🔒Ethel Walker gives students real-world investing, tax prep experience as part of financial literacy program

Stock picking is a notoriously fickle business, but once in a while you can beat the odds. A couple of years ago, Quinn Auger invested $1,000 in Intuitive Surgical, an Orange-based company that uses AI to assist physicians in designing minimally invasive care. When she sold the stock this summer, she had a 97.32% return — all before she turned 18. Auger has just graduated from the Ethel Walker School in Simsbury. Her investing experience was part of an innovative financial literacy program at the college-preparatory high school for girls, which allows every student to invest a small part of its endowment. After some investing advice and doing their own research, students can choose a single stock, bond, mutual fund or exchange-traded fund to invest in. They follow its progress, and at the end of the year, prizes are awarded to those whose investments did the best. The gains are divided between the school and a charity of the students’ choosing. This opportunity for real-world investing was championed by Head of School Meera Viswanathan, who said she saw shortcomings in the traditional — largely theoretical — financial literacy programs usually available at high schools. “My fantasy had always been, wouldn’t it be great if we could do an investment seminar and then have our girls actually invest?” Viswanathan said. With help from a student’s grandparent, Viswanathan said they raised enough money to give each senior $1,000 to invest as they saw fit.

‘Risk versus reward’

The model is not unique, but it is relatively unusual at the high school level. Investing clubs exist at many colleges, which allow students to invest a portion of their endowments. Last year, students at Greenwich High School, a public school that did not previously have an endowment, attracted $50,000 in donations and managed the fund themselves. Boosted by a large gift in 2021, Ethel Walker’s endowment now stands at around $40 million, which is modest for an elite boarding school. By contrast, Phillips Andover Academy in Massachusetts has a $1.4 billion endowment. The largest in Connecticut is The Hotchkiss School in Lakeville with $553.9 million as of June 30, 2023. “The big thing that I emphasize is risk versus reward,” said Ethel Walker math teacher Chris Hague, who runs the student investing program. “I’m hoping that they take away the idea that all investments have some amount of risk, and depending on your goals, that’s how you can figure out what you should invest in.” Auger said she picked her stock after researching AI-based companies online. She also wanted to find something she believed in. “Does it align with your morals? Does it align with what you want?” she said. “And I was just like, yeah, it sounded interesting.” She was not the only student who did well with her investment. For the 2024-25 school year, on average the girls’ investments returned 28.28%, handily beating market averages. Ethel Walker’s program has been tweaked over the years that it’s been running. Now, instead of waiting until senior year, students can pick their investment in junior year so they can hold it for a longer period. Hague says the next innovation will be allowing students to trade after a year if they see their investment is not doing well. The ultimate goal, Viswanathan says, is to show young women they can be successful in what traditionally has been a male-dominated field. “We had better understand that financial system that we are embedded in, and then think about what our role could and should be, based on our own understanding of our place in the world and our moral structure,” she said.

Tax help

The investment program is one half of a full financial literacy program that every Ethel Walker student must undertake. The other half is all about taxes. For almost a decade, the school has participated in the IRS’s national Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) program. The school has now made it mandatory that every junior sit for and pass the IRS’s basic tax preparer test. “We’ve demonstrated that everyone at our school — even the least interested in money, or the least interested in numbers — can do this,” said Viswanathan. Those who have an interest and aptitude can go on to pass an advanced test, and then volunteer to help run a VITA site at the East Hartford library on weekends during tax season. Over the years, Ethel Walker students have been able to return more than $1 million to local families. VITA services are open to eligible taxpayers, generally people making under $67,000 a year, as well as individuals with disabilities or who speak limited English. Viswanathan says the experience teaches students about much more than just how to prepare taxes. “For our students, it’s also eye-opening to understand that families sometimes have to live on $30,000 a year, and they have to make tough choices about, do I pay rent, do I pay health care, do I pay gas?” she said. Student Paula Arévalo, who is bilingual, was able to help Spanish speakers at her VITA sessions. She said she was pleased to help return money to local families. “We should help because we’re able to,” she said. Viswanathan also hopes that the financial literacy program can be scalable to other schools. Last year, Ethel Walker students and faculty visited a public high school in Poughkeepsie, New York, to describe their work on financial literacy, and were met with an enthusiastic reception. And for students like Auger, the program also has a lasting impact. “As soon as I turned 18, I told my parents I wanted an account to invest money into that I can use to invest in the stock market,” Augur said. “I’m so excited to see what happens.”