Cayla and I got to experience the ultimate in field trips Wednesday. I have never seen anything like this before and it was pretty awesome to say the least. Down at Gateway, Junior Achievement has a small city set up where 5
th grade and 8
th grade classes can go and run all the
busnesses as part of their financial literacy courses. This is preceded by several weeks of classroom instruction learning about money, how to write checks, deposit checks, what the role of a CEO and CFO are, the reality of taxes taken from your paycheck, how to set business goals; you name it, they learned it before they got there. I even had to attend 2 hours of training just to volunteer.
This city looks like a mini-mall with all the storefronts being different businesses that you have in a city. The town hall sits in the center and they hold town meetings on the "lawn" out in front.
http://www.ja-utah.org/city/index.html Click on
JA City virtual tour and then on that page you can click on any of the businesses on the right and it will zoom into them. This shows the businesses empty, but they are now set up with everything you need to run a business, desks, lap top computers, printers, and anything specific to that business.
Cayla was the CFO of Merit Medical where they manufacture the "smart pill." Her job was to apply for the business loan at the bank, write payroll checks, pay the business bills, print invoices to bill the other companies, and get ready all deposits to take to the bank. At Merit Medical they packaged and distributed smart pills (a tube that looked like a syringe with smarties inside) to each business (enough for each employee) and billed each business accordingly. Notice the flat screen TV on the wall in Merit Medical, where they broadcast what was going on live in the TV station. Most businesses had a flat screen TV, except for us in the radio station.
I got to help in the Radio station, where we had a DJ and Ad Executive along with our CEO and CFO. The DJ got to play all the music throughout the city, read ads for the other businesses in the city, and take song requests from the citizens. Our ad executive solicited for companies to advertise and delivered their bills to them after their ads were read on air.
Radio Station
On their breaks, the kids became regular citizens and could go around the city making purchases from their wages after they deposited their paychecks in the bank. They had to have some cash and some money in their accounts to write out checks, as some businesses were cash only and some were checks only. This way they had to learn to manage their money according to what purchases they wanted to make.
Cayla's company was only 1 of 2 that actually made enough money in the day to pay off their bank loan.
Yay CFO Cayla!!
The CFO at the radio station, could barely get her invoices entered and checks printed. She was totally clueless how to look up the loan balance or figure out how to tell what was going on with the account. Cayla, however, told me after that she had figured out how to look up and see if her deposits were completed at the bank or were pending, she could check her loan balance, and basically she just found her way around their computer system so that she could always see what was going on.
I was just cracking up the whole day as students came to read our gas and electric meters, change filters, install phones, do safety inspections, all things which we were then billed for. I mean this city was buzzing with every kind of job that it takes to run a city. The realty office even had to measure our spaces in order to know how much rent to charge us. It was an absolute riot to see kids buzzing around this city taking care of business all day. Even the Mayor stopped by to take our votes for outstanding business and citizen of the day.
Restaurant
The only downside to this whole experience is that we had to go home and we couldn't go back the next day!!
Post Note: I just received an email from Cayla's teacher saying the directors at
JA City said our school was one of the best they have had there in the past couple of years and they would like our school to come back next year. Yahoo!! Since Junior Achievement pays for this event, including hiring really nice tour buses to get the kids there, that is a great invitation. Too bad, I'm out of kids that will be in 5
th grade.
