HARLINGEN — It’s about minding your dollars and your sense.
You can break down financial literacy into those simple terms, but it’s a wide umbrella that covers a broad range of pieces: credit, mortgage, loans, savings, living within your means.
About 400 students from four high schools crowded the auditorium Wednesday at the Harlingen Performing Arts Conservatory for the Building Financial Capacity Coalition Summit where their classmates gave presentations on specific topics relating to financial security.
“It’s students teaching students,” said Bertha Garza, executive director of BFCC.
“We have been working with these high schools and their teacher mentors since October,” Garza said. “What we do is we train the trainer and we teach and advocate financial education.”
Isaac Martinez and his classmates Claudio Gonzalez and Delilah Bermea gave a presentation about how to apply loans and acquire assets.
“Our whole reasoning behind the presentation is to get the younger generation, our peers and classmates, to become financially literate,” said Isaac, 17, a senior at the Harlingen School of Health Professions.
“We want them to know how to become a lot more financially stable at a young age rather than start in our thirties,” Isaac continued. “One of the things that we did stress is they have the time to do it right now.”
He and his teammates wanted their young audience to know which loans they should apply for depending on what asset they wished to acquire. Those assets might include a house mortgage, a car loan or perhaps investing in stocks or bonds.
“We chose this topic because we felt it was the most broad,” he explained. “It touched on more areas of finance rather than just going into one end.”
They did an outstanding job, said their mentor, Gustavo Villanueva.
“I think they did great today,” said Villanueva, economics and government teacher at HSHP.
“Their presentations skills were on point, they were very informative, they were very engaged, their collaboration amongst themselves was impeccable,” he said. “I feel very strongly that they learned a lot from this experience.”
Garza was pleased with the event’s success.
“The students were very energized, very interactive with their peers,” Garza said. “They did a fantastic job of portraying each topic. You could tell they did their research, you could tell they knew the content of what they were talking about.”
The same literacy summit will be presented Thursday at the TSC Art Center in Brownsville.
