News

Wall Street West

August 1, 2008

From trading floor to the classroom

Area math teachers learning ways to teach high school students about stocks, bonds, market securities.

By Mark Guydish mguydish@timesleader.com
Education Reporter

WILKES-BARRE – High finance is coming to local high schools, courtesy of the Wall Street West initiative and a weeklong workshop at King’s College.

Teachers in area school districts are learning ways to bring the world of stocks, bonds, options, market securities and trusts – topics that rarely, if ever, find their way into public school math classes – to juniors and seniors.

Launched after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center in the heart of New York’s financial district, Wall Street West is an effort to create a complete backup for New York City’s financial institutions in case another disaster hits the Big Apple. The federally and state funded initiative included nine grants to regional colleges for finance education and training.

Competing with about 25 other institutions, King’s landed two of those grants. One, totaling $91,988, will help the school develop an economics certificate program for non-traditional students considering a move into financial services. The other, worth $103,928, funded this week’s workshop.

Director of Education Graduate Programs Joyce Armstrong said 18 teachers would each earn three college credits for attending the workshop, which included a field trip Tuesday to the UBS trading floor in Stamford, Conn., the largest trading floor in the world. The idea, Armstrong said, is to create a local workforce that could man financial backup centers expected to sprout in the region.

One obvious step in that process is to expose high school students to the complexities – and opportunities – in the marketplace. The teachers being trained aren’t expected to create whole new courses, but to incorporate finance into existing math classes.

“They could set up an algebra equation to calculate investment returns,” said retired Wyoming Valley West math teacher Gene Kelleher, who now is part of Kelleher and Root Financial Services. Kelleher was one of the people giving the lessons to the teachers.

“We want to expose students to the possibilities of a career in financing,” Kelleher said.

Those possibilities, not surprisingly, include healthy salaries.

“The people working on the low end of the salary scale on the UBS trading floor earn $60,000 to $70,000.”

Armstrong is already writing a grant proposal for next year to offer the workshop again. And she’s trying to get UBS workers to come and speak at area schools.

Ideally, some of those speakers would be women successful in the male-dominated field as role models for the high school girls, Armstrong said.

They seem to be off to a good start. Of the 18 teachers in the workshop, 14 were women.

Mark Guydish, a Times Leader staff writer, may be reached at 829-7161

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