“What’s your dream for the future?”
It’s a core question asked of City School students as they become confident, innovative thinkers and effective communicators. The question is central to the district’s Portrait of a Graduate, as students explore their personal aspirations and pursue the skills and experiences needed to achieve them.
The question was also the prompt that led two City School students to become statewide winners in the Spring 2025 InvestWrite competition.
InvestWrite is a national essay writing program where students who participated in The Stock Market Game reflect on their experiences and demonstrate their understanding of investing, financial markets, and economic concepts. The process of developing their essays enables them to strengthen their critical thinking as they connect what they have learned in the classroom with real-world financial decisions.
Mauro and Johns were members of Stock Market Game teams in their City Schools classrooms. With the guidance of their teachers, teams invest a virtual $100,000 portfolio of stocks, bonds, and mutual funds over a semester or the whole school year. They managed portfolios in real-time market conditions and gained financial literacy, economic, and finance insights while developing skills in decision-making and collaboration.
Last year, 320 City School students across 79 school-based teams participated in The Stock Market Game. Mauro and Johns’ InvestWrite essays were selected as winners from more than 120 essays submitted by students around the state. Both programs are offered by the Maryland Council on Economics Education, the statewide nonprofit providing educators with tools and resources for building students’ financial capability and economic understanding.
In his essay Mauro, a 5th-grade student at Francis Scott Key Elementary/Middle School at the time of his entry, shared his dream of becoming a doctor, “not to make money, but to change my life and my parents’ who sacrificed everything to give me a better life than they had.”
He wrote, “Learning about long-term investing in the Stock Market Game helped me realize that achieving my goals of being successful is possible, but with a lot of patience and smart decisions. By making smart decisions, I can finally save up for medical school and help my family with everything they did for me.”
“Since I was young, I have wanted to start a successful business and become a true entrepreneur as a way that would set up the future of my family and me,” wrote Johns, a Holabird Academy eighth grader at the time of his essay entry
“With the Stock Market Game, I learned that I could make my money work for me. After I learned this, I set up my own bank account and investment portfolio under the supervision of my parents. Because of this, my money has been working for me. After a while, I will keep my money building up, which will help me get funds for my business.”
InvestWrite and The Stock Market Game are unique and powerful learning tools that bring together academics, most notably math and English literacy, and student wholeness, as students further develop the traits that make them effective team members and decision-makers.
Samanta Sines Gergela is a Gifted and Advanced Learning leader at Holabird Academy and was Mauro’s 5th-grade teacher. “The Stock Market Game is awesome,” she says. “Students pick stocks to match their personality. The process and the concepts then make sense to them.”
Mauro developed his essay during his personalized learning block focused on math and writing. The students discussed writing strategies and reflected on their Stock Market Game experience, especially how they related to a professional investment advisor who grew up in subsidized housing and shared his story. “Mauro made it personal,” says Ms. Sines Gergela, “and how he wants to pay his parents back.”
“The Stock Market Game is a high-interest engagement opportunity,” notes Felicity Ross, Johns’ 8th-grade teacher at Francis Scott Key. “Students love it. They ask a lot of questions as they learn more about the companies they already knew existed. The learning extends beyond the classroom; they develop teamwork as they overcome disagreements and reach consensus about their portfolios. And they clearly talk about it at home; some kids come in and talk about what their parents said about their stock choices.” Johns, now a student at Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, is an excellent example of how curiosity can catapult a student into success.
The Stock Market game began at Francis Scott Key with a single 8th-grade high school geometry class. It now extends to teams at multiple grade levels, beginning with accelerated third graders.
“Beyond the expected math and computation skills, there are real-world applications”, says Ms. Ross. “Financial literacy is so important.”