CORE CURRICULUM:

To enter the five-story red brick building that houses the Olney Charter School, you have to walk through a metal detector. Once inside, you can't go many feet without encountering yet another security guard. But also inside? You'll find one of the most innovative financial literacy programs in any high school in the country.

In a north Philadelphia neighborhood where many parents don't have a bank account, a teacher started a personal-finance program that not only teaches students the importance of budgeting, saving and investing, but also gives them the opportunity to get paid up to $5,000 a year, and to put that money into a bank account of their own.

The program was started in the fall of 2015 by Dan LaSalle, who was an English teacher at the time, and is now the school's assistant principal. The first year, 30 students were enrolled; this year there are 81. Olney, which became a charter school in 2011, has just over 2,000 students. The high school is made up of 60% Hispanic, 32% black and 1% white students. In 2012, it had a 50% graduation rate, and this year it's on track to have a 70% rate.

"We're a low-income school. Some kids don't get allowances. Some are on food stamps and 100% get free lunches. With this program, kids can leave school with a few thousand dollars," LaSalle says. The median household income in Olney's zip code is about $33,000 -- compared with roughly $61,000 in the U.S. as a whole.

Not many students in the U.S. learn about personal finance in school, regardless of the income-level where they live. Tim Ranzetta, co-founder of the nonprofit Next Gen Personal Finance, which creates free high school personal-finance curricula, says only five states require high-school students to take a personal-finance class: Virginia, Alabama, Utah, Missouri and Tennessee. In other states, personal finance classes are often offered as an elective -- as they are at Olney.

LaSalle says the finance program, as he likes to call it, is unique because it's the only one in the country that pays students, and helps them open checking and savings accounts. Ranzetta, who knows as much about high school personal-finance courses as anyone, says he can't think of another that does those things.

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