For Delaware Teachers · Standards Alignment
Delaware’s Financial Literacy Standards, Mapped to a Ready-to-Teach Course
Delaware requires students to complete a financial literacy course to graduate. This page sets out what the law asks for, lists all 7 of the state’s grades 9–12 financial literacy expectations, and shows for each one whether our 10 classroom-ready units cover it fully, in part, or not at all — with the partial rows naming exactly what is missing.
The Requirement
What Delaware actually requires
House Substitute 1 for House Bill 203 — The Equity and Inclusion in Financial Literacy for All High School Students in Delaware Act — was signed on September 19, 2025 and is codified at 14 Del. C. § 4150. Every district and charter school serving high school students must provide a 1/2 credit on financial literacy, and beginning with students entering grade 9 in the 2026 through 2027 school year students must complete it as part of the Social Studies or elective credits required to receive a high school diploma. The Act also requires a standards-aligned curriculum with high rigorous instructional materials that includes assessments, and opportunities for high-quality initial and ongoing professional learning made available to teachers.
The law names no topics of its own. It says instead: “The 1/2 credit must be aligned to the current Financial Literacy Standards” — so the content is the Delaware K-12 Financial Literacy Standards, approved in January 2018: four standards, and a single grades 9-12 expression of each, 7 expectations in all. Those 7 are what this page maps.
⚠ Financial literacy is deliberately not economics in Delaware. The Act’s own preamble records that the State of Delaware previously adopted Financial Literacy Content Standards as separate and distinct from Social Studies Standards and content areas, and that instruction aligned to them “is distinct from and is not a replacement for” economics or other social studies instruction — even though the half credit may be counted as a social studies credit.
Check every detail against Delaware’s own sources: House Substitute 1 for House Bill 203 as enacted, the Delaware K-12 Financial Literacy Standards themselves — the file this page is built from — and the Department’s financial literacy standards page. Districts choose which course carries the half credit, so confirm your own building’s plan before you build a syllabus around it.
The Course
10 units, 50 days, written to be taught in order
10 five-day units, 50 class periods of core instruction. How much of a semester that is depends on your building: on an every-other-day block, where a semester is roughly 45 to 50 meetings, the units fill it; on a traditional daily period, where a semester runs nearer 90, they are the spine and the course tests and the gap material below fill the rest. Plan the schedule against your own calendar rather than against this figure.
Every unit ships a free pacing guide, pre-quiz and vocabulary sheet that need no account, so you can read the objectives this crosswalk is built from before deciding anything. The full teacher kit — teacher guide, student packet, quizzes, unit project, final assessment, editable slides and the complete ZIP — comes with Full Membership.
Each card shows how many Delaware expectations that unit carries, fully or in part. A standard taught by two units is counted on both, so these add to 18 rather than to the 6 standards the course addresses.
The Crosswalk
All 7 expectations, and how far the course covers each one
6 of the 7 expectations are addressed by a unit — 3 fully and 3 in part. Of the 1 that are not, 1 are served elsewhere on this site and are linked in the table. Standard codes and wording below are reproduced from the grades 9-12 band of the Delaware Department of Education K-12 Financial Literacy Standards, approved January 2018.
How to read the third column. A unit is listed against a standard only where its published pacing-guide objectives support it, so every row here is one you can check yourself against a free PDF. Fully means those objectives support the standard’s main clause and every requirement it names outside its “e.g.” examples. Partly means they support the main clause but not one or more named requirements — and the row says which, so you know exactly what to supplement. It is a strict rule, applied the same way; the member materials in each unit go further than the free guide advertises, so treat this as the floor, not the ceiling.
Delaware states its expectations as seven broad paragraphs rather than as a coded list, so the useful unit here is the clause: each row below names the parts of its expectation the units carry and the parts they do not.
Delaware’s standards are the shortest set on this site, and that changes how to read the table. Four standards, each expressed once for grades 9-12 — 7 expectations in total — and each one is a whole topic in a sentence: “create an overall financial plan for earning, spending, and saving in order to achieve personal goals” is a single row. ⭐ So a coverage total says very little here and the notes say everything: each row names the unit and the day that carries it, and what is left over. Read it as a description of what the course would look like rather than as a score. ⚠ The one expectation no unit carries is FL.4.9-12b, how laws and regulations affect consumers — these units teach the reasoning and print no statute by design, so that is the block a Delaware course supplies itself.
1 · 1. Financial Planning and Decision-Making
| Expectation | What it asks for | Where the course covers it |
|---|---|---|
| FL.1.9-12a Financial Planning and Decision-Making |
Students will apply problem-solving strategies to assess the consequences of financial decisions. | FullyRenting & Major Purchases · Credit & Borrowing · Insurance & Risk · Investing & Long-Term Growth |
| FL.1.9-12b Financial Planning and Decision-Making |
Students will create an overall financial plan for earning, spending, and saving in order to achieve personal goals. | PartlyBudgeting & First Paycheck · Saving & Emergency Funds · Careers & Paying for Education · Taxes & First FilingNot covered here: The plan the units produce is a year, not a lifetime: the long-horizon half of an overall financial plan — retirement, major life stages — is only reached in Investing Day 5’s closing comparison. |
2 · 2. Money Management
| Expectation | What it asks for | Where the course covers it |
|---|---|---|
| FL.2.9-12a Money Management |
Students will evaluate the costs and benefits of various payment options while applying the mechanics of money management. | FullyModern Payments, Scams & Fraud · Banking & Checking · Budgeting & First Paycheck · Credit & Borrowing |
| FL.2.9-12b Money Management |
Students will examine how ability to pay and personal credit history influences an individual's financial opportunities and choices. | PartlyCredit & BorrowingNot covered here: The specific opportunities this expectation names beyond borrowing — housing, employment, insurance — are not stated in any published objective. |
3 · 3. Saving and Investing
| Expectation | What it asks for | Where the course covers it |
|---|---|---|
| FL.3.9-12 Saving and Investing |
Students will evaluate the role of the government and financial markets in savings and investment decisions. | PartlySaving & Emergency Funds · Investing & Long-Term GrowthNot covered here: This expectation is specifically about the role of government and financial markets in those decisions — deposit insurance, regulators, how a market sets a price — and the Investing unit teaches the money before it reaches the market, by design, so that is the block a Delaware course adds. |
4 · 4. Risk Protection
| Expectation | What it asks for | Where the course covers it |
|---|---|---|
| FL.4.9-12a Risk Protection |
Students will analyze costs and benefits of various methods of managing risk. | FullyInsurance & Risk · Saving & Emergency Funds · Modern Payments, Scams & Fraud |
| FL.4.9-12b Risk Protection |
Students will analyze how local, state, and federal laws and regulations affect consumers. | No unit — see Legal Basics articles · Scams & Fraud articles · Credit lessons & worksheets |
The Gaps
The 1 standards these units do not teach
No single course covers 7 standards to the same depth, and a crosswalk that claimed otherwise would not be much use to you in a curriculum review. These are the ones the 10 units do not carry, each with the reason. Most are served by something else on this site; where nothing is, it says so. Links marked lessons, worksheets or by a printable’s name are classroom material; links marked articles are background reading rather than something you can hand to a class.
- FL.4.9-12b Students will analyze how local, state, and federal laws and regulations affect consumers.How local, state and federal laws and regulations affect consumers. These units teach the reasoning and print no statute by design, so that nothing they print goes out of date — which makes this the one expectation a Delaware course has to supply itself. Elsewhere on this site: Legal Basics articles, Scams & Fraud articles, Credit lessons & worksheets.
For Your Documentation
Using this in a curriculum map
Copy the standard codes straight from the table into your planning documents. Each unit’s own page lists its five daily objectives, and the free pacing guide prints them in a one-page table you can attach to a curriculum map or hand to a department head.
If you also report against the national frameworks, the Jump$tart and CEE crosswalk maps the same library to those. For placement and end-of-course evidence, the assessments hub lists the free course diagnostic and the unit and course tests.
Teach the whole course
The pacing guides, pre-quizzes and vocabulary sheets are free and need no account. Full Membership adds every teacher guide, student packet, quiz, unit project, final assessment and editable slide deck across all 10 units, plus the worksheet generators and printables the units point to.
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