Lessons about the federal budget
SOMERSET — Thirty-eight students from Somerset Berkley Regional High School recently went on a field trip to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library where they learned about how the budget for the federal government is put together.
Teacher Matthew Dionne organized the field trip for the students who did a budget simulation during the program in which they debated what and how much should be in the federal budget for certain line items.
Students from different schools broke up into small groups and were given poker chips worth $10 billion each which they used in formulating a national budget. The students were given a copy of the budget of President Barack Obama and were asked if they agreed where the money was being spent.
"It was good because they got to see the whole process," Dionne said. "They could see if one piece is pulled, it affects other pieces of the budget. They could see how much negotiation goes into the budget."
SBRHS student Fred Schobel said some hot topics in the group he was in included education, science and defense. He said it was tough to deal with the defense budget because it was so large and had been cut in previous years.
"We only ended up taking $20 billion out of that," Schobel said. "A lot more would have come out of defense and put in non-defense budgets, like education. But it had to stay in defense."
Schobel said the students had to make some tough decisions during the budget simulations. When the students decided to put more money into education, they took it from income security and community development. Schobel said that decision was not easy, because the students did not know how people involved with those two budgets would be impacted by the cuts, but hoped by putting more money into education, not as many problems would occur that require funding from income security and community development. He said what decisions were made during the budget simulations came down to a lot of compromises.
"I kind of learned about the difficulties of cutting money," Schobel said. "Personally, I have a lot of strong opinions on how government money should be spent, but when we talked about cutting it, we didn't know how to go about it."
Schobel, who is a senior at the high school and is planning to study civil engineering at the University of Massachusetts at Darmouth, said only discretionary spending was talked about during the discussions, not issues like Medicare and Social Security.
Dionne said it was interesting to see how different students from different school districts felt about different areas of the federal budget.
Before students went on the field trip on March 4, they received a packet of information about the program from the JFK Library and Dionne touched on what would happen in his economics and American experience classes at the high school.
"Our students were very well prepared and well spoken when we went to the presentations and it was noted by some of the presenters," Dionne said.