If Durango High School students come home next week asking how well their parents know their dough, they won’t be asking about bread.
The program Know Your Dough will be collaborating with Durango School District 9-R to lead personal finance lessons and discussions in government and history classes.
Launched in 2013, Know Your Dough teaches local young people financial literacy. Allison Andersen, executive director, founded the nonprofit with the help of Paul Gervais, who is now board president. Today, Alpine Bank Assistant Vice President Laura Shelton and Animas High School student Elizabeth Gervais are also board members.
They have organized a variety of classes to create a comprehensive curriculum for kindergarten to 12th grade.
Know Your Dough’s largest selection of programs comes through Junior Achievement, a national nonprofit promoting business education and financial literacy since 1919. More than 80 million people have participated in its programs.
From the JA portfolio, Know Your Dough selected five classes, which is the curriculum that will be used at DHS:
JA Ourselves: for kindergartens; focuses on saving, spending and income.
JA Our City: for third-graders; provides lessons about the economic interdependence of a city, including the role of banks, consumers, producers and taxes.
JA More Than Money: for third- to fifth-graders; shows kids how to start a business, earn money, save, spend and share.
JA Economics for Success: for middle school students; introduces the concepts of budgeting, debt, opportunity cost, credit scores and risk.
JA Personal Finances: for high school students; tackles topics such as goal setting, making choices, saving, investing, budgeting, risk management and giving.
In addition to the JA classes, Know Your Dough offers: The Money Game, which promotes financial literacy as an essential life skill, and Money Habitudes, which helps students talk about money, understand their spending habits and find their money personality.
To extend the in-class financial discussion at home next week, consider asking your teen: How are wants and needs different? How does credit work? What’s the impact of starting to save and invest now compared with when he or she is 25? What has he or she learned during the classes, and how does that compare with what he or she knew before attending them?
Our community is lucky to have such thoughtful and caring people dedicated to teaching young people the basic principles of financial literacy. We are all better off because of Know Your Dough.
matt.kelly.durango@gmail.com. Durango resident and personal finance coach Matt Kelly owns Momentum: Personal Finance. www.personalfinancecoaching.com.
Know Your Dough
To have Know Your Dough present a program for your school or organization, contact Executive Director Allison Anderson: email Allison@know-your-dough.org, call (970) 779-0607 or visit www.know-your-dough.org.
