Hillside High to teach personal finance

DURHAM -- Visa wants young adults to use plastic, but it also wants them to pay their bills.

Monday morning, the credit card company donated five new laptops to Hillside High School to help introduce the students to an online personal finance program.

Visa's "Practical Money Skills for Life" seeks to fill a void in high school curriculums across the country when it comes to educating students about budgeting, spending and credit.

At a news conference in Hillside's media center, Rosetta Jones, vice president of Visa USA, told a group of juniors and seniors that their days of relying on the "bank of mom and dad" are likely numbered and that they had better learn what to do when they're on their own.

"Don't ignore that your future is going to be full of decisions about money," Jones said. As adults, Jones said, students' credit scores will be as important to them as their GPA is now. She told the teens that their ability to pay bills on time will determine whether they make the grade with creditors.

The program provides teachers with lesson plans that can be worked into their curriculums and interactive games and financial calculators for students.

Principal Eunice Sanders said most of the lessons teens get concerning financial responsibility come around the dinner table. But schools need to play a more active role, she said, and Hillside's economics teachers will meld the computer program into their curriculums.

"As they head off to college, our students are going to be bombarded with credit cards," Sanders said. "[We need to teach them] not to use them foolishly as many of us did when we were in college."

U.S. Congressman David Price helped Visa select Hillside as the recipient of the new computers, but the program is free to anyone and can be accessed at www.practicalmoneyskills.com. Visa has donated computers to 50 schools across the country, including one other North Carolina school, under this program.

"I did not have one minute of this kind of instruction in school," Price said. "The more you learn right now, the more prepared you are going to be to handle finances in the future."

Hillside student Joshua Leak said that he had learned some financial management skills from his mother, but that he would need more to stretch his dollars when he enters N.C. Central University this fall.

He called the program slightly cheesy. But Leak said he prefers a little cheese to the blandness that usually turns teens off from other financial lessons. One section asks students to pick a character with a certain income and then decide what he can buy.

"It will help," Leak said. "Being able to budget is what's going to get me through four years [of college]. I have no choice but to budget."