Iowa Public Radio – CLARE ROTH & BEN KIEFFER
“Financial literacy has been required as a part of the 21st-Century Skills portion of the Iowa Core for years. But specifics on enforcing the standard are fuzzy, so personal finance and economics classes vary wildly district to district. Bob Mantell is the director of the T.S. Institute, an organization dedicated to financial literacy for K-12 students, that’s based in Treynor, a southwestern Iowa city of about 1,000 people. His organization puts banks in schools so that kids can get first-hand experience with money. Some kids serve as tellers, others deposit money in a savings account…Mantell says programs like this are particularly important because financial lessons are hard to learn without practical experience.”(more)