Mia Roberto was doing better than her friends.
A mechanic who was married with a 12-year-old child, she made $84,000 a year. That was more than her spouse, who brought home $30,000. In fact, the job was the best around. She had money left over after paying all of her expenses.
“Like if you have kids, you have to buy child care and insurance for them, as well, and then phones,” she said Wednesday.
The financial road was not as smooth for Roberto’s friends.
“They had to go get another part-time job to pay off their debt and all that stuff like that,” Roberto said.
It was a life lesson that was not lost on her. But, perhaps fortunately for her friends, it was only that: a lesson. As in, a school lesson.
That’s because Roberto and her peers, high school seniors in Stafford County, were attending the third annual Chart Your Future Expo at the Fredericksburg Convention Center. The event allowed more than 1,500 seniors from the county’s five high schools and the Phoenix Center for Innovative Learning to learn about opportunities for the future, whether they be in college, the workforce or the military.
The expo was the brainchild of Marcie Rice, the Stafford school system’s executive director for high school leadership. Rice said it comes from the division’s strategic plan, which says that students should be prepared for life after graduation.
“So we see this as one of our culminating events for students,” Rice said. “So they’ve had these classroom experiences, but this allows them to have kind of a real-world experience, or at least exposure here at this event.”
Roberto, who attends Colonial Forge High School, took part in the Topside Federal Credit Union Reality Fair, a “life simulation” that presented different financial scenarios to students with varying degrees of hardship.
“Some kids go broke,” said Lauren Polen, the credit union’s director of member engagement and inclusion. “They lose all their money.”
That’s only hypothetical money, of course, but the idea is that the students learn how much real-life items such as housing or a car cost, Polen said.
Roberto plans to join the Marine Corps after high school, and she also spoke to representatives of that military service who were among 119 vendors at Wednesday’s event. In some cases, students could even apply for jobs, internships or college programs on-site.
One of the vendors was Marine Corps Reserve Maj. Jake Wolff, who’s also a counselor at Stafford High School. Wolff, who was wearing the Marine dress blue uniform, said the event offered a chance to talk to students who may have considered the military as only a stereotypical backup plan if college doesn’t work out. They might be candidates for an ROTC scholarship.
“So we can interact with those students and let them know, hey, college doesn’t have to be a backup, military doesn’t have to be a backup, those things can coexist,” Wolff said.
Another vendor was Kory Ferris, assistant director of transfer recruitment for Old Dominion University. He said students asked him about programs at the school and what life is like on the campus in Norfolk.
“To see their eyes sort of light up when they learn about what we have to offer and the uniqueness about some of our programs is what makes my job fun,” he said.
The expo also offered students a chance to explore career opportunities. Olivia Mosier, who attends Mountain View High School, talked to representatives of the fire and rescue service and the Army, but it was an exhibit for another field that confirmed she was heading in the right direction.
“I already have my cosmetology license, but talking with the booth, it really just solidified that it’s a career that I want to go into,” Mosier said.
