"Kids & Cash" A Preview
Wednesday, November 22, 2006PAUL KANGAS: With the markets closed for Thanksgiving tomorrow, we bring you "kids and cash," a NIGHTLY BUSINESS REPORT special edition. Tonight, we have a preview from Tampa, Florida. That's where Junior Achievement's enterprise village teaches real world money and business skills hands-on. As Jeff Yastine reports, 14,000 of the area's fifth graders will go through the program this year.
JEFF YASTINE, NIGHTLY BUSINESS REPORT CORRESPONDENT: It's a field trip like no other. For these fifth graders, it's time to trade in their textbooks for checkbooks and graduate from being students to shopkeepers because, for at least this one morning, they're members of this JA enterprise village. It's a miniature community of more than 15 businesses which the students will learn to manage...
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The first person I'm going to need to work with is the bookkeeper, because she's in charge of a lot of things.
YASTINE: ...stock with inventory....
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You take the whole bin. I'll be back to collect it later.
YASTINE: ...figure out how to set prices...
UNIDENTIFIED CHILD: Those should be, like, $4.
UNIDENTIFIED CHILD: $3.
UNIDENTIFIED CHILD: No, we don't want to make it too expensive. We want to get some cheap stuff, some stuff that's cheap for us.
UNIDENTIFIED CHILD: $2.50?
UNIDENTIFIED CHILD: Yeah.
YASTINE: ...and cash their paychecks and cover their business loans at the bank.
UNIDENTIFIED CHILD: We're depositing. I'm depositing my check with a deposit ticket.
YASTINE: The basic goal here is teaching children the basics of consumer finance and business economics.
KEITH GALL, JUNIOR ACHIEVEMENT: Kids have a tendency of thinking just money is there. It's available to me whenever I want it. I don't have to manage how I spend it. And so what we're trying to do is set some of those foundations for kids. To understand how it is that I get money, I get it from working in a job. And once I get that money, what are some of the responsibilities I have in managing that money, either as a businessperson or as an individual?
YASTINE: For many of these kids, the experience is an eye-opener. Ten-year-old Molly Fulmer is managing a grocery store.
UNIDENTIFIED CHILD: Now you've got to pay $5 to creative recycling, too. Where's the attorneys office? I've got to take this to the bank.
YASTINE: What you see of the kids here is not just a one-shot, one-day event. They've been preparing for this for more than a month in class. They're learning about work and money as both consumers and businesspeople.
ANNE PELUSO, 5TH GRADE TEACHER, RICHARD PRIDE ELEM.: On your paper, I want you to draw a line down the middle. And at the top, write "enterprise village."
YASTINE: As part of the program, teacher Anne Peluso invited her students to look over classified job ads for JA enterprise village and interview for the positions they wanted. They also learned the basics of bookkeeping, check writing and all the rest.
PELUSO: They have learned so much more than just the math aspects. They've learned to work as a team. We have a manager. We have a bookkeeper. We have workers at every business. And the students have to work together to come up with radio ads and they had to write stories. There have been just so many things that they've learned from this experience.
YASTINE: Although this facility is about a year old, the Tampa-St. Petersburg area has had a JA enterprise village for nearly 20 years and the concept has since expanded to other U.S. cities and even Japan. They say research has shown that it works and kids learn. All you have to do is ask Thomas Scruggs, the manager at the village's Bank of America branch.
THOMAS SCRUGGS, 5TH GRADER: I've enjoyed it.
YASTINE: What do you think you learned most?
SCRUGGS: How hard it is for other real Bank of America people, managers, to do this.
YASTINE: Or ask the village mayor, Jason Canada, who's learned a little about life, along with an education on money.
JASON CANADA, 5TH GRADER: How hard it was to actually have a job like this. And, like, checks, money-wise, it's harder to write checks because you don't want to spend all your money at one time.
MOLLY FULMER, 5TH GRADER: I didn't know anything about ticket - I mean deposit stubs or anything like that and how complicated it was. I can't even believe adults can do this.
YASTINE: Jeff Yastine, NIGHTLY BUSINESS REPORT, Tampa.
