Wilmington teachers get schooled on living in poverty during DSEA training exercise

Jessica Bies , Jessica Bies | The News Journal

Show Caption Hide Caption Educators learn struggles of poverty Red Clay educators learned about the challenges of living in poverty through a simulation exercise based on real life cases of low-income families.

Imagine a life of pure chaos, the Delaware State Education Association asked a group of Wilmington educators Tuesday.

You're a grandmother, raising your daughter's 7- and 9-year-old children because she's in jail and their father isn't in the picture. Your husband is disabled and can't leave the house, so he stays at home with the kids which is helpful until you're stuck in line at social services and realize you won't be able to make it across town in time to pay your utility bill.

He can't go either, so it looks like it will be late. Again.

During a simulation of what it's like to be poor, Red Clay School District educators from Warner Elementary, Highlands Elementary and Shortlidge Academy each took on the identity of someone living below the poverty line, acting out what it'd be like to subsist on a limited income for one month.

They were each given a "house," a group of chairs in the middle of the room, some money and a card explaining their make-believe family's unique circumstances. Their task was to provide food, shelter and other basic necessities by accessing various community resources during the course of four 15-minute “weeks.”

About 20 volunteers played the roles of resource providers, manning tables arranged around the perimeter of the room. Those resources included:

Quik Cash

Community Action Agency

Interfaith Services

Food-A-Rama

Sweaney’s Mortgage and Realty Co.

Big Dave’s Pawnshop

Realville Police Department

Friendly Utility Co.

Department of Social Services

Realville School

Building Blocks Daycare

General Employer

Community Healthcare Clinic

DSEA President Mike Matthews played the role of a drug dealer, roaming the room and trying to tempt educators into buying or selling drugs for quick cash. Another volunteer robbed houses left empty while participants applied for jobs, bought groceries, worked and attended school.

Delaware's First Lady, Tracey Quillen Carney, played the role of a utility worker, disconnecting families' power if they couldn't pay their bills.

The simulation was held in a conference room at the Christiana Hilton Hotel in Newark and kicked off two days of trauma-informed training for teachers.

DSEA, the state's largest educators union, is part of a new group called the Compassionate Connections Partnership. It received a $253,000 grant from the National Education Association in 2017 to provide targeted support to educators and reduce the impact of trauma on students.

The poverty simulation, in particular, is intended to help educators understand the situations that some families experience every day — the decisions they must make, and the fears and frustrations they feel.

More than 80 percent of students at Warner and Shortlidge come from low-income families, while more than 65 percent of the students at Highlands do, according to the state Education Department

"It helps our educators understand what their students go through at home," said Shelley Meadowcroft, director of public relations for DSEA. "It's hard to pay attention when you're hungry. It's hard to pay attention when you saw someone shot in front of your house."

Deb Stevens, director of instructional advocacy for DSEA, led the exercise.

"This is not a game," she told educators, "though it might seem like a game because you have play money."

She encouraged them to stick to their roles, especially if they were playing children.

"A child is generally not knowledgeable enough to give their parents advice on where to seek resources," she said.

Some of the participants were given small dolls, which represented babies. Throughout the course of the exercise, several were evicted from their homes or denied Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits (formerly known as food stamps) and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, cash benefits for impoverished families.

They had to pay one "transportation pass" per family member every time they traveled to a new place, symbolizing the money spent on public transportation or gas.

One teacher got to the social services office with only a couple of minutes left on the clock and couldn't finish her application for benefits before the buzzer sounded, which meant she had wasted her transportation pass.

She sighed heavily.

Another teacher told a bank teller: "I'm on my way to pawn our microwave. We don't need it."

Twenty minutes into the exercise — two weeks in simulated poverty — no one had visited the community health clinic, despite having underlying health conditions that required prescription medication. That community resource table was being manned by Eunique Lawrence, the assistant principal of Warner Elementary.

Health is the first thing many families sacrifice, she said, because they can't afford insurance or hospital bills and are too busy trying to provide for their families to make it a priority.

"It's good my staff gets to see this," she said. Teachers in the Red Clay School District make an average starting salary of $43,460 and get health benefits.

Some of the educators rushed around the room with big red "HUNGRY" signs around their necks, symbolizing that they couldn't afford groceries that week. At the school, several students sat looking dejected, left behind during a field trip that their parents couldn't afford to pay for.

One 15-year-old, who had been expelled, started wandering around the room, bored. Matthews took the opportunity to try to sell him drugs.

James Stiner, who has been working at Shortlidge Academy as part of Wilmington University's one-year teacher residency program, was evicted, he said. He stood in the middle of the room with Thelma Hinds, assistant chair of WilmU's clinical studies program, trying to figure out what to do next.

The homeless shelter only had two empty beds, but they had four people in their family. Stiner and Hinds, role playing as parents, quickly decided that their 15-year-old daughter and disabled father-in-law would stay in the shelter, while they slept in their car.

"I was angry," Hinds said afterward, describing what it was like to walk back to their house and see the evicted sign. "I was frustrated ... I probably took it too personally."

During a debrief held after the simulation, she admitted that Wilmington University could be doing a better job getting teachers ready to work with students from impoverished families. She asked DSEA staff what it would take to bring the poverty simulation to campus.

"I don't think we prepare them for this," she said.

Zach Kern, a fifth-grade special education teacher at Warner Elementary, played the grandmother raising her daughter's kids.

"It's just a lot to juggle all at once," he said. "There are so many things to take care of, so many places to be. It was a constant scramble."

"I didn't know what to expect, but it was really valuable."

Many of the teachers felt angry and frustrated because they had so much difficulty paying for things during the simulation. They started shouting or rubbing their heads.

One teacher admitted to being on the cusp of cursing at the volunteers.



Vickie Caprinolo, with DSEA, encouraged them to tap into that feeling and think about how many parents seem annoyed when they have to leave work and come to school for a conference. It's probably not personal, she said. Those parents are juggling a lot of things at once.

Keziah Finney, a fifth-grade math teacher at Warner, said some of those families may not feel comfortable letting the school know what they're going through or asking for help.

She recently had a student whose family was evicted, she said, but they wouldn't give her any details because they were afraid she'd call child protective services.

Though the simulation was being held after the end of the school year, Caprinolo thought it had a lot of value.

"The fact is a lot of people in poverty do get the runaround," she said. "When we come back in the fall, we're still going to have families experiencing this."

The educators were also given a book called "Disrupting Poverty," with strategies they could study over the summer for helping students deal with the debilitating effects of acute financial need.

TRENDING STORIES

No suspension for these four teachers, under current Delaware law

Domino's paves potholes in Milford

A sneak peek at Brandywine Zoo's $13 million vision

Contact Jessica Bies at (302) 324-2881 or jbies@delawareonline.com. Follow her on Twitter @jessicajbies.

Looking for more education news? Visit delawareonline.com/education. Submit story ideas at delonline.us/2i2tugB.