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EVE LEBERSONOlder students instruct younger ones and everyone learns in a joint project involving Sickles High, Citrus Elementary and Junior Achievement.
CITRUS PARK - It's payday in Room 201.
Little hands reach toward Stacey Spivey and Nick Rodriguez, two Sickles High School students who will be in charge of this classroom in Citrus Park Elementary for the next 45 minutes.
The high school students-turned-teachers are giving a lesson on how a community works. They assign jobs to 23 second-graders: mayor, librarian, doughnut shop worker. Then they circle the classroom to distribute wages - five faux bills to each nongovernment employee.
The kids are excited: Oh, the things they'll buy.
Then Spivey and Rodriguez break the bad news: It's tax time. The students have to fork over $2 apiece so government workers will get paid. The second-graders groan under the weight of their tax burden.
Most civics lessons aren't greeted with this much enthusiasm, but this particular Tuesday is different. It's not every day that students teach students.
"It's a change, and whenever there's a change, it makes (class) more interesting," said Diana Koch, assistant principal at Citrus Park Elementary.
Spivey and Rodriguez are among 22 student government leaders from Sickles High who are coming to the elementary school once a week this spring to lead second- and third-graders through an economics lesson.
The schools are pairing up through Junior Achievement, a nonprofit organization that teaches students in kindergarten through 12th grade about the free enterprise system.
The program now reaches more than 15,500 students in 75 schools across Hillsborough County, said Carla Prescott, education director of Junior Achievement of West Central Florida Inc. It offers classroom curricula and job shadowing opportunities.
Junior Achievement also provides the education materials at Enterprise Village in Pinellas County, where fifth- and eighth-graders learn about the business world in a simulated city environment. In Hillsborough County, the organization will break ground in May on a similar facility adjacent to Muller Elementary in North Tampa.
"We really build our programs as an enrichment to what they're already teaching" in both the elementary and high schools, Prescott said. Junior Achievement allows young students to get extra exposure to economics, so "we're actually helping the teachers meet some of the benchmarks" required by the county, she said.
At the same time, teens are building communication, presentation and time-management skills. "It's a nice opportunity to help these high school students gain skills which will be transferable into adulthood," Prescott said.
Sickles has been involved with Junior Achievement for several years. But this is the Sickles students' first venture into teaching through the program.
The teens prepared for their five-week project with a two-hour Junior Achievement training session in March, where they learned teaching techniques to use with the children.
Last Tuesday, they completed their third lesson at Citrus Park.
Sickles' student government sponsor, teacher Art Swary, said this has been a valuable experience for the high-schoolers.
"It's a situation where the kids are in charge of things and learn what works and what doesn't," he said. "It's really been great to see them working in front of the students."
Elsewhere in the elementary school on Tuesday, seniors Adam Tate and Christine Swain were giving a classroom full of third-graders a lesson on city planning.
At Tate's feet was a 3-foot by 4-foot floor map of a fictional city that the children have dubbed Smallville. Their creation includes personalized three-dimensional popup buildings with business names such as Angelica's Clothing Store, Uncle Jessie's Post Office and Cheese Elementary.
The previous week, the class had learned about different land-use zones. This time the lesson taught how one would open a restaurant.
"It's an experience for the younger kids as well as us," said Tate, the Sickles student body president. "I'm learning just as much as they are, just in a different sense."
- Eve Leberson can be reached at 269-5302 or leberson@sptimes.com