From classroom to Capitol - teaching children about Catholic social doctrine and political action

National Catholic Reporter, March 2, 2001 by Teresa Malcolm

Program teaches kids to lobby for social justice

The questions the sixth-and seventh-grade students had prepared for legislators were already blunt, but in the hands of one 12-year-old, they briefly turned into a grilling as she confronted a Missouri state senator. He did not support the bill she and her classmates had come to the capital to push -- a tax credit for the working poor.

"Have you actually met a poor person?" Mallory Bahmani, a seventh grader at St. Patrick's School in Kansas City, Mo., asked state Sen. Larry Rohrbach.

The students' activities were part of a pioneering program designed to teach children about Catholic social doctrine and how to move beyond charity to work for change in social structures that keep people in poverty.

Rohrbach said yes, he had met a poor person. So had Mallory and her classmates: They had met Kristin and Kurtis, each single parents living in poverty. The young lobbyists were in their state capital, Jefferson City, Mo., Feb. 7 to share Kristin's and Kurtis' stories and to press lawmakers to pass the tax credit bill that would help them and other poor families.

"You can collect canned goods until you drop," said Tom Turner, one of the program's creators. "If you work for justice, it has a wider impact."

The three-month lesson plan, called "That's Not Fair! A Program for Teaching Catholic Social Doctrine to Sixth Grade," was developed last year at St. Patrick's School. In the 2000-2001 school year, it is being used in 14 schools in the Kansas City area. Turner, director of Bishop Sullivan Center, a local social service agency, hopes next to take it nationwide.

"That's Not Fair!" had its genesis in the previous school year, when Turner had been invited to speak to Catholic school principals about Catholic social justice teachings. There, Turner was met with a challenge: "One principal said, `Talk is cheap. Let's see you guys do something,'" Turner said. That was Jean Roach, the principal of St. Patrick's. The school's sixth-grade religion teacher, Patricia Scherrer Haney, was willing to work on it, and she and Turner began a week-to-week experiment -- putting lessons together usually the night before the weekly social justice unit, Harley said.

"I came to the relationship not knowing anything about the church's teaching, and he came to the relationship not knowing anything about sixth graders," Haney said. "That's why we combined so well."

With Turner's suggestions for the concepts of Catholic social teaching that needed to be taught -- human dignity, the difference between charity and justice, solidarity, subsidiarity and a preferential option for the poor -- the two developed classroom exercises, including games, art projects and skits, to communicate those teachings. Together they taught the classes.

The lessons worked so well that Turner. and Haney created a teachers' manual, which this year has been used in Catholic schools throughout the Kansas City area. The manual also includes a teachers' section that includes theological background, biblical references and excerpts from church documents.

The program's entertainment approach made the difference in its effectiveness, according to Marla Byrne, who was the outside presenter collaborating with the sixth-grade teacher to implement the program this year at St. Thomas More School in Kansas City. "Every time I'd come, I'd hear, `Are we going to play another game?' I think sending the message through these parables was the best way," said Byrne, a volunteer at Bishop Sullivan Center. "They would never have gone for any kind of lecturing, but it was the games that made the program work."

Aubrey Adams, 11, a St. Thomas More sixth-grader, agreed, saying that the lessons were "fun, and it's better than just sitting and getting a lecture, because it's interactive."

But the classroom education is only one element in the program's four components. The others seek to take the teachings out of the classroom and into action. On the advice of the Missouri Catholic Conference, Turner and Haney chose the issue of earned income tax credits for the working poor, a bill before the Missouri State Legislature, as the real-life issue to which St. Patrick's students would apply their knowledge of Catholic social doctrine.

The first step outside the classroom takes students to a social service agency where they meet some poor people and hear their stories. The objective is to personalize the issue of poverty and dispel stereotypes. Erin Campbell, 12, said her perceptions had definitely changed.

"We had an image of poor people as dirty people, living on the street with raggedy clothes," she said. "But we learned there are working poor. Some people still look nice when they're poor, and we have to go past the looks and try to help them out."

Last year, Erin and her classmates, then in the sixth grade, met Joyce through the Bishop Sullivan Center. They asked Joyce, a single mother, what she would do with $1,000 she might get from an income tax credit. "You should have seen her face," Erin said. "It just lit up. It was the saddest thing you've ever seen. I felt so bad for her. She would buy some furniture, some clothes for her kids, food, toys."