Kids take on 'real' roles
Junior Achievement program lets students experience economic concepts, jobs, life

By BETH MILLER / The News Journal   03/06/2005

WILMINGTON -- What 11-year-old Ashlee Stratman, of Dover, thought she wanted to be was a restaurant manager. But by the middle of her visit to Junior Achievement's Enterprise Village in Wilmington, she was pretty happy as manager of St. Francis Hospital.

She might even want to do a job like that later in her life - when the decisions and money she makes are for real.

The visit to the Junior Achievement complex Friday gave Ashlee and dozens of her fifth-grade classmates from Lake Forest Central Elementary School in Felton a chance to try on grown-up roles.

They worked in name-brand offices with realistic equipment and jobs modeled after the ones they'll likely see when they're looking for work not many years from now. They tried to make payroll, balance checkbooks, control spending, market their products, buy some stuff in the Happy Harry's store and still wind up with a little something in the model WSFS Bank.

The pace was hectic and purposeful, if sometimes a bit confusing. Periodically, everything would freeze to allow kids and adults to evaluate how business was going.

"I think it's great," Ashlee said. "It really is like real life. You're doing one thing and then another thing pops up and you have to go do it really quick. You have to put other people first. You can't take a minute."

"It's a start-off for what you'll do in the future," said B.J. Hamlett, 10, of Felton, who was working in the bank. "It's good experience."

Enterprise Village is one of two similar programs at Junior Achievement of Delaware's facility. It gives kids in elementary grades greater exposure to economic concepts they need to meet state education standards - and other life challenges. The other program, Finance Park, is adjacent to Enterprise Village and designed for students in middle- and high-school grades. The older students are assigned a life situation and a salary, and let loose to see how they manage. They might be single or married with four kids. They might make $50,000 a year or $29,000. Adults are on hand to help them monitor their finances, examine their budgets and determine how their purchasing decisions are affecting their ability to meet their responsibilities.

Junior Achievement of Delaware was the first in the nation to open both programs, said program manager Perry Bacon, who has 15 years of retail experience. About half a dozen other sites in the country have the Finance Park concept in place, according to Keith Gall, Junior Achievement's vice president in charge of the two programs worldwide, and a Tokyo chapter has the Enterprise Village program, which they call "Student City." Great Britain, Colombia and Korea also are discussing participation, he said.

Local businesses lease space in the 13,000-foot Delaware complex, provide some inventory or supplies and outfit an office or store to look like the real thing.

"I was amazed," said volunteer Tammy Cole, who owns the Country Skillet in Harrington and had a daughter participating in the program. "You walk in and it's like a miniature community. There's just no better experience than hands-on."

About 2,000 students from private and public schools throughout Delaware, Cecil County, Md., and Salem County, N.J., have been through the facility in its first full year of operation, Bacon said. A minimum of 65 students and 17-20 trained volunteers are needed to run a program's many parts, he said, and smaller schools sometimes join together to meet that threshold.

The programs teach many concepts that link with the state's education standards, said Lewis Huffman, who oversees social studies for the state Department of Education and is a member of Junior Achievement's board of directors.

"We used to have kids coming out of school who didn't know how to balance checkbooks, didn't understand finance charges, what interest was or how it affected payments," Huffman said. "Now, we're much more sophisticated with the standards. ... And the more we can get kids involved in an activity that simulates the real thing, the more likely they are to come away understanding the concept and skills we're trying to teach them. Here are the concepts of economics put into practice."

Economics has something to do with why local businesses use their real dollars to lease space in the complex, too.

Jim Kelly, chief customer service officer of ING Direct, said financial literacy is important to his company, and almost 100 of ING's 600 employees signed up to help with such programs.

"It's teaching kids how the community works in terms of government and service provision, but also how business works and how money moves throughout the community," he said. "We saw it as a natural tie-in to what we're doing."

Helping kids understand business is a goal for Steve Gaus, president of Interstate Equities Inc., which has 10 Burger King franchises in the area and sponsors the restaurant at the Junior Achievement complex. It also brings business to those franchises, he said, because kids who complete the program get a coupon for a free meal.

"Kids obviously don't go into Burger King by themselves," he said, "so the average check increases significantly."

The payoff for students is long-term, said Central Elementary teacher Karen Wyatt of Felton.

"I was worried the kids wouldn't be able to handle it all," she said. "But they're all psyched. I think they've learned a lot. ... They're having a ball. And we need all these guys to grow up and lead productive lives."

Aaron Forrest, 11, of Frederica, who wants to be a football player, wasn't wild about being the mayor. But he was giving it his best shot and would be giving a speech at the town meeting later in the day.

"It's fun," he said. "It teaches you how to work and it's just like real jobs - only it's for little kids."

Contact Beth Miller at 324-2784 or bmiller@delawareonline.com.

© 2005 delawareonline.com/The News Journal