Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 14, 1995 TAG: 9505190016
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: B3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ELIZABETH STROTHER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Eighth-graders in the know were running back to advise friends just starting out, all of their choices still before them: How long would they go to school? What job would they have? At 28, would they be married? Would they have children?
These youngsters were shopping at the Reality Store-Galax. The "store" is a Business and Professional Women project designed to get youngsters thinking about the choices they'll soon be facing, and what impact those choices will have on their lives. The Galax BPW held one this month in cooperation with the Galax Middle School and a guardian angel in the person of Toni Fowler of the Twin County Coalition for Better Beginnings.
I went down to check it out, since I had written last year about working at my sister's club's "store" in Alexandria, and Toni had called to find out more. One big difference I noticed right off in Galax: A sweet kid named Lee Brackens hustled from table to table asking the volunteers if they needed any refreshments.
I'm not complaining, mind you, but in Alexandria, I talked to kids for four hours straight on a thimble full of water, dragged myself on my belly across a parched gym floor, and found that our little clients had consumed pretty much all of the food and drinks.
Another difference that impressed me was the community nature the project had taken on. In the smaller, more cohesive city of Galax, the middle school gladly incorporated the exercise into its guidance program for kids at the appropriate age, and businesses and organizations lent workers to help club members bring it off.
That had been Fowler's daunting task: rounding up enough volunteers on a workday to man the tables where kids made their choices - and where they learned how much those choices were going to cost. In the ABCs of life, the Reality Store carries nothing on the A's and B's of sex education - abstinence, abortion and birth control, delicate subjects left to the school's family-life curriculum - but is well-stocked with C's: consequences.
If the kids can make the connection between A, B and C, they might make more carefully considered choices before saddling themselves too soon with the expenses of having children. Shoot, the expenses without kids were childhood-shattering.
"I'm not gonna use water!" one boy lamented as a volunteer at the utilities table subtracted the cost from his after-tax earnings. "I never knew it'd cost this much to live." And he hadn't even got to the Chance of Life bowl yet, where he'd draw a slip of paper telling him what to fork out for some unexpected bill. That can get nasty, as another youngster found.
"I've got diabetes and my car caught on fire!" he blurted to a friend as he approached the station where Janet Carrico was handing out prescriptions of Skittles candies and telling kids how much they had to pay for medicines.
"I'm just gonna make it," he said, bouncing nervously in front of us. "I think I'm gonna be like a dollar in the hole. First I had a Mustang, but it burned up. Now I have aaaaa - a Dodge Neon, I think." He was going to be an auto mechanic, and he did all right. He had $55 at the end of a rather disastrous month.
Less fortunate was a shy young girl who wanted to be a beautician. She thought she'd be unmarried, but have one child, and she found she couldn't make ends meet. "You might want to buy a cheaper car than a Mustang," I suggested cheerily as she stared in disbelief at her negative balance after paying for day care.
"Do you want to do that, or give back the child," asked Rebecca Alexander at the child-care table.
"Give back the child."
She was not alone.
"A lot of them coming through say 'I got rid of those kids,'" Carrico had told me earlier, smiling and rolling her eyes. "It's not that easy."
No. But like the Mustangs and the medical degrees so many of these eighth-graders are planning to have, the kids aren't yet real. These children at the threshold of adolesence still have all of these choices to make - about schoolwork, goals, sex - and perhaps this glimmer of reality can help light their way.
"It really told you how quickly money can leave you," one participant commented on the evaluation afterward.
"I learned that you can't just buy anything that you want to, but that you have to balance your budget," wrote another.
One parent told Fowler her daughter had come home complaining about how expensive everything was. And that she had had to buy a $200 stove at the Chance of Life bowl, and she didn't like that one bit. Another girl complained she had to spend $20 to buy her husband a box of chocolates. Surely a woman "whom Fortune hath cruelly scratched."
So they don't yet fully "get it." But they learned a lot. The experiece, wrote one student, "taught me to appreciate my parents because they have to work so hard to provide for me."
We have contact.
by CNB