Wyoming Education Association

Winter 2018

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X X WEA at Work 19 How the Poverty Simulation Can Help You Serve High Risk Students by Judy Trohkimoinen Could you and your family live a month in poverty? Would you know what resources are available to you? Would you be able to improve your situation, would it stay the same, or would it get worse? How can you help your students and their families if they're living in poverty? The Missouri Community Action Network (CAN) developed a simulation that can help us to answer these questions and learn more about families and individuals living in poverty. The simulation (it is not a game!) assigns each person a role in a family living at the edge of the poverty line in the town of Realville and each family is given some resources and information about their families. Some families' only income source is a disability check. Others have no income source because they were abandoned by their breadwinner. Still other families do have employed members to support them but have other challenges, such as health issues, and need to navigate through resources. Realville also has resources like a bank, a supermarket, a school, interfaith, and social services for participants to utilize. The goal of the simulation is to keep your family fed, your home secure, and to survive the month. This simulation is not easy! WEA has received a NFIE (National Foundation for the Improvement of Education) grant from NEA to increase poverty awareness and our ability as educators to have empathy and better serve our students who are living in poverty. It focuses on our more rural and high poverty areas in the Northeast Region and on the reservation. As part of that grant we're using the Poverty Simulation with school districts and will be incorporating other activities to help our members and their districts better meet the needs of their students. This powerful tool is available to districts free of charge and can be a life- changing event for participants. To get started, we have partnered with South Dakota Education Association to do some presentations and to get more ideas to help our members learn more about poverty and the reality of living in it. The two groups met this summer in Rapid City to develop ideas and to write the grant. Upton EA members Meda Warbis, Mindy Darrow, and Kasi White joined Newcastle EA member Michael Alexander in brainstorming ideas that might work in their communities and giving us an idea of what local resources were available. We used this information in submitting the grant and will continue to work with these locals as we move forward with implementation. We started with a Poverty Simulation for the entire school district in Newcastle on October 15 and will do another in Upton on January 2, both on professional development days. There's potential to do many more in the area as we go through the school year. Along with their Poverty Simulation kits Missouri CAN off ers facilitation trainings three times per year for organizations who have the kits so that they can eff ectively run a simulation. Judy Trohkimoinen attended the November 12-13 training in St. Louis and learned a good deal about facilitating the Poverty Simulation. The kit has been purchased by groups in all 50 states as well as Canada and is being used in Asia. It has become widely used and is an excellent resource. If you are interested in having the sim come to you, please contact us at jtrohkimoinen@wyoea.org and we'll work with you to fi nd a time to conduct it. Judy Trohkimoinen attends a training St. Louis to learn to facilitate the Missouri Community Action Poverty Simulation. This simulation can help educators better serve their students and families who live in poverty.

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