“I teach them ‘index funds, index funds, index funds.''
To enter the huge red brick building that houses the Olney Charter School, you have to walk through a metal detector. Once inside, you can’t go many feet without encountering yet another security guard. But also inside? You’ll find one of the most innovative financial literacy programs in any high school in the country.
‘You can come from humble beginnings, live frugally, invest as much as you can, save 10% to 20% of your paycheck, invest in low-cost ETFs, and become a millionaire.’ —Dan LaSalle, Olney Charter School’s assistant principal Not many students in the U.S. learn about personal finance in school, regardless of the income-level where they live.
“I teach them ‘index funds, index funds, index funds,’” LaSalle said when we first spoke about the program. I recently spent a day with LaSalle and many of the program’s students, and he teaches them a lot more than that. Taliah Watt, a 17-year-old 11th grader, was also motivated to join the program because she could get a job and get paid. But it’s had a much broader effect on her life. The program has not only taught her about the importance of saving and using one credit card to build up her credit score — it’s also inspired her to attend school more regularly and improve her grades.
Since then, he has started opening accounts for students at American Heritage credit union, which he found out about when another teacher took students there on a field trip. He now opens checking and savings accounts for students there, but at times he still has to use Wells Fargo because it allows students to open accounts even if their parents don’t have a bank account.
So he entered a teacher grant competition and was given $15,000 from the Philadelphia Academy of School Leaders to start the program. He said other teachers were asking for laptops for their schools, but he had something unique. “I went in front of a panel and said, ‘Kids need Roth IRAs, the stock market is not the same as a roulette wheel, and low-income students need this.’”
One of the program’s donors is the former NBA player Troy Murphy, who recently started the financial firm Sweven Wealth to help people deal with sudden wealth. Murphy will donate all of Sweven Wealth’s profits to LaSalle’s program and another financial literacy program, The Giving Project, which was created by Kerri Herrild at De Pere High School in Wisconsin.
He says they’ve all been patient and supportive, and Aspira’s lawyers wrote the waivers students have to sign, saying they won’t sue over anything related to the bank accounts or investments they have through the program. Since the school can’t give students paychecks, it pays them as sub-grantees, so the money comes directly from the donors.
He is grateful for LaSalle, who he calls a mentor. And LaSalle is grateful for him, in part because of what happened one day at school. Merricks says his first check from the program was for $100. “I just ran through it completely. It was me pulling out money for clothes and food because I was hungry,” he says. Then his account went five dollars into the negative. LaSalle gave him $50 from the finance program’s funds to get back into the positive, and he learned from it. He put $25 into his savings and $25 into his checking.
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