There are few things harder to hold onto than the attention of a 7th grader, a fact Gistel Flavius is keenly aware of as she shepherds her class at Elena Christian Junior High School through the day’s lesson.
“What’s an event in life that carries risk?” she asks them.
“Being in the military,” one student offers. “Being a firefighter,” adds another.
Flavius agrees, but tries to steer the class towards everyday concerns.
“How about if you own a home and you leave the stove on and go down the road to go shopping?” she asks. “You’ll burn down your house!”
Today’s class is on insurance. It’s not a normal lesson for these kids, but then Flavius isn’t a normal teacher. She’s a volunteer with Junior Achievement of the Virgin Islands, a non-profit that places business professionals in local schools to teach the basics of entrepreneurship and personal finance.
On a normal day, Flavius is a financial assistant at Marshal and Sterling, but once a week during the six-week course, her boss lets her leave during the workday to come here and try to give back.
Junior Achievement is an old organization, tracing its roots back to a small group of businessmen in Massachusetts in 1919. Over the years the organization has flourished, and it now claims to reach four million students a year in 176,000 classrooms across the US.
While the scope has changed, the mission has largely remained the same: to get the business world directly involved in education.
Junior Achievement asks people to do more than just put their money where their mouth is. They aren’t just looking for donations or sponsorships. They challenge businesspeople to put down their checkbooks, roll up their sleeves, and take their pitch to the toughest boardroom they’ll ever face: a public school classroom. The transition isn’t always easy.
Before JA, Flavius had never taught a class before, and she admits that being in front of the classroom is a little intimidating.
“I’m not very much of a speech person,” she says.
Still, she keeps coming back every week for her one-hour lessons because she thinks she knows a few things these kids need to learn.
“Pretty much street sense,” she says. “I want them to learn to make good choices.”
JA has developed curriculum for many grade levels, but in the Virgin Islands the program focuses almost exclusively on 7th graders.
The lessons for this age are fairly straightforward. They learn about things like insurance and the perils of purchasing items with credit. The goal is to give them a glimpse of the messy, complicated financial world they will step into as adults, and convince them that there is value in getting an education before they do.
Judi Fricks Buckley, the executive director of Junior Achievement of the Virgin Islands, says that they chose to focus on this grade because this is the time when many children decide whether to drop out or push ahead to graduation.
Ideally Buckley would like to expand out of the middle schools. A pilot program for high school students recently conducted on St. Thomas demonstrated what the charity could achieve with older students.
Over the course of a 12-week after school program, students formed their own small businesses, complete with stock. They created and sold products, and at the end of the course all of the students managed to make at least a small profit.
Buckley says that this type of program can have a substantial impact on the lives of students.
“The high school curriculum is more focused on getting them ready for what they’re going to do upon graduation, be it go on to higher education, be it just get a job, be it start their own business, or whatever,” she said.
But before JA can move into the high schools, it must complete its goal of reaching every seventh grader in the territory. That means more volunteers like Flavius.
JA has only been operating in the Virgin Islands since 2008. Buckley is still building the charity’s base of support in the business community, a process made more difficult by the territory’s lack of large corporations, which often partner with chapters in the states.
This means that Buckley has to make a lot of pitches to a lot small businesses and convince them its worth their time and money to lend their employees to the cause.
It’s a lot to ask, but Flavius thinks the decision is a no-brainer. When asked why she thought businesspeople should get involved in the schools, she simply replied, “Your child.”
“I mean, you child needs to learn this and you should be able to share [your knowledge] with not just yours, but everybody else your child is around,” she said. “Because their friends help influence your children.”
By the end of the class, Flavius has gotten the kids attention. She has them playing a dice game that decides what happens to their fictional, insurance-bearing selves. Some of the kids do indeed burn their house down. Others get appendicitis, while a few just lose their cell phones.
Those who chose the right insurance coverage will get through these crises, or at least, that’s the lesson Flavius hopes they walk away with. It can be hard to tell.
“Sometimes you think they’re not paying attention,” she says. “But they are in their own little way.”
Junior Achievement is a long way from its goal. It will take a lot more classes and many more volunteers for them to make a major impact on the territory’s school system. But on an individual level Flavius is happy with the personal investment she’s made in the kids in her class.
“I love them,” she says. “They are the best things in the world, in all truth.”
To get involved with Junior Achievement, contact Judi Fricks Buckley at javirginislands@gmail.com.
