Money 101

Students learn life skills

By MINDY KEPFIELD

Staff writer

Nathan Hieberts’ students can’t tell him they will never use what they are learning in personal finance class at Hillsboro High.

Budgeting, understanding student loans, tax preparation, and home buying are a part of an adulthood the school’s juniors are being prepared to tackle.

“We start them off on the right foot,” said Hiebert. “It helps build the right foundation for their future.”

Students in the class explored their career interests, polished resumes and recently participated in mock interview sessions with 12 area businesses.

Hiebert said more than 20 area firms agreed to help the students with their interviews, but only 12 were chosen, because he wanted the exercise to be competitive.

Juniors Adisen Ward, Aidan Unruh, Megan Jost and Dani Kline all participated.

Ward and Jost are both interested in psychology and were more than happy to interview at Prairie View in Hillsboro — even though neither one was old enough to take the open job.

“It really gave me insight into how things are run in my chosen field,” said Kline.

Unruh and Ward both interviewed at small businesses, because they would like to run one themselves some day.

Ward interviewed at Mama C’s Take and Bake. She was offered a job and plans to start this summer.

“I want to know what it is like to work in a small, business — not a chain,” she said.

Unruh helps his family run Rhubarb Market and works at Dale’s Supermarket. He chose to interview at Rod’s Tire – a family business very different from his own.

“Since it is his own business, he told me about it from his standpoint — how to work there. I thought that was cool,” he said.

Unruh would like to continue to build his family’s business and make use of his customer service skills.

“My strength is talking to people,” he said. “Being able to listen to customers instead of just jumping in and helping them.”

All of Hiebert’s students said they were happy to be gaining life skills — like understanding student loan debt, which has been a huge focus of the class so far.

“Personally, right now I know nothing about finance,” Kline said. “Literally I think most of us are clueless about something like this. So this will help us when we do have to start paying our bills and do all of this stuff ourselves.”

Ward said many parents don’t like to talk about money with their children.

“I am glad to be learning about that, since I can’t get that from my parents,” she said.

Unruh said his parents envied him his class experience.

“My parents told me they didn’t have anything like this in high school,” he said.

Jost, who has a part-time job at Tabor College, said she will be more confident because of the skills she will gain.

“It will feel a lot less scary going out into the adult world,” she said.