Deb Moore
Deb Moore fell victim to identity theft while at a teaching convention in Las Vegas. She was on the convention floor demonstrating model rockets to students, when the thief grabbed her purse from a nearby table.
"Whoever stole it ran up $22,000 worth of purchases in about 30 minutes. As soon as I noticed my purse was missing, I called and cancelled everything. They call that 'turn and burn' – they got my cards, burned them, and were gone."
Moore acted quickly. She called the financial institutions associated with her cards and filed a report with local police. She also contacted the credit bureaus and had her credit accounts frozen. When the thief later attempted to buy a car using her identity, authorities were tipped off, and the attempt was thwarted. Not everyone would have acted with such deciciveness, but Moore, a Marketing teacher at Peoria, Arizona's Sunrise Mountain High School, knew a thing or two about identity theft. And now, so do her students.
"I became an identity theft case study for them. The kids wanted to know everything. So every time I received an email or phone call or filled out a form, they knew about it and helped me deal with it."
Moore's advanced marketing students had completed the credit lessons on the Practical Money Skills website; they had discussed the responsible use of credit and had learned how to read a credit report.
Moore's students are no strangers to unraveling the practical aspects of money management. In her basic marketing class, they spend a considerable amount of time in the learning lab, an on-campus retail store that sells school supplies, spirit apparel, and food. At the store, students learn how to create awareness through visual merchandising techniques and advertising, and they master the use of a point of sale system to track their effectiveness.
The marketing students, all underclassmen, also learn about management styles in the campus store. They are assigned to the store in rotating shifts and are managed by different members of Moore's advanced marketing class on different days. The advanced students mentor the underclassmen, as they were once mentored, in equipment usage, inventory, and customer service.
Moore's marketing program is a well-honed system that integrates student learning and experience at multiple levels, but it wasn't always that way. When she came to Sunrise from the private sector nine years ago, there was just a single marketing class, which she has since grown to six full sections of marketing.
Moore also teaches sports, entertainment marketing class and a tourism and hospitality internship. Many of her students are active in DECA (www.deca.org), a marketing, management, and entrepreneurship association for high school and college students, and several of her former students have become successful entrepreneurs. According to Moore, this kind of job satisfaction can't be beat.
"I miss working in industry at times, but one thing I could never replace is that not a day that goes by that I don't feel like my presence here has somehow helped a kid. And that's priceless."
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