Junior Achievement underachieving

By Susan Pugh

Published: November 8, 2008

There is an irony here, when you stop to think about it.

The Lynchburg chapter of Junior Achievement, an organization that exists to teach kids about economics and business, is on the verge of closing its doors because the economy has gone sour.

Why has the economy gone sour? Well, in large part, it’s because of a lot of people who don’t know anything about economics and business.

“About June or July, we knew we had some challenges ahead of us,” local chapter President Randy Holden told News & Advance reporter Annie McCallum last week. “A lot of the donations were not of the same caliber as before.”

For Martha Hamlett, a long-time Junior Achievement volunteer who works for Babcock & Wilcox, reductions in caliber weren’t the worst of it. Suddenly, a lot of former supporters were firing blanks.

“I started hearing, ‘Why don’t you come back and ask me next spring?’” she said. “Unfortunately, that’s going to be too late. We’re trying to make it until our Bowl-A-Thon in January, but our board has voted to shut down Nov. 15, if we can’t come up with the operating expenses we need.”

Which would be a shame, because Junior Achievement teaches kids the ways of the business world from kindergarten up, in the schools, at no cost to the taxpayers. It’s been doing this locally for 40 years.

This education includes information kits (at $75 a pop, according to Hamlett), classroom talks from business people who serve as volunteers and guidance in forming kid-run businesses.

According to the organization’s national Web site, “Junior Achievement programs help prepare young people for the real world by showing them how to generate wealth and effectively manage it, how to create jobs which make their communities more robust, and how to apply entrepreneurial thinking to the workplace.

“Students put these lessons into action and learn the value of contributing to their communities.”

This has a nice resonance in an age where “generating wealth” all too often means closing a factory or two so your stock price goes up.

Maybe some of those bank employees who gave home loans to people with no visible means of income might have benefited from Junior Achievement, along with the financially challenged loan applicants sitting across from them.

When my wife Gail was a Consumer Credit counselor, it was not unusual for her to encounter clients with a half-dozen Master Cards or VISAs.

Hey, no problem — you use Card B to pay off Card A, Card C to pay off Card B, and on and on.

Sure. Meanwhile, layers of interest build up like barnacles, and you suddenly find that you’ve been actually losing money at your current rate of payment.

Junior Achievement talks about that a lot in classrooms, which must make it even more galling to be slowly slipping into insolvency.

“Our basic budget is about $85,000,” Hamlett said. “A couple of companies have stepped up in recent weeks to help us out, but we still have about a $17,000-$20,000 shortfall.”

“The decision (to shut down) has been made for us,” JA board Chair Sarah Burnett told Annie, adding that she still held out a faint hope for some sort of resuscitation.

Not only does the local chapter cover Lynchburg, it covers the counties of Amherst, Appomattox, Bedford, Campbell and Pittsylvania as well. According to Hamlett, that means serving more than 5,000 students.

Charlottesville’s Junior Achievement chapter has already ceased to exist. Richmond’s is flourishing, but in the midst of a multi-million dollar building campaign.

“We asked them to adopt us,” Hamlett said, “but their board turned us down.”

There is also apparently some competition with Blue Kiwi, a similar business education program with ties to Lynchburg College and the City of Lynchburg.

Of course, there should be more than enough economic ignorance to spread around.

So why doesn’t Junior Achievement borrow the money from somewhere? Put it on somebody’s credit card? Worry about it later?

Because they know better. And there’s the irony.