Learning low-income lessons

Inglemoor students participate in a poverty simulation

AmyJo Christensen spends most of her time as a 17-year-old student at Inglemoor High, where she is a member of the Key Club.

Likewise, Cody Freeze, also 17, is, most days, a student at Inglemoor. On March 13, both were transformed, at least for about an hour or so, into some very different roles.

AmyJo aged to 19 and became an unemployed single mom with a 1-year-old son, Josh. Her son’s father wasn’t in the picture and wasn’t paying child support. AmyJo was living with Cody, who jumped all the way to 25 years of age and had just been released from prison. Instead of graduating high school, he had earned his GED and was working in the cafeteria of a hospital.

AmyJo and Cody were two of about 50 or more Inglemoor students who took part in a poverty simulation sponsored by the school’s Key Club with the help of the local Hopelink. Cascadia Community College student Kelly Benson helped organize the simulation as a college project.

Hopelink’s Linda Benson said her organization has put together such simulations in the past. Participants are given random outlines of their family situations and then have to figure out how to find a job, pay the rent, pay for food, transportation, find day care or whatever else they might need. Various stations are set up, in this case in the Inglemoor cafeteria, simulating everything from banks to pawn shops to the county Department of Family Services.

“It sounds like it’s going to be a challenge to try and balance all the things we need to balance,” AmyJo said. Cody agreed, adding he could see it was going to be tough to support two adults and a child on one income.

Another student, Chelsea Eliott, 17, said the simulation seemed especially appropriate given the current economic headlines.

“This is a really great thing to raise awareness of the problems a lot of people face,” said another Key Club member, Paige Roberts, 15, who was running a “Quick Loans” paycheck loan shop.

The loan shop became a pretty popular destination as students began to run short of cash as the “month” wore on. Another crowded stop was the social-services table run by Hopelink’s Barbara Whitehurst. Students stopped by to sign up for aid with their children and so on.

“The challenging thing here,” Whitehurst said, “is they find out there is a lot of paperwork.”

Students lived their newly assigned lives for a “month” consisting of four, 15-minute “weeks.” Several students said one of the challenges was finding time to do everything they needed to do, in many cases, including taking care of children from infants to teens.

Kelly Benson admitted some of the students seemed to be having fun running from place to place.

“This is sort of a game,” Benson said. “But even if they are not being 100 percent serious, they are still are picking up on some of the realities of living with a low income.”

Benson interrupts her comments to remind students it is officially the “weekend.” Even if they hadn’t gotten done what they needed to get done, they had to spend some time at “home,” essentially groups of chairs spread around the cafeteria.

The simulation became fairly detailed as the “month” grew longer. As a 3-year-old left at home alone by his single father, Brian Trabun, 16, found himself being picked up by social services. He said it had proven difficult for his “father” to keep him in child care.

“We have needed things I’d never really thought about,” Brian added.

Playing a 42-year-old armed-robbery suspect in police custody, Sean Murphy, 16, stated what might seem painfully obvious to some.

“Life is challenging on a low income,” he said.

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