Seventh Grader Community Service 

One day last spring I happened to be walking through the campus of the middle school. Jon Meridith, the director, looked at me with wonder, since I have not had a child on that campus for four years and said, “Amazing, you are on my list to call today.”  
We talked about his plan about changing the seventh grade’s community service focus to hunger issues. I gave him some ideas and he asked if I could come and talk to the seventh grade for just less than an hour when school got back in session. Knowing I would have gotten Carter off to college by then I said yes.
Talking to seventh graders is not everyone’s idea of a fun time. They can be hard to engage and entertain. My role was to bring the hunger issue down to the Durham level. Hunger is a complicated issue, it mostly starts with poverty. I had to devise a talk that got the kids involved. I planned to invite at least a dozen kids up on stage with me and do it game show style.
My allotted time was today at 1:30 after lunch and recess, not the most energetic time of day. I started out by telling the kids the story of the man who used to eat from my garbage can in Washington, then moved into the game of them learning about the cost of living in Durham and how much money someone who earns a living age needed for food, housing, childcare, transportation, medical, taxes and other.  
When I asked questions many hands went up. When I needed volunteers to come up on the stage, more hands. The kids were polite, involved, insightful, and very engaged. After learning about how much it cost to live we talked about what happens if someone is sick, or looses a job, where in those buckets of money that were budgeted for housing and transportation and the like would the saving come? This is how we discussed that the food budget is one of the elastic buckets.
Once they saw how much it cost to live we played a second game to show them what the average wage in Durham was for different jobs. I saw the light go off in their eyes when they knew that it took a single parent of two children to earn over $59,000, but the average wage of a hair dresser was around $31,000 or someone in protective services was $32,000.
We talked about how hard it was to concentrate in school when they were hungry. They now understood that 65% kids in the school just down the street were on free or reduced price lunches.
They began to grasp the importance of the Food Bank so I spent a few minutes explaining exactly how it worked. They asked great questions. When I finished something happened that I never expected, they gave me a standing ovation.  
If you have a seventh grader at DA you should be proud. They could not have been a better audience. I hope they will have a good day tomorrow going to work at the Food Bank and then to the grocery store to try and buy food on a budget. I think they will go with a much better understanding of a very complicated issue.