[South Carolina] 'Realville' gives real-life poverty experience

from The Hilton Head Island Packet

BY JANUARY HOLMES,

Ann Cobb recently learned that her daughter is in jail, leaving her and her husband to take care of their grandchildren on a fixed income of $1,700 a month.

She tries her best to be calm, but desperation has begun to set in after the first week of living with her two grandchildren. Eventually, the children end up in jail because they tried to pawn her ring and a stereo they stole to buy food.

"It's not looking good," Cobb said.

Welcome to 'Realville.'

Realville is not a town, but a poverty simulation exercise created with help from Step Up Savannah's Poverty Reduction Initiative. Within an hour, the exercise took first-grade teacher Cobb and 54 of her Okatie Elementary School co-workers through a month in the life of a low-income family.

The simulation, which took place in the school's gym, involves four 15-minute "weeks," in which each family has to work and provide food, clothing, shelter and transportation for their children.

School administrators thought the poverty simulation would help teachers better understand their students since more than half of the 721 students at Okatie Elementary fall within the poverty line, said Matthew Hunt, a music teacher who helped coordinate the event.

A family of four with an income of less than $18,000 a year is considered to be living in poverty, said Lindsay Trout, Step Up project director assistant.

During the simulation, Cobb portrayed Zola Zuppot, who is married to Zeke, a 52-year-old who can't read but has a job as a security officer at the hospital. Zola works part time at the hospital gift shop, but has missed work lately since taking in 9-year-old Zenobia and 7-year-old Xander.

When the grandchildren get sick at school, Cobb takes them to work because she can't afford to miss a day, find a baby sitter or leave them at home alone. With $1,500 worth of bills, she and Barbara Westcott, who plays Zeke, barely have enough money for food or gas.

"We have no money," said Cobb. At the end of the first week, she has run out of time to cash two paychecks; the children's illness has her frazzled. "We have not planned well," she said.

For the next couple "weeks," they don't even have enough money to fill a prescription for Xander's attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. Without it, he becomes a menace at school.

"He's out of control," the children's teacher, played by speech pathologist Reaves Montjoy, told the grandparents. "You have your hands full with Xander."

The simulation was an eye-opener for those portraying people who are struggling to make ends meet while attending to family emergencies such as house break-ins, children on drugs and home foreclosures.

For Westcott, her role of not being able to read was especially hard when applying for food stamps.

"I was angry," said Westcott, a fourth-grade substitute teacher. "Everything was failing me."

Kristy Miller and Melissa Massett, both first-grade teachers who played the grandchildren, felt neglected as their grandparents worried more about paying bills than paying attention to them, they said.

Other teachers expressed similar frustrations after the simulation, but they also said they gained a better understanding of why some of their students come to school hungry, misbehave during class or never have the supplies they need.

"The kids really wanted to do well in school but they couldn't," Montjoy said of "students" whose families were too poor to buy school supplies. "They didn't have the means to."