The JA Finance Park program is for seventh or eighth grade students. Through the program, they are assigned real-life situations—marriages, families, incomes, student debt and credit scores, for example—and they must develop household budgets. During their visit to a JA Discovery Center, they play out their roles, managing their lives and finances.
The first JA Discovery Center, a 50,000-square-foot facility, was built in Atlanta in 2013. It serves students from Atlanta Public Schools as well as from Dekalb County and Fulton County schools.
Learning to build
A year later and at the time of her hiring in 2014, Woodfield didn’t expect to be involved in construction. In her previous job at Simpson Elementary School in Norcross (outside Atlanta), she had been the registrar, records manager and web manager, among other roles.
However, someone noticed her civil engineering and project management experience, and Woodfield quickly found herself guiding the construction of the JA Discovery Center at Gwinnett. The 45,000-square-foot facility was the first built on a school campus as part of the new Discovery High School in Lawrenceville.
After the project was completed in 2015, she began work on the Mike & Lynn Cottrell JA Discovery Center at North Georgia in Cumming. It opened in 2018 and serves students from schools in Gainesville and Calhoun City as well as Dawson, Forsyth, Hall and Lumpkin counties.