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Experience offers eighth-graders a dose of reality
Imagine living paycheck to paycheck. Trying to make rent and a car payment on minimum wage. Raising kids when you'd rather be raising cain.
Now that's reality. And welcome to the experience, eighth-graders.
Take a spin on the Wheel of Life and discover your profession. Roll the dice to see if you're a parent to none or four. Get a green card and go directly to the legal table for some divorce court action.
Life itself perhaps isn't quite as simple as the Reality Experience portrays it in a one-hour visit to the Putnam County Fairgrounds. But Monday's annual program for the county's eighth-graders can be just as cruel nonetheless.
After all, it was all about the harsh reality of facing tight budgets, rising housing and utility costs, insurance needs, future goals and innumerable obstacles along the way.
Nearly 500 students from Greencastle, Cloverdale, Eminence, North Putnam and South Putnam schools -- many of whom have never previously been exposed to the true cost of living -- descended upon the Community Building at the fairgrounds Monday for the annual Reality Experience.
Sponsored by the Greencastle Kiwanis Club in conjunction with the local Lions and Rotary clubs, Kappa Delta Phi and Delta Theta Tau philanthropic sororities, League of Women Voters, Youth Development Commission, Putnam County Foundation and Putnam County Hospital, the program also involved numerous local real estate, insurance, banking and justice system representatives.
The Kiwanis inherited the Reality Experience 10 years from the Greencastle Business and Professional Women (BPW) which had called it the Reality Store. The process essentially remains the same as 15-stop, hands-on tour of the adult world, starting with the inevitability of paying taxes and concluding with information on voting and civic pride.
"It's an eye-opening experience for some of them, especially when they run out of money," organizer Justin Long, a past president of Kiwanis, noted.
Long joined Barb Ashworth and Jim Maxwell in a core group that works on the experience for several months, but he's the first to say the event would not be possible without all the volunteers and organizations that man the booths and help move the waves of students through the process. The Lions Club, for example, feeds the students lunch.
"We couldn't do it without them," Long said of the volunteers. "It's really a collaboration of those groups and local business. We all believe in it as a worthwhile experience.
"It's good for kids to learn early on the value of a dollar."
Or, as many of the students soon found out, the predicament of not having a dollar left after paying bills, funding education and insurance and putting food on the table.
By the time most of them get to the food and housing table, they have no money, having succumbed to the lure of a new car or truck, coupled with the necessity of insuring and maintaining such a vehicle. That meant little or no dough left to spend on food and clothing, let alone furniture and appliances.
"Man," one Cloverdale eighth-grader moaned, "I had to get a part-time job to get more money."
The goal of the Reality Experience has been to motivate local eighth-graders to think about their futures, what financial resources might be necessary to meet their lifestyle and the value of education in getting a job that pays well enough to enable such an existence.
Given a chance to see what it's like to be an adult, students even cast ballots on a timely question of the day (this year it was "Should the minimum wage be raised?").
"I voted yes," Cloverdale eighth-grader Dymond Foster said in what would seem the simple, logical answer for most young teens.
However, she had a very adult explanation of why she thought raising the minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $10 was important.
"There are some women who can't get better jobs and make better money," Foster reasoned, "because maybe they don't have the education to do so."
Prior to the fairgrounds experience, the students worked with school counselors and their teachers on career planning and such aspects of adult life as balancing a checkbook.
In reality, the program even presented a hidden benefit, standing as a good example of local groups and businesses working together for the betterment of the whole.
"It's good to see," Long agreed. "It's a great example of getting a diverse group of people working together for one goal."