CUSD Newcomer Students Learn Budget Skills at JA Finance Park
Media Release
Learning how to manage your personal budget is a crucial life skill. 60 CUSD students enrolled in Newcomer courses at Centennial, Compton, and Dominguez High Schools recently visited the Junior Achievement Finance Park to learn how their financial decisions impact their potential income and overall quality of life.
Participating in a budget simulation experience, students received randomly-selected “life personas,” which included personal profiles with details about their potential adult lives. Students had varying annual salaries, job titles, age, marital status, debt ratios, credit scores, and total savings amounts to manage in the simulation.
Guided by volunteer facilitators from banking and real estate institutions, students visited life-like store fronts to explore how line items in their monthly budget influenced their simulated finances. Making decisions throughout the budgeting simulation experience, students learned how their choices could affect their monthly cashflow and overall lifestyle.
The JA Finance Park is unique financial literacy lab that allows students to experience hands-on learning using experiential technology and the wisdom of the human experience to get a glimpse of what their futures could look like.
As the only center of its kind in Los Angeles, JA Finance Park hosts more than 15,000 annual visitors including students, parents, volunteers, educators and business community members.
The key to the JA Finance Park is in its “reality.” The life-like storefronts, representing some of the most recognizable brands, each correspond to a budget line item within the student’s simulation. Through this experience, students truly feel like they are experiencing real life situations and managing their own personal budget.