'Kids, I'd like you to meet your money...'

FIRM, a money-management program run by Ecount of Philadelphia, lets parents load money onto a PIN-protected debit card held by their children and then monitor their spending patterns. Like debit cards offered by other financial services companies, such as the Buxx program from credit-card issuer Visa, FIRM offers financial literacy courses geared to teenagers.

"Just giving away money doesn't help them learn where money is spent," says Matt Gillin, CEO of Ecount. (Mothers and fathers need to mind the details: Ms. Lee saw one classmate of her son's run up thousands of dollars of charges for shoes on a parent-controlled card.)

Though Adam attended a school loaded with smart, affluent kids, many of them lacked basic money-management skills, he says. He ended up giving pointers to his classmates after completing his FIRM online courses. The financial smarts he picked up convinced him he'll do well at the University of Colorado's business school, where he is now taking classes.

"This really drove me," Adam says of FIRM.

While he sought out financial literacy, sometimes it finds the students - typically in their classrooms. Foster offers a 10-day course that teachers can use along with his books. And nonprofit groups such as the JumpStart Coalition work tirelessly to put month-long or semester-long educational programs before students.

An April 2005 survey by the National Council on Economic Education found that while nearly every state requires some sort of economics education, only seven - Alabama, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Kentucky, New York, and Utah - mandate a personal finance course for a student to graduate. Still, that's two more states than the 2003 survey found, and nowadays, says Nan Mead of the National Endowment for Financial Education, schools seem much more receptive to money skills curriculums.

"It's pretty much up to the school" to teach kids how to handle money, says Ms. Mead. Many parents feel they lack the necessary skills, she adds, while others believe it's the schools' job to educate teens about money.

Whatever the reason, Mead says that with the exception of more calls for teaching about entrepreneurship, the focus is pretty much the same as it always has been. Just as there are basics to grammar, there are ground-floor skills to money management: balancing a checkbook, setting monetary goals, creating a budget, saving and investing, etc. And where would a decent money- management course be these days without discussing debt and credit abuse?

Covering so much ground in one semester or less may require racing through the material. But it's raising an awareness level at a very important time for a young person, Mead says.

"This is something kids are going to use the rest of their lives," she notes. "I'm happy the schools are looking at it as a critical need."

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