff, and Sue Smith, Family & Consumer Science teachers at Souderton High School and Indian Valley Middle School, participated in the 2006 Governor's Institute for Personal Finance and Entrepreneurship Education at Lehigh University in Bethlehem this summer. The week-long event was attended by more than 100 educators and school administrators selected from across the state.

Through a variety of speakers and interactive workshops, K-12 teachers learned how to include age-appropriate financial concepts - everything from understanding the concept of earning money to budgeting to recognizing scams and rip-offs - in their existing lesson plans to meet Pennsylvania state standards. Studies show that many young people (and adults) lack basic understanding of money management, leaving them at a great disadvantage in today's increasingly complex financial marketplace.

Valuable hands-on activities to incorporate real-life money skills into many areas of the FCS curriculum were collected. Hilary Hunt, Director of the Office of Financial Education, whose agency sponsored the Institute with the Pennsylvania Department of Education stated that the institute was "about using personal finance content within the context of what teachers are already teaching. It's also about helping achieve the outcomes for which teachers are being held accountable."

The Commonwealth operates 23 Governor's Institutes that provide a wide range of professional development training for state educators in specialty areas such as literacy, math, early childhood education, world languages and technology. Teachers who attend are awarded scholarships to cover their materials, program of study, meals and lodging. Participants who attended this year's Institute for Personal Finance and Entrepreneurship Education also earned two graduate credits.

FCS teacher, Michele Neff, said, "Our goal is to incorporate valuable financial information into FCS courses and to establish an FCS course in finance that would be a graduation requirement."