Hundreds of Ohio schools will receive help from a regional bank to comply with a new state education requirement to teach personal finance.

Fifth Third Bank will spend $441,200 to help 357 Ohio schools — including Middletown — cover the cost of a personal finance curriculum. Ohio Senate Bill 311 requires that students graduating in 2014 and after to be taught about money.

The program, called “Dave Ramsey’s Foundations in Personal Finance,” is designed to provide students with financial basics that will guide them through adulthood, said Fifth Third spokesman Jeff Kursman.

“We started off two years ago with a pilot program among some schools within the 12 states in which we operate, and that program has expanded quite a bit,” Kursman said. “Rather than having a mandate without necessarily the funds or the resources to support it, or trying to figure out how they are going to support it within their current classrooms, our sponsorship of this material is allowing school districts to take advantage of it at no cost to their own.”

This will be the second school year that Middletown Schools are using the Dave Ramsey program, according to district spokeswoman Gracie Gregory.

Kursman said expansion of the Fifth Third program turned out to be perfect timing for schools who wanted to participate.

“They now have a curriculum they can use that’s pretty much turnkey — the teachers get a teaching kit that explains to them how they can implement the program, with the flexibility that allows them to implement it in a way that works best for their particular classroom environment,” he said.

“It was a way of being able to deliver this education cost effectively to their students without having to worry about any expenses,” Kursman said. “That’s rare these days for a school system to be able to do that.”