Financial knowledge is power

After years in corporate IT, followed by a stint doing overnight stocking at Wegmans, Sandra Battle became a Career and Finance teacher at Transit Tech High School in Brooklyn. She teaches her students real-life skills such as networking, resume writing, and personal money management. She even took her students to visit the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.“ Gen Z just loves being in the building on their phones!” says Sandra. “So I try to make the classroom more immersive and interactive so they can better grasp the concepts.”

Guardian partnered with EVERFI® to deliver a complimentary digital financial education course called Minding Your Money: Skills for Life^TM, available at no cost to all teachers nationwide. It teaches high school students about different financial stages in life, how money and mental health are intertwined, and how money can affect interpersonal relationships — all concepts that Sandra wanted her students to learn. It’s more than financial literacy; it’s about empowering young people to take control of their finances and make informed choices that will impact them, their families, and their communities for generations.

Sandra brought Minding Your Money: Skills for Life^TM to her students in an attempt to make personal finance concepts more fun. Making classes more interesting and creative can be difficult on a limited budget, so this program offered an alternative to textbook learning. To this day, her students say that the program is one of the best things they have done in the classroom.

Financial health has an outsized impact on the well-being of the whole you.¹ Generation Z in particular feels the effects of economic instability; in fact, 67% of Gen Z state that money and finances are the top sources of stress in their lives.² The more financial stress a person experiences, the likelier they are to self-report poor physical and mental health, so having confidence in one’s finances is key to managing overall well-being.

“Where I teach in East New York, there’s a high poverty level,” says Sandra. “For my students to get out of inherited poverty, they need to know how to manage their money. It all starts in a school setting. When I started teaching, they didn’t know the difference between a checking and a savings account, or the importance of having emergency funds. We also talk about how to properly network when looking for a job, or the idea of ageism in the corporate world. These are concepts they need to learn when they’re young. The younger they are, the more time they have to improve themselves and be on the right path.”

Sandra believes in finding solutions to everyday problems that people tend to overlook, like finding small means to navigate around poverty, or finding ways to help others overcome adversity. She is passionate about breaking the cycle of generational poverty.

“This is not an everyday job,” she says. “Teachers are crafting the future. This is my final career. This is probably the most fun I’ve ever had at a job. Being a teacher makes an impact for our community’s future.”