This post comes to you from Christian Sherrill, our Director of Advocacy here at NGPF.

Christian interviewed Julius Prezelski, previous NGPF Podcast guest, last week over the phone. Their exchange was part of NGPF’s #FinHero Advocacy Push, where Julius earned the prestigious title of FinHero of the Month for January 2018.

Why? For 21 dogged years, Mr. Prezelski has been advocating for comprehensive personal finance education, first at DeMatha Catholic High School in Hyattsville, MD and now at Mount Saint Joseph High School, a private boys’ school in Baltimore.

Christian Sherrill: Thanks for joining me, and congrats on being named FinHero of the Month for January ‘18. First of the new year!

Julius Prezelski: Thank you for having me. I’ve been looking forward to it!

CS: Let’s get right into it. What classes are you teaching this year?

JP: I have 6 sections of personal finance and one section of a business law class. All electives, 20-22 students per section. So about 120 students out of the school are taking personal finance.

CS: And is that number up from previous years?

JP: Yes. I actually started out with just one section of personal finance and worked my way up to serving a much larger group of students over 5 school years.

CS: Tell me about that...

JP: I have to go back a little further to 21 years ago when I started teaching. I had always been interested in financial stuff. To this day, when I’m bored, you’ll find me looking up stock prices, tracking indexes, checking my portfolios or reading finance articles. I always have the Wall Street Journal on hand. I literally have it with me right now. Fast forward to 5 years ago - and I remember reading this bestseller book by Beth Kobliner (Editor’s Note: Beth was also a guest on the NGPF Podcast) and I just decided to build a course using the chapters in her book as a template. I thought it was a good place to start in transitioning from a personal passion of mine to actually teaching my Business students financial literacy.

CS: Did you have free rein to teach the course at first? How’d you make it happen?

JP: No, I came prepared. I went to the Principal with the course I had built with a nicely structured scope and sequence, and he said, “go for it.” Administrators need to be able to trust you that you’re going to bring a lot of value with a new course, especially if it requires scheduling or personnel changes, and you have to earn it by putting in the work up front.

CS: That’s a good lesson for folks who might be looking to launch courses at their schools. So walk me through it, you started with a single course, how do you now have 6 sections?

JP: Well, over time I’ve been building on top of that original course I started from Kobliner’s book. I looked for materials online and supplemented with whatever high quality resources I could find. It was a popular course because it was real-world and practical. So it was clear that we needed more sections of it. There were some problems making it happen though.

CS: Like what?

JP: Well, expanding any elective to more students is hard. You’ve always got to be thinking, “Where are the openings? Where can we fit this in?” But this subject is important - not just for college but for life. So I actually brought in some alumni of the school to talk about it. I wanted to see what they thought. The alums were coming out with quotes like, “why isn’t this course being taught to more students?” I had to laugh - and I still laugh about this all the time - because I swear I didn’t pay them to say that.

CS: In addition to working within the scheduling structure to try to get more sections added, what other obstacles did you face?

JP: The other issue was that students at my school are really conscious of their GPAs, and we didn’t have an honors section of the class. Kids literally wouldn’t take the course because even if they earned an A, because it wasn’t an honors class, the course would actually hurt their GPA. Which sounds crazy, but it’s the way things are at the school. It’s very competitive.

CS: How’d you get around that?

JP: So this year I worked with my Principal and AP to actually offer Honors Personal Finance so we could keep expanding. With the honors guys we go into more analytical depth and dig deeper into the concepts we learn in the general - we call it College Prep - class. And the sections - College Prep and Honors - are actually combined. Sometimes you just have to be flexible with how your sections are scheduled and organized to get more kids into the course. In my case, it works out because you have a good range of perspectives in any one section.

CS: What’s the next move for you and the class?

JP: I’m getting to the point - and I mean this as a good thing - that people are kind of getting sick of hearing from me about this. I want this to be a required course for all our students, and I think we’re getting there. I’m fighting for it. You have to love it, right? Otherwise people will know you’re not actually trying to get this done. Losing is not in my repertoire.

CS: So what advice would you give to teachers who are trying to start a course, advocating for more sections or attempting to make a personal finance class a requirement?

JP: I would qualify my advice by saying I teach in a private school, so I probably have fewer hoops to jump through. But I would definitely advise having a really good pitch for other teachers in the building about what you teach and why you care about it. Get to know your colleagues so they’re on the same page with you and know what crucial skills are coming out of your class. You have to keep pushing, but build a group of people around you to help you push. It also helps if you bring in parents and students. I have parents come to me and say, “I wish I took your course.” Your school’s PTA can take this message and translate it into raising money for training, curriculum, class materials, speakers - anything. Last, use the statistics about financial literacy to help make your pitch (Editor’s Note: a great place to find these statistics is NGPF’s Free Teacher Advocacy Toolkit)! I had this proposal I wrote up with a bunch of stats on why financial literacy is so important. That’s what I took to admin. You need the emotional and the rational pieces to be in place.

About the Author

Christian Sherrill

Former teacher, forever financial education nerd. As NGPF's Director of Growth & Advocacy, Christian is laser-focused on our mission to guarantee all students a rigorous personal finance course before crossing the high school graduation stage. Having paid down over $40k in student loans in the span of 3 years - while living in the Bay Area on an entry level teacher's salary - he's eager to help the next generation avoid financial pitfalls one semester at a time.