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Grannemann Elementary students visit Enterprise Village
Paychecks, break times, timecards and other working-world concepts took on a more real tone for Grannemann Elementary fifth- and sixth-graders recently as they met the free enterprise system.
Approximately 120 students from the school paid a visit to Donald O. Schnuck Junior Achievement Enterprise Village in Chesterfield. It is a simulated community where students run sponsored businesses, receive paychecks and become consumers by making purchases.
Bank of America, AmerenUE, SBC/Cingular, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and St. Louis Children’s Hospital are among many of the village’s sponsors. Students worked in these businesses for a day. Students also determine advertising, overhead and operating expenses. They set retail prices on items as well as get involved in charitable giving and recycling programs, just as actual businesses do.
“Make sure you spend your money because you can’t take it with you when you leave,” Lorri Batsie told the students during a group morning briefing before they split into groups and walked to their “jobs.” Batsie is a program manager for Junior Achievement.
“It’s a great opportunity for us to provide students with a real-world experience where they assume the roles of workers, consumer and investors,” she said. “There’s nowhere else in St. Louis they can come and do this. Where else do you get to see fifth graders as nurse practitioners or as a mayor?”
Some of these students may return in a couple of years because middle and high school students have the chance to participate in the Free Enterprise Center’s other main activity, the A. G. Edwards JA Finance Park.
Over in the CW11 newsroom, Grannemann parent volunteer David Bell went over the instructions and rules for his students. Bell was one of 20 parent volunteers who agreed to help. The students’ participation in the village is impossible without parent volunteers.
The first step was for each company to send one person to the warehouse with a check to buy supplies for their stores. Only these people were allowed to leave their stores prior to the playing of the national anthem, which signified the start of the business day. At the warehouse, located in a corner of the vast room, students busied themselves accepting checks and filling supply requests.
Across the room at the Bank of America, Free Enterprise Center Executive Director Dr. Sara McCorkle explained how deposits and withdrawals and savings accounts worked to the new bank tellers as they prepared for customers. The first place each group of students headed on their breaks was to the bank to cash their checks.
Working in the Enterprise Village teaches students to follow directions, to be on-time and to read business descriptions. A large model traffic stoplight on a wall indicates which group’s turn it is to go on break — red, yellow or green group. Today, red group went first and soon the queue out of the bank stretched halfway across the room.
“We had nine class lessons to prepare for this,” said Beverly Brown, a guidance counselor at Grannemann. “The teachers had two hours of training and the parent volunteers went through an hour of training.”
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