About 80 Ball State University students and faculty participated in a poverty simulation from 6 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. Wednesday in the L.A. Pittenger Student Center Ballroom.
Participants were assigned roles as members of families living below the poverty line, which is below $20,000 for a family of four. Family homes were marked by various groupings of chairs scattered throughout the room. Places such as a grocery store, bank, pawn shop, school and jail were set up as booths along the walls.
Although each family's experience was different, general similarities were noticeable. All family members were given money, transportation passes and a small backstory to start their lives.
Children were expected to go to school, where attendance was taken and homework was assigned. After school, they went back home to wait for their parents to return.
Senior social work major Teri Whitaker was assigned a role as an 8-year-old child with learning disabilities and a single father. She said her experience at school was a good example of overcrowding in public schools because a combined classroom of elementary, middle and high school students was taught by two teachers.
"I tried to get in trouble [at school]," Whitaker said. "But they weren't paying attention to me."
To fight boredom, Whitaker and her 3-year-old brother, played by counseling psychology professor DeLeana Strohl, asked a suspicious stranger for "candy" [drugs] and money for their family. Whitaker and Strohl both spent time in foster care after their father, played by senior elementary education major Christopher Braden, neglected to return home to look after them.
During a debriefing at the end of the simulation, participants who role-played as children said they were bored at home because they couldn't leave and had almost no interaction with their parents.
Adults had to provide money for their families. They went to work, cashed their paychecks and paid for food, mortgages and utilities.
Braden, who played a full-time employee and a recently divorced man with three children, said he didn't have enough time to do everything.
"I was running back and forth, and I still didn't have enough time," he said.
After the time-elapsed four weeks of simulated poverty, only one of approximately 20 families managed to pay all of its expenses and keep its house.
Strohl said she required students in her graduate-level multicultural counseling course, to attend the simulation as a way for them to better understand the situations some of their clients experience.
Poverty Simulation Facilitator Kyra Hainlen said she hoped students left the simulation with a better understanding of the realities and obstacles people living in poverty face everyday.
The poverty simulation was sponsored by TEAMwork for Quality Living, a local nonprofit organization, and the department of social work, Hainlen said.
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