Nationwide — Shelby Lattimore, an African American teacher from Charlotte, North Carolina, charges her third-grade students rent to use their desks, fines them for missed homework, and pays them salaries for classroom jobs. The unusual system has gained attention online, where she is also a content creator known as Ms. L, with more than 2 million combined followers on TikTok and Instagram. While the students use fake money, the setup is meant to teach them how earning, spending, and saving work in real life.
The idea grew from challenges Lattimore faced when she first began teaching. She started during the COVID-19 pandemic, when she taught students online and struggled to keep them focused for an entire school day. When she entered the classroom in person in 2021, she found that some students had trouble returning to school after spending a year at home. She also noticed that traditional rewards, such as stickers and candy, were not enough to motivate some students to complete their work or follow classroom rules.
That led her to think about what had motivated her when she was a child: money. According to People, she created a classroom economy using fake money and connected it to lessons in math and financial responsibility. The approach became especially useful because some of her students were struggling with basic addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Instead of only practicing those skills on worksheets, they could use them while managing their classroom earnings and expenses.
Each student receives a classroom job with its own salary. Some jobs are assigned randomly, while students can also interview for certain positions. Lattimore uses those interviews to teach students that having a job comes with responsibilities. Once they receive their pay, students must keep enough money in their wallets to cover their desk rent. Everyone pays the same rent, even though students earn different salaries. The setup teaches them to budget instead of spending all their money immediately on prizes at the classroom store. Lattimore also adjusts the rent over time to introduce the idea of inflation.
There are financial consequences for breaking classroom rules. Students can receive fines for missing homework, damaging classroom items, acting out, or deliberately breaking things. They also lose income when they miss school because they are not paid for days they are absent. Lattimore sometimes raises the rent to teach students about inflation and changing expenses. The classroom also includes a teacher’s helper who watches classmates during the week and reports on their behavior and responsibilities. As students become more familiar with the system, they can take over more of its operations, including running the classroom bank.
For Lattimore, the lessons are about more than getting students to complete their schoolwork. She has said that some families in her Charlotte community face housing insecurity, abuse, immigration issues, and generational poverty. She wants students to have a place where they can learn about budgeting and financial responsibility in a controlled environment. Her classroom economy has also attracted other educators online. She began sharing videos about the system in 2023 and later created an online course for teachers who want to use similar ideas. She has also clarified that the money shown in her videos is fake, after some viewers mistakenly believed students were using real cash.