APRIL 2006

Getting Fired Up

For These Oklahoma High School Students, the Stock Market is the Future

Would homemade muffins and juice be enough to get you out of bed and to school a half-hour early every day? It was enough for a half-dozen students from Seiling High School in Seiling, Oklahoma. "I wanted to get students excited about investing and personal finance and I wanted to teach them about the stock market," says Seiling High School Business Teacher Marquita Seifried. "So, I offered to come in on my own time every day for six weeks to teach them a short course on the stock market."

Success!

Her experiment was a success. Her students were so enthusiastic about what they were learning that Marquita received permission from the school to change the topic of her fifth-hour class from an Introduction to Game Graphics to Personal Finance so that they could continue to learn about investing and the stock market.

Marquita is determined that her students learn as much about investing and personal finance as they can before they get out into the real world. "A personal finance course should be mandatory in high school," Marquita says. "I didn't know much about investing until I read the The Beardstown Ladies' Common-Sense Investment Guide in 1996. My first reaction was, well, I was upset that this information wasn't taught in high school. I had already lost the most important component of investing -- time."

Tanner McBride and Dani Louthan are among the students who attended Marquita's six-week stock market course.

Spreading the Word

She wanted young people to learn about investing at the age that she wished she had -- high school. Marquita made it her goal to someday teach personal finance at the high school level. That opportunity came four years ago, when she took a teaching position at Seiling High School.

"I wanted to teach my students about the importance of time -- that because of compounding, it was important for them to start as soon as they could," Marquita says. "I also wanted to teach them about the dangers of credit card debt -- that Big Business doesn't care if they get themselves into trouble, and that they have to take charge of their financial lives." Marquita has managed to get those concepts, along with a score of others, across to her students.

Students in Marquita Seifried's Personal Finance class have access to a computer lab and often use the Internet to research stocks. The class also uses the BetterInvesting software and students are particularly adept at using Toolkit. Photos courtesy of Marquita Seifried.

Real Life Examples

Teaching high school students that they need to start saving and investing for the future now can be a daunting task when to the students, the future seems oh-so far away. To get the point across, Marquita pulls in as many real-life examples as she can. "I showed them a $2,000 check I had received in the mail and asked them what they would do if they received a check like that," she says. "It sounds great -- until you read the fine print and see the high interest rate on the back of the check."

She also uses a hands-on approach. "We have access to a computer lab and we often use the Internet to research stocks," she says. "We also purchased the full version of the Toolkit Software and we use the BetterInvesting S&P Stock Data Service (formerly Online Premium Service)."

The 2004-2005 school year was Marquita's first opportunity to teach a semester-long Personal Finance class. "Only a couple of the students were really interested," she recalls.

All of that changed last summer, when Marquita and her students from Seiling High School decided to participate in the Invest Ed^TM "Students Tracking and Researching the Stock Market" (STARS) contest. One of the goals of the STARS program is to educate high school students and raise their awareness of savings, investing and money management.

Taking the Blue Ribbon

Seiling High School Senior Tylee Frazer was one of 287 students from across the state who participated in the contest. Though the contest embraces a long-term perspective, it also gives its entrants something to shoot for in the short-term -- a $1,000 scholarship. "Once I introduced the Invest Ed^TM program and scholarship contest to my students, they began to see the future impact of the choices they make today," Marquita says.

Tylee was the only student from Seiling High School to enter the Invest Ed^TM contest (See Tylee's winning essay). "I'm very proud of Tylee," Marquita says. "It has really given me the determination to make sure that Personal Finance stays in our curriculum." The course is not only going to remain a part of the curriculum, but Marquita has received approval to make it a full-year course.

Tylee's accomplishment has also encouraged her fellow students to enter the next contest and, in the meantime, to learn as much about investing as they can. "I'm really proud of how far my students have come this year," Marquita says. "One of my students was going to buy Apple Computer and Google, but by the time we completed Stock Selection Guides on those companies, we could see that they weren't the best choice. The students learned that it's important to know whether or not a stock is a good value.

Hands-on Learning

"The stock prices of both of those companies went down. There's a lesson in that -- that when there's a lot of hype surrounding a company, that might not be the best time to buy its stock."

The BetterInvesting Stock Selection Guide has proved to be a very important tool for Marquita's class. "One of my students wanted to put all of his money into one stock -- Apple," she says. "I told him that, while I understand his passion, the contest requires that he choose at least five stocks.

"I showed him how to use the SSG to evaluate companies, and asked him if he still felt the same way about Apple once he saw it on the SSG. It changed the way he looked at stocks. His portfolio ended up being the most diversified and he used the BetterInvesting Investor's Toolkit software more than any of the other students. I feel confident that he will use this method, rather than emotion, to evaluate stocks in the future."

Marquita's students plan to invest for the long term.

Touching the Future

Marquita's class has also encouraged the students to make investing a part of their lives. "Mrs. Seifried's class and the Invest Ed^TM contest have proven to me that investing at a young age has the potential to better my future," said Seiling High School junior Brandon Mongold, 17. "I have learned to invest at a young age because you have time on your side. I have already started to invest my own money. I bought 90 shares of Grey Wolf Inc. stock a couple of weeks ago."

Senior Kayla Fuqua, 17, agrees. "Money used to be unimportant, but now I realize how important it is to keep track of it and how how to gain more," she says. "I plan on investing and watching my money grow."

Though Marquita is glad to see her students becoming more and more interested in investing, she thinks they are only just beginning to see the impact it could have on their futures. "Lots of big companies are getting rid of their pension plans," she says. "If today's young people can't, for example, figure out the fee that a mutual fund charges, they will not be able to make good decisions for their retirement plans."

Marquita also hopes that the word about long-term investing will reach people outside of her classroom walls. "We live in a rural part of Oklahoma where a lot of people play the commodities market," she says. "As a result, they look at the stock market as risky. My goal is to educate kids and adults about investing responsibly for the long term." $

Editor's Note: Invest Ed^TM is a free investor education program for high school students instituted by the Oklahoma Securities Commission and Department of Securities and produced by the University of Oklahoma Outreach -- College of Continuing Education. This project was funded through a grant from the Investor Protection Trust (IPT) a nonprofit organization devoted to investor education.