Wake Forest’s Calloway School students take business knowledge into local classrooms

The 23 students are volunteers with Junior Achievement of Northwest North Carolina, the local chapter of an international program designed to educate young people about free enterprise, business and economics.

Once a week this semester, Calloway students have visited third-grade classrooms at Sherwood Forest Elementary School and seventh-grade classrooms at Jefferson Middle School to teach students there about the core principles of the American economic system. Each lesson lasts about one hour. Junior Achievement supplies the curriculum and materials; Calloway students supply the creative energy.

“Without the volunteers to bring these lessons to life there would be no program,” said Arthur Hardin, president of Junior Achievement of Northwest North Carolina. “Calloway students bring with them an excellent reputation and to be able to share that excellence with local students is really a positive for the program.”

Jack Wilkerson, dean of the Calloway School and a member of Junior Achievement of Northwest North Carolina’s board of directors, introduced the idea to his students last spring.

“Whenever we can take our knowledge of business and the marketplace and share it with the community, that is a great opportunity,” said Wilkerson, who also volunteered as a teacher with Junior Achievement at Jefferson Middle School last fall.

Junior Achievement gives each grade level a different economic focus, with materials that complement the grade’s established social studies curriculum. Third-graders learn about various aspects of a city by role-playing as city planners, restaurant owners and newspaper reporters. Junior Achievement’s international marketplace curriculum shows seventh graders how they are connected, through trade, to people and cultures throughout the world. For the Calloway students, the subjects are familiar, but teaching the concepts to a young audience can be a challenge.

“It can be challenging to find ways to bring these somewhat complicated issues to their level,” said Brent Blum, a senior business major who participated in Junior Achievement as a young student in the Cincinnati school system. “It took a couple of visits to learn how to present ourselves to a group of seventh graders.”

Blum volunteers at Jefferson Middle School on Friday afternoons. Lindsey Jones, a senior from Atlanta, volunteers at the school on Friday mornings.

“For me, part of this experience is seeing what the students already know,” said Jones, who is double majoring in business and French.

The Calloway students team-teach in groups of two to three in classrooms of about 25 students. Many volunteers, like Ryan Reitz, see their involvement in the program as a personal mission.

“One of my own objectives was for the students not just to learn something, but to be able to see it when they leave the classroom,” said Reitz, a senior finance major from Pittsburgh.

Reitz used resources from the students’ hometown of Winston-Salem to help explain economic lessons to third-graders at Sherwood Forest Elementary. For the city-planning lesson, he took pictures of local developments, construction sites and factories to help the students relate the lesson to their own surroundings. To encourage students to share what they had learned about the restaurant business, he gave out coupons to a local fast-food chain.

“It has given me a chance to look again at the core elements of what we’re learning in the Calloway School,” he said. “We’re really teaching the very basic building blocks of capitalism.”

Note to editors: Members of the media are invited to Jefferson Middle School on Friday morning, Dec. 7 for the students’ last lesson. Contact the News Service to arrange coverage.