The Times - Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley

WAITSBURG—Most Waitsburg High School alumni over the past couple of decades were required to take a class called “Life Management Skills” their junior year. The class met in the Home Ec lab, a long room in the middle of the building with a row of kitchen stations against the far wall.

Students balanced mock checkbooks, put together hypothetical budgets, learned how to comparison-shop for groceries, and went over the ups and downs of using a credit card. Come test day, they were expected to be experts on everything from car insurance to IRAs, from healthcare costs to the process of consumer com...