Chemistry, algebra, literature and… balancing a budget?
Students in Polk County will soon learn life skills at the “Junior Achievement Barnett Family Discovery Center” in Lakeland.
“The students in Polk County get to come and experience what it’s like to be an adult for the day,” said Shauna Dykes, market president at Junior Achievement of Tampa Bay.
Students will learn all about “adulting” at the JA Barnett Family Discovery Center currently being developed on the Tenoroc High School campus.
“The students get to come, have jobs, work jobs, complete tasks. They learn about savings, earning and being able to spend money that they make,” Dykes said.
A JA Discovery Center already exists in Tampa, where students learn about banking, budgeting and being professionals.
Those are lessons not always taught in school.
“We teach to the standards, right, that teachers are able to do that. Some of our life skills that we would normally be teaching our children, they cannot be taught in the classroom,” Dykes said.
Dykes said about 1,000 students from Polk County were able to attend the center in Tampa.
With the new center in Lakeland, she expects all Polk County students of a certain age to be able to participate.
The program involves a 12-week in-classroom curriculum culminating in a field trip to the Discovery Center.
There are two separate experiences: Finance Park for 8th graders and Biztown for 5th graders.
Finance Park is about managing an at-home budget.
“If they make $50,000 a year and they have to choose housing and transportation and insurance and all the real-life things that you have to pay for, when they start looking at that and they go, ‘Oh wow, this isn’t enough money. I may need to make more money’,” Dukes said. “They may start looking into, ‘Well what do these jobs pay? What is a living wage?’ It starts to stimulate the thought process for them as they graduate and become adults.”
At Biztown, students learn how to run a town for a day.
“So we have everything from mayors to bank tellers from CEOs to CFOs of all of the businesses, and they get to run the town,” Dykes said.
Dykes said the program is funded by the Barnett family, as well as from local donors and some funding from the state and Polk County Public Schools.
The center at Tenoroc High School is set to open in September 2026.