Five-year-olds are learning what a bank account is in a classroom in Wesley Chapel, Florida. Yes, but not in a vague, crayon-drawing way. In a planned, lesson-based way that treats the idea of saving like something a child can really understand, which it turns out they can.
Innovation Preparatory Academy is a charter school in Pasco County that serves kids in kindergarten through eighth grade. It’s not necessary to wait until high school to learn about money. It begins very early on; most kids have learned about money as part of their daily lessons before they even lose their first tooth. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis didn’t choose a high school as the place to sign the state’s new bill into law in 2022 that teaches people about money. He came over.
That choice was important. Florida became the seventh state to require a separate personal finance course for high school graduation. The bill, SB 1054; was passed unanimously by the state legislature. Beginning with the 2023–24 school year, ninth graders will have to take a half-credit course that covers a wide range of topics, from different types of bank accounts and credit scores to basic tax laws, loan applications, and how compound interest works. It’s a reasonable and long-overdue demand. But Innovation Prep had been following this way of thinking for years before the paper was even printed.
Take a moment to think about why that matters. To put it simply, the financial situation of adults in the United States is not good. About half of adults in the U.S. say they live from paycheck to paycheck. About three out of ten people have more credit card debt than savings for emergencies. A big chunk of the country couldn’t pay a $1,000 bill all of a sudden without borrowing money or giving up something else. On paper, the average retirement savings of people in their 50s are about $629,000, but when you look past the average, you see a very different picture. The median amount is about $246,000, which is a lot less than the $1.4 million that many Americans say they’d need to really enjoy retirement. These are not general statistics. Real people who were never taught the basics have written about their money lives.
That brings you back to that Wesley Chapel kindergarten class. There’s a good case for and more and more evidence for the idea that money habits and attitudes start to form much earlier than people used to think. It’s better than nothing to teach a teen about compound interest. It’s one thing to teach a six-year-old about saving, and it’s a whole other thing to reinforce that idea every year until middle school. Innovation Prep seems to know this without even thinking about it. The lessons build on each other, so by the time a student is in eighth grade, they already know how to handle debt and the basics of investing. They’re going over old ground.
DeSantis signed the bill on the school’s campus with the simple words, “We think it will help students learn how to handle money better when they get out into the real world.” Even that’s not enough of an answer. It’s possible to measure the cost of not knowing about money: making bad decisions about debt, not saving for retirement, and the quiet buildup of financial stress that changes lives. The fact that the national debt has grown past $39 trillion makes all of this seem a bit darker. Congress has been showing young people how to “buy now, worry later” for decades, and they take those messages in whether anyone means to or not.
What Innovation Prep stands for is not a magic bullet. There’s no doubt that if you teach kids real things early on and over and over again, some of it will stick. There’s no doubt that things would be a little different now if this way of doing things had been common a generation ago. The numbers for living from paycheck to paycheck might be lower. People in their fifties might not be staring at savings for retirement that won’t last as long.
Florida’s high school requirement is a good step forward. But the school in Wesley Chapel says that when to start isn’t the most important question. That’s why anyone thought it made sense to wait so long.
