Fri, March 29, 2024

Insights from JA Discovery Center Tour

Yesterday, while touring Savannah’s JA Discovery Center, I met Travion, a married pastry chef with one child.

Even though he’s only 12 and in seventh grade, Travion already earns $44,000 a year, which might not sound like much to some, but I can assure you, it’s the dream salary of many a journalist. Of course, it wasn’t real. Instead, it was a scenario assigned to him in JA Finance Park, a program offered by the center for seventh and eighth-grade students.

While this may sound like a field trip, the immersive experience is part of his school’s curriculum, thanks to the Junior Achievement of Georgia. In the experience, students learn about budgeting, borrowing money, and maintaining a high credit score, concepts I didn’t even know existed when I was in middle school.

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I’m a little embarrassed to admit it now, but even as a college freshman, I was totally clueless about finances and thought there was no way credit card companies kept track of my payment history. Of course, I never learned about credit in school, and like many adults, I had to learn the hard way that my creditors do keep score.

I don’t remember much of what I learned in seventh grade, but it’s clearly much different from the current curriculum. One of the Junior Achievement staff members said parents have told them their children have asked about their credit scores after participating in JA Finance Park. It’s both surprising and refreshing to witness the advances in public education over the years.

We didn’t get the opportunity to watch students participate in JA BizTown, but it’s an experiential learning environment for sixth graders that involves running a business, something I know little about to this day.

In JA Finance Park, students are tasked with creating budgets and learning to stick to those budgets while visiting the center’s storefronts.

In that program, students are assigned to various corporate roles, such as CEO and CFO. As a painfully shy sixth grader, I probably wouldn’t have lasted more than a day in either of those positions, but it’s great to know students now receive more hands-on instruction than I did. I’m sure they learn and retain much more from these experiences than they ever could from reading a textbook.

While the local JA Discovery Center will be located at the Support Department Complex in Columbia County, all middle school students in several counties throughout the CSRA, including Richmond, McDuffie, Burke, and Aiken, will visit the center as part of their schools’ curriculum.

Ashley Whitaker, Junior Achievement of Georgia’s Director of Development for Augusta, said one of the great things about the 30,000-square-foot center will be its inclusivity.

“It’s not an after-school program,” Whitaker said.

One of the other professionals who toured the Savannah site said he now feels he was deprived in middle school. When I need financial advice in the future, instead of visiting a professional advisor, I may be better off asking a 12-year-old.

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