Students Attempt to Cash In on Counterfeit-Resistant $20s

To the relief of Federal Reserve Bank officials and the Secret Service, those hard-to-counterfeit $20s are living up to their, er, billing.

Just ask the schoolchildren who tried their hand at copying the redesigned currency as the greenbacks began circulating in Los Angeles on Thursday.

The new $20 bills feature changes that authorities hope will thwart counterfeiters. They include hidden security stripes, color-shifting ink and a more detailed portrait of Andrew Jackson, the nation’s seventh president.

It was the presidential portrait that was the biggest challenge for youngsters who were invited to sketch out their own version of the revamped currency. The student creating the winning phony bill was offered a real one as a prize.

Michael Negrete, 10, drew a curly haired Jackson. Nine-year-old Rodrigo Ayala’s sported green hair. Ten-year-old Carlos Cervantes’ wore a soldier’s hat. Alberto Martinez, 9, showed a Jackson clad in a Batman hood.

Others from 20th Street Elementary School near downtown Los Angeles were more fanciful.

Lilian Ramirez, 10, pictured her mother on her $20 bill. “That’s because she buys me stuff,” Lilian said. Silvia Haro, 9, put her father’s face on hers. “He makes money for our family,” Silvia said.

Mariana Lopez, 9, chose a more contemporary president: Bill Clinton.

Clinton was depicted with a noose around his neck.

“He’s in trouble,” Mariana knowingly explained.

Judging the crayon currency were Mark Mullinix, head of the Federal Reserve’s Los Angeles branch; Los Angeles school Supt. Ruben Zacarias; Jim Freer, chairman of Junior Achievement of Southern California; and Secret Service Agent Jerry Wyatt.

They picked Santiago Flores’ $20 bill as the winner. It showed a smiling, blond boy in place of stern-faced Jackson.

“That’s a picture of me!” Santiago said.

Wyatt said Secret Service agents expect the new $20s to crimp the style of counterfeiters trying to print bogus bills on high-end copy machines and computers. But he pronounced the students’ copies as outstanding--”from an artistic point of view.”

Santiago’s prize was a crisp new bill dispensed by an automated teller machine outside the Los Angeles Unified School District headquarters.

Joe Volmar, an ATM technician for the credit union that owns the machine, crossed his fingers when the boy pressed its buttons and waited for his prize to appear.

“It should have no trouble recognizing the new $20s,” Volmar said hopefully. “But new bills have a tendency to stick together.”

The familiar old $20 bills will remain legal tender. But Treasury Department officials anticipate that one in every four $20s in circulation six months from now will be the redesigned version.

Although the government issued newly designed $100 notes in early 1996 and began circulating new $50s a year ago, the new $20s will probably be the first new design that most people will see. That’s because it is the currency that most ATMs dispense and the largest bill used by most consumers.

Santiago proved one thing when his prize finally popped out of the ATM, slipped through his fingers and fluttered to the floor:

The new $20 bills aren’t any easier to hold on to than the old ones.