You can hear Ms. Morris' classroom from down the hall. Despite the board games scattered around the room, what she's teaching is no child's play.
The course is one the students asked for as a way to spend their summer. They wanted to learn real-world math and how to use it.
"Budgeting, finances, taxes, things we don't learn in school, they teach us here," said Anaya Martinez, a student at Dallas ISD's Judge Barefoot Sanders Law Magnet.
Students are calculating monthly salaries. They use an average of their grades -- higher grades mean more money. They take that money and figure out the right way to spend it.
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"I have a budgeting system at home. I'm about to get a job a month from now and I need to learn how to budget," said Alfredo Fuentes, another student in the program.
It's part of the Brewer Foundation Future Leaders program which is designed to help prepare some Dallas ISD students for college and beyond. The Brewer Foundation does it during the summer and during the school year, and it's filling a gap.
"I teach calculus. So, you think they would be a part of it. It would be an amazing topic to teach. But, we teach calculus, derivatives, integration; not finances," said Felicia Morris, a teacher at Judge Barefoot Sanders.
Carter In The Classroom
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Morris knows how much she needed this when she was in high school.
"There were no financial literacy classes and I had a single mother. She worked, earned a check, paid bills, that was it. We didn't discuss that, so there are things I'm learning while teaching this class," said Morris.
The kids didn't use some fancy app but used envelopes and put money for housing, food and fun and tried to manage their spending for the month.
"I like to see the cash because I like to go to concerts and there's a certain limit I have and I know to know, I like to see it so I don't overspend," said Martinez.
It's one tool of many they're teaching in this program to help prepare these young people for success by knowing your hard-earned cash needs to be spent smartly and not just by chance.
