Karina Curcio is a hardworking citizen trying to eke out a living in the rough-and-tumble bakery business. She is beset with competition and the often-unmarked pitfalls of small business ownership.
Curcio said Tuesday that for the past eight weeks she has done everything she can think of just to stay afloat. “We worked really hard to avoid bankruptcy,” said Curcio Tuesday, “because as we learned, that’s not a good thing. There were some people that just spent all their money right away and they aren’t doing so well now.”
Curcio is an energetic fourth grader at All Saints Episcopal Day School who participated in the school’s sixth annual “Mini-Society Program.” The Mini-Society project, for third through sixth graders ages 8 through 12, is an experience-based program in which the students establish their own society, open their own businesses, and create their own government. Through this program, the students experience firsthand how money flows throughout a society.
The Mini-Society instructional system, created by Dr. Marilyn Kourilsky of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, has the goal of students experiencing the “real world” in the context of entrepreneurship, including opportunity recognition and generation of business ideas.
According to Elisabeth Dayo, the head of the school, within this self-organizing society, the children independently make their businesses adapt to meet market demands. The skills and knowledge learned in the program incorporate and complement other curricula, such as language arts, social studies, math, science, critical thinking, problem solving, practical arts, and cooperative learning.
The students were encouraged to name their society, and the consensus was to name it the United Classes of All Saints (UCAS). They created their own currency, which came in denominations of thunders, sunnies, and rainies, and designed and sewed their own their national flag.
“Every person had to come up with their own business idea and make it successful,” said fifth grader Sam Proctor, who started a popcorn business with his brother.
Proctor also doubled as the city’s health and safety inspector. He said this was a duty he particularly enjoyed. “This was the part was most fun for me,” he said with a wry grin, “to be able to enforce the law. I saw firsthand that people do commit a lot of crimes, and what happens to them when they do.”
He said the most common offense was leaving a storefront unoccupied while open, a big no-no in UCAS.
“If they were in violation, they would have to pay a big fine,” said Proctor.
Dayo said Tuesday that the program presents a great opportunity to apply the academics they learn in the classroom to real-life scenarios.
“That’s the beauty of the program,” she said. “It’s the application of math, problem solving, social studies, economics, and other learned skills to something as important as creatively building a business from the ground up, or creating a budget.”
The All Saints Episcopal Day School is an interdenominational private school of more than 100 students in nursery through sixth grades, located on the corner of Seventh and Washington streets.
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