By the City of Doral (FL)
May 24, 2010

Over 150 students from Doral (FL) received first-hand knowledge of our nation's financial system during several field trips to the Miami Branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, as part of Doral Mayor Juan Carlos Bermudez's DollarWI$E Campaign, a U.S. Conference of Mayors initiative.

This branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta is located within the city limits of Doral, and this is the third year that the city is sponsoring the trips.

“Our hope is that through these field trips, the kids will learn about financial responsibility, take this knowledge back home to their parents and grow up to become financially responsible adults,” said Bermudez.

During the free field trips, children from five elementary, middle and high schools in Doral learned about the Federal Reserve's structure and function through videos, a lecture and a scavenger hunt in the bank's newly opened monetary museum. The museum included a standard gold bar, a cash bus containing more than $2 million and an interactive wall game. The object of the game is for the player to generate money for a bank by making smart lending decisions.

The students also learned that bills that are old, worn out, torn, written or belong to an older series are shredded to make room for newer bills with the latest security features to prevent counterfeiting.

The students also visited the cash-receiving room, where they witnessed the bank's cash-handling operations, an area that is usually off-limits. The field trips took place from April 26-30.

“Tours like this introduce children to economics at an early age and gives them an inside view of how monetary policy is created,” said Marycela Diaz-Unzalu, Economic Education Specialist with the Miami Branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. “We know that the younger you educate a community about the economy and finance, the stronger our country's economy will be.”

As the nation's central bank, the Federal Reserve carries out several functions that affect the economy. The Federal Reserve aims to keep inflation in check while supervising and regulating commercial banks.