This past June, more than 2 million seniors graduated from high schools throughout the United States. Of this number, fewer than half of one percent graduated with the financial literacy skills needed to survive in today's complex financial environment. This statistic underscores the need for MoneySKILL, an on-line personal finance course developed and distributed by the AFSA Education Foundation. The program is available free of charge to every interested high school and requires no teacher training, no textbook purchase, no volunteers, and no valuable class time!

Those schools and teachers who have tried MoneySKILL have become believers and word has spread quickly in states where it has been introduced. As a result, the AFSA Education Foundation has found that the best way to spread the word is to train teachers directly, particularly in summer classes held at universities in states where teachers live.

This summer, more than 200 teachers have gone through the one-hour MoneySKILL teacher training in Madison, WI and Morgantown, WVA at one-week programs focused on high school teachers of economics and personal finance. As part of the program, teachers sit at computers and go through an actual module (chapter) of the program that students will do as part of the MoneySKILL curriculum of 34 interactive modules and two lifetime simulations. This activity shows teachers that students can handle the technology and that they can offer a complete course in financial literacy without having to prepare to teach it themselves or even spend class time on it. They merely have to use a portion of the grade in the course that they teach to serve as an incentive for students to do the entire curriculum and to learn it well. Following the demo module, teachers register themselves in real time and are given their user ID's and passwords.

In Wisconsin, the Wisconsin Institute of Financial and Economic Education trained MoneySKILL Master Teachers who will conduct training sessions in other Wisconsin cities in an attempt to equip all high school seniors with the financial literacy competency provided by MoneySKILL. Results from the Upstate New York MoneySKILL initiative indicate that every teacher trained in MoneySKILL has the ability to reach at last 100 students per year, indefinitely. Therefore, the 200 teachers trained in Wisconsin and West Virginia workshops this summer should be able to reach some 20,000 additional high school seniors (about 1 percent of graduates). The use of Master Teachers will increase this number even more.

Professor Lew Mandell, MoneySKILL's author, used the curriculum in his senior investments class at the University at Buffalo to supplement the standard investments curriculum. For the first time in his 35-year teaching career, he was named "Teacher of the Year." When he received his class evaluations, most students cited MoneySKILL as the best part of the class.