Walking out onto the sunny parking lot at St. Catherine of Siena earlier this school year, nine middle schoolers crowded around their teacher’s green Kia Soul and geared up to change a tire for the first time.
“They said it looked easy” after watching a how-to video on YouTube, Sarah Ashmore said. This is her fourth year working as an intervention educator at the private Catholic school in Fort Thomas.
Ashmore popped open the hood of her car and the seventh-grade students peered inside as she quizzed them on how to check the vehicle’s oil and windshield wiper fluid. She explained what a parking brake was and then opened the trunk to find her spare tire.
“Your hands are going to get dirty,” she said. “I’ve already warned you.”
Ashmore is calling this new class “life skills” and said she crafted the curriculum by thinking of everything she would have liked to have known when she was younger. This year she’ll teach students how to go grocery shopping, boil eggs, cook pasta, use credit cards and apply for loans. They’ll pretend to buy a house through a simulation experience, she said, and learn about relaxation techniques like listening to classical music.
As school board meetings have grown heated across the region around issues like critical race theory and social and emotional learning, parental rights activists' battle cry has remained consistent: teachers should stick to teaching the basics of math and reading.
But stripping away lessons about mental health and other life skills, including financial literacy, is not only robbing kids of essential life lessons, educators say. It's going against state standards.
Do Kentucky and Ohio require schools to teach lessons outside of the standard subjects of math, reading, science and social studies?
Yes. In addition to physical education, health education, fine arts and technology standards, both states require schools to educate students on financial literacy.
Kentucky's academic standards for career studies in grades K-12 are centered around the following learning goals:
- Communication skills.
- Knowledge to make economic, social and political choices.
- Understand governmental processes as they affect the community, the state and the nation.
- Sufficient self-knowledge and knowledge of their mental health and physical wellness.
- Sufficient grounding in the arts so as to appreciate their cultural and historical heritage.
- Sufficient preparation to choose and pursue their life's work intelligently.
- Skills to compete favorably with students in other states and other parts of the world.
The state has a model curriculum, with the goal to "produce students that are ethical citizens in a democratic global society and to help them become self-sufficient individuals who are prepared to succeed in an everchanging and diverse world."
In Ohio, the state adopted learning standards for financial literacy in 2018 for grades K-12. In grades K-6, financial literacy standards complement what educators are already teaching students in social studies and math. Financial literacy lessons can be provided as stand-alone classes or integrated into other courses, and cover the following topics:
- Financial responsibility and decision making.
- Planning and money management.
- How to be informed consumers.
- Investing.
- Credit and debt.
- Risk management and insurance.
The state education department has a model curriculum schools can use to teach these skills to students.
In its materials, the state emphasizes the need for students to graduate with a strong basic understanding of financial literacy, stating the model curriculum has "immediate implications for high school students as they begin to make large financial decisions such as purchasing cars, signing contracts for places to live or taking out loans to continue their education."
"The goal of financial literacy instruction is to provide students with the knowledge they need to make a lifetime of informed financial decisions," the state's model curriculum literature states.
There are other things kids need to know, too, that they can't learn in a standard math or reading class. In Norwood, Spanish teacher Leila Kubesch, who was Ohio's Teacher of the Year in 2020, said students who were home during the pandemic struggled to make meals for themselves and their siblings while their parents were at work. So she created a cooking show, "Chow and Tell," that streamed to kids' homes and taught them how to make easy recipes by themselves.
"It really is precious and priceless when a child comes to a teacher and says, ‘I want to learn this,’ " Kubesch told The Enquirer at the time.
Back in St. Catherine of Siena's parking lot, Ashmore and the kids started to sweat as they took turns trying to loosen up the lug nuts and remove her back driver-side tire. The car’s tires were recently rotated and secured by an auto mechanic, Ashmore said, so they were snugly secured.
“It’s like the sword in the stone,” Emily Hallau said, giggling. “I think we need someone named Arthur to do this.”
Ashmore’s students fantasized about changing tires fast enough to be on a racetrack and rolled the spare back and forth across the pavement. Their homework is to change a tire themselves, at home.
Before the class made their way back inside, Logan Meyer looked up at Ashmore for approval. How did they do?
“You did amazing,” Ashmore said. “I’m very proud of all of you.”
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