As students flooded Mountain View High School’s hallways for lunch on a recent Thursday afternoon, four students stood behind the campus’s bank branch desk ready to help customers.
The students are enrolled in iQ Credit Union’s Student-Run Campus Branches program — a course at local high schools that is rooted in financial literacy and involves working as a teller. As part of the program, students run iQ’s campus branches.
Each campus branch is open during the schools’ lunch hours when students can open savings and checking accounts, deposit cash and checks, withdraw money, and learn more about what the credit union has to offer.
“This program goes beyond the teller basics,” said Brian Juárez, iQ’s education program manager. “It focuses on leadership development, effective engagement and marketing skills.”
Staff members from iQ are assigned to oversee the campus branches and guide students throughout the school year.
The credit union created its Student-Run Campus Branches program in 1997. It now partners with six Clark County high schools — four from Evergreen, one from Vancouver and one from Battle Ground public schools. In 2016, Mountain View became Evergreen’s third school to open a branch. Heritage High School opened the most recent Evergreen campus branch in 2019; Union High School opened a branch in 2007 and Evergreen High School in the late 1990s.
The high school course tackles banking fundamentals, employability, leadership and workplace skills, and financial planning and literacy.
“The students get to undergo extensive financial training and learn best practices to serve as tellers,” Juárez said. “They also get to develop and execute campus marketing campaigns to encourage their peers to become iQ members.”
Mountain View’s financial literacy teacher Lisa Harvey said students also gain public speaking skills and learn how to respond to constructive criticism in the workforce.
“There’s the classroom part where they learn more of the textbook knowledge, and in here, they put that knowledge to work,” she said, pointing to the school’s campus branch Feb. 20.
Mountain View senior Kateryna Miftakhova, 17, guided other iQ students while setting up for the lunch rush Feb. 20. She said her marketing presentation to other students was about waking up and taking control of their finances.
“We really emphasize that banking is not evil,” Miftakhova said. “Banking isn’t a big monster. Banking is not something that’s going to want to drag you into debt.”
As one of the school’s iQ interns, Miftakhova also spends time at the Salmon Creek iQ Credit Union branch.
The program offers 10 paid internships for those enrolled in the course. Interns work in the campus branches and at iQ locations, Juárez said, where they learn more responsibility and leadership to help other students.
“(It provides) that competitive edge for the workforce,” Juárez said. “It is a career launchpad where students are able to gain those real-world skills by working in a student-operated branch.”
Since 2015, more than 40 students have worked as iQ interns while in school, and about 20 successfully obtained careers at the credit union, according to its webpage.
“It’s a great experience, especially if you haven’t had a job (before),” said senior Luis Ramirez, 17, the other Mountain View intern. “If iQ let me, I would want to join as a bank teller or anything (after graduation). They care a lot about their members.”
