Business and Finance Academy

MALE SPEAKER: More and more high schools offer a financial literacy course to give their students some practical money skills. Well, there are five Chicago high schools that have gone far beyond that offering three-year finance academies. Chicago’s Tonight Jay Shefsky visited one academy that is part of Schurz High School, Addison and Milwaukee, and it’s run by this year’s Illinois State Teacher of the Year Kevin Rutter.
KEVIN RUTTER: We’re gonna start with Group #1 Ponzi Scheme. So --
JAY SHEFSKY: We’ve all heard of specialized high school academies and the arts, or math and science, but these students are among 200 at Schurz High School who have chosen a three-year long finance academy.
MALE SPEAKER: See, what he did is he made up data to make it seem like --
JAY SHEFSKY: There are six teachers in the finance academy. Kevin Rutter runs the program.
KEVIN RUTTER: So our next group is, uh, tax evasion.
JAY SHEFSKY: He admits that recruiting students can be a little challenging.
KEVIN RUTTER: Telling a sophomore boy that’s he’s gonna be an accountant for the next 30 years, I mean there’s not too many kids lining up to do that particular career path. The pitch for me for the students is that every career, no matter who you are or what you do, uh, will be tied to the world of money. Uh, you’re gonna want to own a house, you’re gonna want to get a car, you’re gonna want to, uh, have a bank account, and here’s how you do those things.
MALE SPEAKER: And it goes right here for adjustments.
JAY SHEFSKY: But it does go beyond personal money matters with career-oriented classes in accounting, banking, insurance, they take field trips to places like the Federal Reserve Bank and the Cook County Treasurer’s Office. Lydia Cortez was skeptical at first. Then she found out the program would get her a job.
LYDIA CORTEZ: I was gonna set that on my -- okay. I mean -- ‘cause I wanted a job since I was like 15.
JAY SHEFSKY: Lydia has worked as a teller at TCF Bank for nearly a year. All juniors and seniors in the program get at least one paid internship at a bank, a hotel, even the Cook County Treasury, and many times a year they shadow other people in financial services jobs. Kevin says many students just don’t know what careers are out there.
KEVIN RUTTER: They know actress, athlete, and entertainer, but they don’t know IT, PR, or you know, basically any office job that’s out there. They need to have that exposure.
LYDIA CORTEZ: Even if you don’t go on to business and finance, or accounting it exposes you to a lot of different things. We learn about, uh, insurance, about ethics and morals, basic things like in life that you would know about the stock market.
JAY SHEFSKY: The curriculum for the finance academy was created by the National Academy Foundation which supports career academies around the country in a variety of fields. A lot of local institutions are also involved and not only by paying interns. This job interview program, for example, is offered by Northwestern University and working professionals show up often to share their own real-world experience.
MALE SPEAKER: Let’s just somebody you’re working with at the bank, wherever, you find out that they are committing fraud. How hard do you think it would be to turn that person in?
MALE SPEAKER: Say that’s person’s, uh, has medical problems or something and they need that money, then that’d be kind of, uh, not -- uh, I’ll be like, you know what, that’s not even my problem.
FEMALE SPEAKER: I would tell on them because if they found out that I knew and I didn’t say anything, couldn’t I get in trouble for it?
MALE SPEAKER: Have you now become kind of like the experts in your own families on some --
FEMALE SPEAKER: Yeah --
MALE SPEAKER: -- money matters?
FEMALE SPEAKER: -- definitely.
FEMALE SPEAKER: And even my mom and my brothers and they’re like 25 and they’re asking me. I’ll be at home, they’ll call me, oh yeah, I’m about to go to the bank or I’m about to do this, I’m about to do that.
FEMALE SPEAKER: They just know that we know.
JAY SHEFSKY: For Kevin Rutter the fact that Schurz High School is not a magnet school or a charter school makes the finance academy even more essential.
KEVIN RUTTER: I think it’s really important to have programs like ours at a neighborhood school because we’re giving real opportunities to students that maybe didn’t score the best in 8th grade. I understand that not every kid desires to be a financial analyst or accountant but the real goal here is to get them prepared for the world that they’ll be experiencing down the road; and if they end-up being astronauts, that’s fine too.
MALE SPEAKER: Yeah, that would be okay.
JAY SHEFSKY: For Chicago Tonight this is Jay Shefsky.
MALE SPEAKER: In addition to the finance academy Schurz High School has other “small schools” within its walls including a music academy and a global studies academy. You can find out more information on our website.