Anyone who’s ever found it difficult to file their taxes or manage their bills will appreciate what Oklahoma’s schools will soon be doing. Starting this May, Sooner State students will learn skills that prepare them for financial responsibility.
As the NewsOK reports, following state state legislation passed in 2007, Oklahoma students “must demonstrate an understanding in banking, taxes, investing, loans, insurance, identity theft and eight other areas to graduate.” And teachers are required to certify students’ working knowledge in each area. The requirements will be implemented from the seventh through 12th grades and schools have the option of using curriculum provided by the state Education Department or whatever they choose, Amy Lee, the executive director of the Oklahoma Council on Economic Education told the publication.
MORE: This Congresswoman Has a Plan to Protect Students from Crippling Debt
Oklahoma’s move to teach financial literacy sounds like a no-brainer if we want to prepare students with skills outside of reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmetic. It’s also important to ensure that future generations avoid financial blunders when we’re still reeling from the 2008 economic crash—not to mention our ballooning student loan debt, which has surpassed $1 trillion.
Tag: Oklahoma
Meet the Oklahoma Mayor Who Reengineered His City to Help Citizens Lose a Million Pounds
“This city is going on a diet,” Oklahoma City mayor Mick Cornett declared while standing outside the elephant exhibit — of all places — at the zoo on New Year’s Eve of 2007. “And we’re going to lose a million pounds.” It’s not every day that you hear a politician talk this way. But for Cornett, his city’s struggle with obesity was deeply personal. Prior to his bold announcement that December night, Men’s Fitness magazine had published its annual list of the country’s most obese cities, and it included OKC. “I didn’t like being on that list,” Cornett said in a TED Talk. He got on the scale and then entered his weight and height in a Body Mass Index (BMI) calculator. Much to his disbelief, he clocked in as obese. It was then that Cornett realized that not only did he need to make a change. His city did, too.
MORE: Too Much Sitting Isn’t Just Bad for Your Health. It Wastes Energy
“I started examining my city, its culture, its infrastructure, trying to figure out why our city had a problem with obesity,” Cornett said. “I came to the conclusion that we had built an incredible quality of life — if you happened to be a car.” OKC’s city limits are about 620 square miles. People live far away. The highway system is extensive, so citizens can travel from place to place easily, if only by car. Neighborhoods had virtually no level of walkability. In fact, some recently developed inner-city neighborhoods had schools and homes, but no sidewalks connecting them. In order to help the citizens get healthy, the city needed a redesign. Cornett got right to work. City officials continue to build new sidewalks, are redesigning streets to be more pedestrian friendly, and adding 100 miles of bike trails. They’ve built senior health and wellness centers, developed designs for a central park and a downtown streetcar, and are in the final stages of developing a state-of-the-art venue for the sports of canoeing, kayaking and rowing on the river. In turn, young athletes from all over are flocking to OKC.
ALSO: Improving Americans’ Health Begins with These Three Numbers
While officials were busy redesigning the city, Cornett opened the lines of communication about the obesity epidemic. As the national media trickled in, the conversation grew louder. The city’s weight-loss-tracking website, OKC Million, gained members by the thousands. The pounds lost started adding up. The topic of obesity was no longer taboo. Churches started running groups, schools refocused on health and fitness, and workplaces created weight-loss competitions. In a city once dominated by cars, the humans were finally making moves, and not surprisingly, the benefits extended well past getting healthy. OKC boasts one of the strongest economies and lowest unemployment rates in the nation. “We seemed to have turned the cultural shift of making health a greater priority,” Cornett said. “And we love the idea of demographics of highly educated 20-somethings, people with choices, are choosing Oklahoma City in large numbers.”
In January 2012, the city reached its milestone of one million pounds lost — five years after Cornett stood in front of elephants and put his city on a diet. On a media blitz in New York City, Cornett stopped by Men’s Fitness — the same magazine that spurred this initiative five years prior. But this time, Oklahoma City wasn’t on the list of the nation’s fattest cities. It was on the list of the fittest.
MORE: Five Tricks for Health Technology Startups
The Ingenious System to Grow More Food With Less Water
If there’s one high school competition I’d love to see, it would be schools competing for which one can do the best job of teaching students how to live more sustainably. Third generation farmer Kaben Smallwood has my vote for creating an aquaponics greenhouse at a rural public school in Kiowa, Oklahoma. Kids are harvesting crops for their school lunches while learning about water-thrifty systems that combine fish and plant farming. His company now has $40,000 and mentoring support to keep growing, with an award from the 2013 Hitachi Foundation Yoshiyama Young Entrepreneurs Program.
Oklahoma’s Pilot Pre-Kindergarten Program Provides National Model
“Since 1998, Oklahoma has offered universal access to pre-kindergarten and has one of the highest participation rates in the country, with 74 percent of all 4-year-olds enrolled in a pre-K program,” according to the Washington Post. Recently, New York Times columnist Nick Kristof visited a few families participating in the state’s universal pre-K program and was impressed by depth of support it offered low-income families. He noted how the issue of early childhood education isn’t political in Oklahoma, and attributes this as part of the program’s success. In addition to pre-kindergarten, the state also offers younger children free access to full-day, year-round nursery school. “Oklahoma also supports home visits so that social workers can coach stressed-out single moms (or occasionally dads) on the importance of reading to children and chatting with them constantly,” Kristof wrote. “The social workers also drop off books; otherwise, there may not be a single children’s book in the house.” So far, studies have shown that children enrolled in this program outperform those not enrolled. President Obama recently proposed nationwide adoption of this pre-k program modeled after the success in Oklahoma. Read Obama’s plan here. More on the program here.