"If Mary Ann Vimont has her way, no student will enter the real world without being able to balance a checkbook and budget for life.
Through her graduate course at UK titled "Problems in the School Curriculum: Economic Education," an elective for teachers earning their required master's degree, Vimont teaches teachers of all levels and subjects how they can incorporate economic lessons that can stick with a student beyond their next test.
"It's important that they are independent," said Emily Harris, split second and third grade teacher at Veterans Park Elementary. "I never learned how to balance a checkbook or do all that; I just kind of learned through experience. Kids today especially need to learn that's more of an independence skill. There's economics everywhere. There's no running away from that."
They can't even run to English or to the sciences, where fourth grade Veterans Park teacher Molly Dabney is preparing to mix economy into her daily teaching. "I teach all the earth and physical sciences, so (I'm) trying to incorporate it in," she said.
Though only recently out of school themselves, these aren't lessons that were taught to Dabney, now in her fifth year of teaching, Harris in her second and fourth year, or teacher Kristen Diggs, who has a K-1 class at Veterans Park. "I thought you could write checks and you didn't have to have money," Diggs said of growing up and watching her parents buying things.
But through her classes, Vimont wants to show today's children that it takes more than signing a check or swiping a piece of plastic to own whatever you want.
Dabney has already been trying to show her students what their parents go through on a monthly basis. "One of the math lessons I do is having my kids do a checking account and having them get the right amount at the end," she said. "(We're) teaching it younger as opposed to later in life, and they're going to be better off for life."
Diggs works on instilling these basic economic and entrepreneurial principles as early as possible, as her kindergarten and first grade class spends a week operating as a miniature city, with students working in groups of four to develop products and run businesses.
But something Diggs and Dabney said they saw firsthand during the course was that even the way group work was set up, with one student tending to lead, is outdated.
During a tour of Toyota's Georgetown plant, Dabney said she was surprised to see the way employees worked in teams and how those teams operated. "You may be in charge of the team today, but tomorrow she may be in charge of it, and you have to be able to take up anybody's slack and move throughout all the jobs."
Steven Duerson, a social worker at Dunbar High School, said he will no longer be the leader of his after-school group, Leaders in the Making, when it comes to planning tours of universities for students exploring their after high school options.
Each year, Duerson has been calculating what it will take for the group to go to another city and visit colleges; after taking the class, he will let the group members figure it out.
"They're going to get the chance to do the number crunching and recognize that there's an opportunity cost of going one place versus another place," he said.
This exercise can serve a dual purpose for the students, who often don't realize the cost of going to college out of state, Duerson said. Beyond tuition, which is higher at out-of-state public schools, many students don't realize the logistics involved in getting back for holidays or special occasions. "They don't even think about that until they've accepted an offer from out of state. Then they think, 'How am I going to get home?'"
Duerson said he hopes he can make what he learned this summer really hit home for his students.
"I'm just trying to educate myself so I can go back and educate my kids, and hopefully their parents," he said.