Lexie Centers tells her students all the time: everybody has to deal with money.
It’s not like music or art or sports – it’s not necessarily an interest, but a life skill.
Students at Gregg Middle are learning that particular life skill early in Centers’s class.
Centers teaches financial literacy and keyboarding at Gregg Middle, where she’s been for three years. Financial literacy is a unique elective to Gregg Middle, as it is the only school to offer the class.
Centers taught in Kentucky for seven years before her family moved to South Carolina.
Centers is also originally from Kentucky and went to Clemson University where she got her degree in marketing, went back to Kentucky, got married and worked in the business world and decided to go back to school. She has a master’s in teaching and a master’s in instructional technology from Morehead State University in Kentucky.
Centers subsequently became a business teacher and taught in web design, Photoshop and graphic arts in high school. When they moved to South Carolina, she found an opportunity to work at Gregg Middle in what was called a compass lab, where she helped children with math and reading intervention. Centers enjoys teaching math, so after the school did away with the compass lab, they looked at the standards for seventh grade and saw that interest and how loans work is part of the curriculum. The school looked into what Centers could teach to seventh and eighth-graders to enrich the math standards and landed on financial literacy, which, she said, is right up her alley, “because I love money.”
“I love teaching the concepts of it, because it think it’s a life skill,” she said. “Every person on the planet has to deal with money.”
Centers said she loves what she teaches, and a fun aspect of her class is her students participate in the stock market game. They play it with the South Carolina Department of Economics. Students are given $100,000 of play monopoly money and they get to buy and sell stocks. Last year Gregg Middle won both semesters on the state level. Centers said that is probably her best experience with teaching.
Her worst experience is when children don’t see the value in what teachers are teaching them.
Centers tries to explain to her students that money “hits home to everybody” and that students have the power to be in control of their finances. Centers enjoys reading financial blogs about saving money and stock tips, saying things like that interest her.
“So getting to teach this has been really awesome,” she said.
At Gregg Middle Centers is team leader for the electives and serves on the School Improvement Council.
Her professional goal is to keep learning about changing trends, economics and finance so that students can excel “and understand current events and topics that relate to them,” she said.
Centers is married to Jeff Centers, a pastor. Their son, Jaron, is a freshman at Ashley Ridge High and their daughter, Phoebe, a seventh-grader at Gregg. The family has two West Highland Terriers, a boy and a girl, named Molly and Ryder.
Her hobbies outside of school are reading, traveling and being active in her family’s church, Riverland Church.
As a family they like to travel, go to the beach, watch sports and go to downtown Charleston.
Centers’s life goal is to keep touching children’s lives with kindness.
“Being nice goes a long way with kids,” she said.
Her favorite thing about Gregg Middle is the people.
“I work with friends,” she said. “I love the kids too, they’re really diverse.”
