Exchange City continues a $2.5 million capital campaign

Although it now sits empty, soon approximately 100 fifth-grade students will flood into Exchange City, a cavernous room lined with shops, and take their places as police officers, disc jockeys, bankers, reporters, graphic designers, judges, city officials and countless other positions that make a real city run.

Checkbooks will be distributed. Laws will be enacted. The police will write tickets for offenses like walking on the grass. Environmental workers will fight pollution in the city’s fountain. Utility workers will read meters. Store owners will peddle their wares in a frantic quest to repay their loans. Six weeks of preparation in the classroom, including job applications and interviews, will culminate in students living in the adult world of business for a day.

Terry Click, president of Junior Achievement of Central Iowa, explains the process with enthusiasm: Students file off the bus and go to their shops. The mayor and Exchange City staff members address the group. Each business goes to the bank to get a loan. The little citizens then go about selling goods to repay their loans.

“Where else can an inner-city fifth-grader experience being the president of a bank?” Click asked.

Exchange City was created in 1980 by the Learning Exchange in Kansas City. Des Moines was the 10th city to adopt the program. Among the different centers in Exchange City are a bank; a broadcast center; city hall; a distribution center, which sells all supplies used by the other centers; an energy center, which provides utilities and distributes paychecks; a publishing shop, which puts out a magazine; a snack shop; a sports shop; and a technology shop. Junior Achievement of Central Iowa altered the standard Exchange City list of centers, adding an agriculture shop, an environmental center and an insurance agency to reflect major Iowa businesses. Each center is sponsored by a different business.

According to Carey Jury, chairman of the Junior Achievement board and vice president of group benefits at Principal Financial Group Inc., the board can cover the $3,000-per-day cost of running the city. The cost of building the city is another matter. It took more than $4 million to create the facility out of what had been a large automotive garage. Besides the city and offices for the Junior Achievement staff, the W.A. Krause Center for Entrepreneurial Education/Richard O. Jacobson Exchange City building houses a conference room, a state-of-the-art classroom and a computer lab with cutting-edge equipment. It is also the satellite center for the University of Iowa’s Tippie School of Management.

Richard Jacobson initiated the campaign with a $500,000 gift. When Jacobson was first approached about the program, he said it was difficult to visualize. After visiting an existing Exchange City in Kansas City, however, his mind was made up.

“He said, ‘There’s no way someone can see this and not give money,'” Click said. Junior Achievement still needs to repay $2.5 million of construction costs, however. Click admits it’s a though time to be fund-raising.

“We just have to continue with our mission,” Jury said. “We’ve faced challenges before, head on, with a plan. To me, the reason this is so important is it’s really experiential learning.”

Exchange City combines the three main modes of learning: reading, listening and watching. The students read about the world of work, talk about the world of work, then act out the world of work. Click and Jury tell stories of children begging to stay in the fifth grade to come back another year, families visiting to see the fount of their child’s enthusiasm, and parents gushing that a son or daughter finally understood what they did at work. West Des Moines was the first school system in the nation to adopt Exchange City as part of its curriculum.  

“It’s a jewel in the community most people don’t know about,” Click said.

At the end of a long day of buying, producing, serving and selling, the children turn to a wall decorated with a mural of Jacobson and the first Des Moines Exchange City class, and an American flag. The little citizens put their hands on their hearts and sing the national anthem minutes before they become average children again and scramble onto their buses.