Teachers experience poverty simulation
Teachers got a glimpse of what it’s like to live under the stress of poverty during their professional development training last week.
High school teachers spent Wednesday doing the United Way Poverty Simulation, and Middle and Intermediate School teachers worked on the project on Thursday.
The poverty simulation is a way to educate people about the challenges those who live in poverty face, according to Kim Johnson, United Way training facilitator. United Way provides the simulation to businesses and organizations throughout Northwest Arkansas, she said.
During the poverty simulation, teachers were divided into families and each given a role, such as parent, teen or child, and a scenario. Each family had its own dynamic, including families led by single parents, two parents, grandparents and older siblings.
Participants were then asked to survive four 15-minute weeks. Teens and children attended school, and parents had to report to work. They were also responsible for finding money for food and paying bills.
The simulation included booths where social services were available, as well as a grocery store, bank, doctor’s office, pawn shop and payday advance loan company. However, participants were required to have transportation passes to reach those locations.
Some of the participants became so desperate they resorted to crime, stealing their neighbor’s resources or taking advantage
of them financially. Participants also faced misleading information about where to find resources, and scam artists who took their money.
The simulation included a police officer, played on Wednesday by high school vice principal Kevin Snavely, who was in charge of arresting and jailing those who broke the law. He reported afterwards that he was often overwhelmed by the number of complaints and couldn’t provide adequate assistance.
After the simulation, teachers spent time debriefing and discussing their experiences. Many teachers reported they were so stressed about the various challenges they faced during the simulation that education simply wasn’t a priority. Stephanie Goddard, a high school teacher who played the role of a parent during the simulation, said she was so worried about finding a way to meet her family’s basic needs that she entirely forgot to send her children to school.
Joey Cox, another high school teacher who played the role of a pregnant teenager, said she had to drop out of school to care for her two younger brothers and to find a job to support the family. Another high school teacher who played the role of a teenage boy, reported he turned to a life of crime to help feed his family.
Teresa Morgan, middle school principal, said the poverty simulation helped teachers better relate to some of the situations their students face and gave them an empathy they may not have had before. It also provided teachers with a level of problem-solving challenges many had never experienced, such as transportation problems, household dynamics and ill parents or grandparents, she said.
“They’re experiencing things they see in their students and their families,” she said.
The simulation was paired with training on recognizing student trauma and its effects on brain development, according to Grace Davis, professional development director for the district. She explained that school officials wanted to pair the informational learning with experiential training, emphasizing that poverty in and of itself does not equate trauma.
Both experiences reflect on the school’s commitment to serve the whole child, academically, physically, socially and emotionally, she said. The trauma sensitive training helped teachers recognize when behavior problems are caused by trauma. Once teachers can meet children’s needs, they can help them get back to the job of learning, Davis said.