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insurance agents. Her lesson plans include budgeting, secure mobile banking and how to protect yourself from identity theft and social media misuse. She used to include how to set up a landline phone, but thinks students don’t need that skill anymore. However, other staples like handwriting thank-you notes and writing checks have stayed. “For every guest speaker, the students write thank-you notes, and it’s more than thanks and their name. I have them make it specific,” she says. “We mail these out the next day to practice what I preach.” The class’ budgeting project is titled Welcome To Your Future, and as part of it, McComb includes examples of careers while teaching lessons about money. She explains the job of an insurance actuary while talking about paying for car insurance, and says if students like math and logic, they might consider that career path. But the class isn’t about figuring everything out. “I don’t want them to think that they have to know everything right now,” McComb says. “They might still change their minds.” After all, that’s what she did. After 15 years in finance, McComb left her job to be a stay-at-home mom. But when her son went to kindergarten, she started substitute teaching and fell in love with working with teenagers. A few years later, McComb was offered a full-time job, and she accepted. Then, she realized she needed to go back to school in her mid-40s to earn a teaching degree.
BUDGETS AND COMPROMISE Seniors Lindsay Deck and Daniel Lauer were paired together for an assignment on planning a wedding with a $15,000 budget. They came in under budget at $11,000 but said they were surprised at the costs. Lauer says he splurged on what he would wear, but they saved costs by choosing less-expensive attire for the wedding party. The duo also cut costs by inviting fewer than 100 guests and scheduling the wedding on a Friday. “It’s definitely something where you are like, ‘That would be cool for my wedding,’” Lauer says, “and then you see the price.” Even if students decide they don’t want to have a wedding or marriage later in life, McCombs says the mock wedding lesson is still valuable because it teaches compromise. She says people often assume that students learn these skills at home, and sometimes they do. And bits and pieces are covered in other classes such as personal finance and accounting. But McComb says she tries to connect the dots “so that it’s much easier to digest and understand.” Lauer emphasizes the benefits of budgeting. He used to spend the money from a part-time job on food and hanging out with friends. Then he started saving so he’d have money to spend when he entered college. This class is all about “adulting things that will help me in the future,” he says.
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Teacher Julie McComb leads a class on adulting at Westfield High School in Indiana.
Sydney Ballance, left, and Audrey Bettis learn life skills such as budgeting and planning in McComb’s class.
Students Snezhana Hardcastle, left, and Alex Pucci search for a car online as part of a class project.
— MJ Slaby writes for the Indianapolis Star.
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