Material World: Seton Catholic School Brings Financial Literacy Home

Seton Catholic School has taken a creative approach to teaching its eighth graders financial literacy. Its program puts students in the shoes of a married and employed 27-year-old.

“They get a salary. They find out what the education is on that job. And then we go … from their gross salary to their net salary,” says Christine Bielecki, the facilitator and teacher of the program. “We talk about health insurance. We talk about contributing to your retirement.”

Bielecki teaches the five-day program every year to her eighth grade class. It starts with getting randomly assigned a job and going over general concepts — such as how you make money, what income is and how you get a job. Then Bielecki goes into specifics on taxes, credit, balancing checking accounts, investments, stocks and more.

“It really teaches them a lot of real-life economic principles, and they’re learning how to write checks, subtract things from their checking account and learning to pay bills,” she says. “It gives them a better sense of what money’s about.”

For the final lesson, parents come in to run different stations during a simulation. Students go to each station and use the salary from their assigned job to pay for one month’s worth of bills and expenses. Each station represents a real-world expense, and students must determine how much they can pay for each. The goal is for students to have enough money to pay their bills by the end — if they can’t, students go back and determine where they can cut back on spending.

Jacob Aurand, a 2025 Seton graduate, participated in the program in spring 2025.

“It really taught me how responsible you have to be about yourself and that small decisions with small parts of taxes and money can help determine your future,” he says.

The program introduces key financial concepts — but most importantly, it encourages conversations about financial literacy at home.

“The way I teach it through this program, it makes it more relevant to them,” Bielecki says. “The purpose of this is to really open their eyes, get them to understand that there is a bigger world out there, and they’re not that far from making those decisions.”