Bryan Sims is a 23-year-old college dropout. So what can he teach a high school class about money management?

Plenty.
While he may not have a degree, Sims does have a successful business. He's the editor and chief executive of brass, a money magazine for 16- to 24-year-olds whose slogan is "Young today, rich tomorrow." Distributed primarily through credit unions to 350,000 readers nationwide, the glossy quarterly uses interviews with hip-hop artists, basketball stars and other youth culture icons to introduce consumer finance issues.

"I lead a little bit of a different life compared to most people," Sims told two dozen students in Mike Stair's Personal Finance class at Crescent Valley High School in a recent visit to his alma mater. "I travel about 100,000 miles a year meeting athletes, entrepreneurs and musicians, doing cover shoots."

Pretty glamorous stuff. But Sims' advice to the students is anything but.

Get a job, he tells them.

Save your money.

Stay out of debt.

Build good credit.

It's the kind of message most teenagers don't want to hear. But when Sims the young CEO stands in the front of the classroom in jeans and a sportcoat, his hair fashionably gelled and his shirt fashionably untucked, and tells the students he still doesn't drive a fancy car despite his business success, the lesson appears to be sinking in.

And that's the whole idea.

Sims' show-and-tell session at Crescent Valley was the opening salvo in a campaign to get a student edition of his magazine distributed in Oregon high schools as a tool for teaching personal finance. Brass Media, Sims' Corvallis-based publishing company, launched a pilot program last year that has put the 'zine in more than 1,000 New York high schools.

"We want to generate interest to bring the program to Oregon," said Lauren Beyer, a public relations specialist for Brass Media. "We want to get the wheels turning."

Jon Greenwalt, who supervises business and marketing instruction for the New York State Education Department, contacted Brass Media after picking up a copy of the magazine at his local credit union.

Greenwalt thought the content would help extend the personal finance component in the state's high school economics curriculum. He also thought students would find brass more accessible than other money management publications.

"It's not written by the Vanguard CEO, it's not written by adults — it's written by kids," Greenwalt said. "I think it's easier for them to pick it up and read it."

Brass Media was already being distributed through a number of New York credit unions, which pay for a certain number of copies in exchange for advertising space in the publication.

To finance the student edition, the company put together a sponsorship package involving close to two dozen credit unions plus the state credit union league, the league's educational foundation and the state business teachers' association.

The sponsors pay for 50,000 copies of brass, which are distributed to virtually every public high school in the state. The magazine makes custom lesson plans linked to each issue available on its Web site if teachers want them, or they can use the articles as an entry point to their current curriculum.

Greenwalt rates the program a success.

"We've had nothing but great response from teachers," he said.

Andrea Morgan, the social studies specialist for the Oregon Department of Education, said a similar approach might work here, but it would be up to individual school districts to decide whether to participate.

The state dropped Personal Finance as a specific course offering several years ago, Morgan said, as greater emphasis was placed on reading and math to meet new requirements imposed by the Legislature and the federal government. But some instruction in that area is still part of Oregon educational standards.

A number of interest groups are already lobbying for more personal finance education in the schools — some offering competing curriculums of their own — and that might add momentum to Brass Media's proposal.

"Oregon districts could be using this right now, and it would be really cool if credit unions would pick up the tab because the other issue in Oregon right now is cost," Morgan said. "Almost all of the major banks in Oregon also offer curriculum and would love to see their curriculum taught in the schools."

While Brass Media has built its circulation model on credit unions to this point, Beyer said the company is open to relationships with all kinds of sponsors. And while it's currently focused on bringing the magazine to Oregon classrooms, it hopes to keep expanding the student program from there.

"The point is to get it into all 50 states," Beyer said.

At Crescent Valley High, where Sims graduated in 2002, Principal Cherie Stroud said there was a strong demand for instruction in consumer finance and money management.

"It has been absent from the curriculum for a number of years, but we brought it back this year," Stroud said of the Personal Finance elective. "I think it's a pretty popular class."

While the instructional emphasis in Corvallis schools has shifted toward college-prep work, Stroud said there's still a desire by students to learn such nuts-and-bolts material as how to balance a checkbook.

"We have a tendency to focus on the high-end math and science classes, which is great," she said. "(But) we need to teach our kids some of these life skills as well."