Bradford's Reality Check

I had a great time volunteering for Bradford's Reality Check. Since Bradford High School is in my district, I received an email request from the Educator's Credit Union; the hosts of the program.

Here is a little ditty in the Kenosha News about Reality Check.

I, of course, worked at the Government Station. The taxes were taken out of the kids paychecks before they even made it to our table. I worked the government station with Jeff Coe, an alderman from Racine, who had done these Reality Checks before at the Racine High Schools. Before the event started, Jeff told me I would have a blast.

He was not kidding. I did have a great time. Basically our job was to just try and help get these kids through the process. One young lady approached out table with about $1000 in her "checkbook", and needed to pay $821 in child support. She went ahead and paid the child support and had $179 left. Since we were trying to help these kids, we continued to ask the basic question. Do you have a roof over your head? Have you paid you electricity? Do you have a way to work? etc. I found out the young woman with $179 left in her account still did
not have a place to live. Yikes! I sent her to the "SOS" table to try and find a part time job.

The kids were well behaved and a lot of fun. The teachers milling around really did a great job in just trying to steer the students to the right tables and helping them balance their checkbooks.

Those from the Educator's Credit Union were so helpful and so attentive to the kids. They were also very organized and kept things moving pretty quickly for the 300 students moving through the process.

All in all, there were a lot of great students, great teachers and the hosts of the event were a lot of fun.

I appreciated the opportunity to work with this program.