Toward the end of the school year, Alex Oest sat inside Commack High School’s new financial literacy lab — a mini New York Stock Exchange with the bright graphics of stock tickers around the room spooling out the latest financial information.

A new course in the school district lets students access a high-tech laboratory with Bloomberg stock terminals, and it had him thinking about a career in finance.

Sitting with classmates Jacob Abzug and Christopher Bannon, Oest, 18, said he had been considering a career in engineering. But the financial literacy course showed him parallels between finance and engineering that he thinks will help him to consider his options.

“I realized there’s a lot more to [business] than on the surface level. It takes knowledge and experience to build up your resume throughout the business world. Even with these terminals, you can learn so much that most people aren’t learning until college or even after college,” Oest said.

The Commack school district launched its lab, complete with more than 30 financial terminals provided by Bloomberg LP, at the start of the 2024-25 school year. The program was part of an effort to teach what educators from Commack and across the state say is a gap in LI students' education: financial literacy.

One year into the program, educators in Commack say it has shown signs of success. Students have been learning critical financial skills such as saving. Some competed in a recent global investment contest that Bloomberg sponsored. A Commack team ranked 84th among 2,200 high schools and colleges worldwide in the Bloomberg Global Trading Challenge.

Commack schools Superintendent Jordan Cox said high school seniors have spent time in the lab since its launch in September. The goal, he said, is to educate students on how to be "financially fluent."

“We want them to understand how money works in the world, we want them to understand retirement, savings, checking accounts, mortgages, interest rates, how loans work," Cox said.

The Commack district invested $213,000 into its lab, which supported access to eight fully licensed terminals, according to Cox. The district received an additional 24 terminals at no extra cost as part of Bloomberg's educational licensing program, he added. The district was able to invest in the lab after several years of reviewing instructional software and digital resource subscriptions, identifying overlaps, and reallocating funds where possible, Cox said.

Peter Myers, who teaches a financial literacy course at Commack High School, said freshmen can take classes in the lab for two weeks and learn how market analytics affect stock prices. As the year stretches on, students begin to tie in global events and see how those forces can affect stock prices, while seniors learn how to develop an investment portfolio.

Myers said the terminals help students research companies — usually in the S&P 500 — and learn how to study trends. Even prom season was used as a lesson, with students learning how global events affecting the retail industry such as tariffs or trends in holiday shopping could affect the cost of a suit or dress for prom.

“We had a discussion on ‘buy your prom dresses now’ because we could watch the retail industry suffer from different events. … Students are getting a deeper understanding of that,” Myers said.

Roslyn High School added a Financial Research Lab and Trading Floor in 2022, according to the Roslyn school district's website.

Last year, voters in the Garden City school district approved a $23 million bond that included funding for the district's own business center with financial terminals. The district is planning to finish building the center by next summer so it can be ready for the 2026-27 school year, Superintendent Kusum Sinha said in an interview.

“I think our students will be better prepared [for life post-high school],” Sinha said. “How do you save money for the future? There are things that you can teach kids very early on, and that helps them plan for their future … it gives them a global perspective."

The Commack district plans to offer more electives to help expose students to more aspects of finance.

“Thinking about entrepreneurship, thinking about statistics, personal life budgeting … we’re going to continue having the challenges, adding more courses and giving students that hands-on exposure as well,” Myers said. “There’s been huge interest from freshmen to seniors, and that’s been absolutely amazing.”