Students, parents learn more about investing in stocks

Local students will have a chance to call their broker next week when financial consultants from Salomon Smith Barney stop in to give them a little advice on future investing.

For three days, select groups of young scholars will learn how to buy, sell, diversify and trade stock on Wall Street.

Fifty schools in 18 states are participating. Nevada schools include Boulder City High School, Mike O'Callaghan Middle School and Helen Cannon Middle School.

After a successful test run last March in schools in suburban Boston, Chicago and New York, officials chose Tuesday as their official kick-off for "Take Your Parents to School Day."

The program focuses on financial literacy, setting short- and long-term goals, and understanding saving and investing, and how securities are bought and sold.

Local teachers who have been provided with Salomon materials work with the students the first two days of the program.

On Thursday, parents will be invited to hear what the consultants have to say.

"It's information that everybody could use," Mary Connolly, Salomon spokeswoman, said. "You start them young, they'll be better consumers in the future."

The idea for the program came from clients who wanted their children to be more financially aware and from consultants who noticed the need in schools, Connolly said.

The program will run all year as requests come in.

Local teachers won't be starting green. Some have already approached aspects of stock market through the trimester, Roberta Holton, principal of O'Callaghan Middle School, said.

"Understanding stocks, vocabulary and financing is part of how teachers approach math and thinking," she said. "We've had teachers who have done something similar in the past. It gets them to realize that mathematics has real-world applications.

"It's a little stock-market orientation," she said. "We're not trying to turn them into little investors."

For students at Cannon Middle School, it's a little more than orientation.

Janice Jensen, a seventh-grade reading teacher and former math teacher at Cannon, uses the Internet's Stock Market Game, a simulation of Wall Street trading, to familiarize students with trading.

The game is an educational program introducing students and adults to basic economics, finance and capital formation.

Using pretend money, a "hypothetical $100,000 in common stocks," teams can invest in real companies. Jensen said her students have beat other participating Nevada middle schools the past two years.

Jensen, a strong advocate of teaching financial literacy, also uses her explorations class -- a middle school elective on entrepreneurship -- to teach students the basics of the stock market.

"When they form their own corporation, that's when they learn about stocks," Jensen said.

Seventh grade is just as good a time as any to learn the stocks, Jensen said.

"I don't know when else they're ever going to learn it. So many students don't know about the market and the benefits of investing. Unless you really want to learn about it, you may not ever hear about it."

Nearly one-fourth of her students really get into learning the market, she said. The rest, "are introduced to what a stock is and call it a day."

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