‘Time, talent and treasure’

These are the ways that money manager Leonard Aplet is working to give back to teens in Columbia County

By Erica Ryberg

The South County Spotlight, Dec 2, 2009, Updated Dec 2, 2009 (2 Reader comments)

OPPORTUNITY ANALYST – Longtime Scappoose resident Leonard Aplet spends his days watching the markets in order to help 401k-holders get the most from their bond funds. In his spare time, he works with his wife Brenda to increase the opportunities teens have for education in Columbia County.

Erica Ryberg / The South County Spotlight

It’s been a long journey from the farm of Leonard Aplet’s childhood to his corner office in downtown Portland. Along the way he and his wife, Brenda, began to think about ways to improve the world around them.

“We believe you get to a certain point in your life because of the path that you traveled. When you get to a certain point financially, you want to give back,” the Scappoose resident said. “There’s three ways of doing that, through time, talent and treasure. We try to do a little bit of each.”

The first stop, Aplet said, was to create an endowed scholarship to help a student from Columbia County go to his alma-mater, OSU, to major in business or agriculture and resource economics.

Then, three years ago, he brainstormed a finance symposium for Scappoose High School where each of his four children have attended and invited financial professionals and, because 4-H is about more than the state fair, 4-H Youth Development Professional Woody Davis.

“There’s a lot of areas that

4-H covers, not just traditional animals, cooking and sewing...” he said. “I thought that financial management seemed like a natural area to go into.”

The all day symposium taught investments to 100 students.

“That was an extraordinary thing,” said Scappoose School District Superintendent Paul Peterson. “He had all these people come in from the finance industry for a career day.”

CLASS ACT

The symposium’s success spawned an Introduction to Investments class at the SHS.

“I think it’s pretty common for high schools to have personal finance classes,” Aplet said. “But a full-blown investment class is something they haven’t had before.”

The Aplets made the class possible by paying for math instructor Mark Sprenger to teach it and by purchasing the textbooks.

“Finding a textbook for a high school investment class was not an easy chore,” Aplet said. “There are not a lot of high school investment classes out there and so we actually are using a college textbook.”

When 17-year-old Kevin Callahan took the class last year, he was pleasantly surprised. The high school senior had signed up for the course mainly to get math credit. While he expected a lot of abstraction with no bearing on his life, what he got was a conceptual walk through the world of finance as it related to him.

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