I was a “bean counter” today, but alas, not a very good one.

I’m talking family finances here, not accounting. The bean-counting exercise that I and about 25 other journalists participated in was sponsored by two home finance experts from the University of Maryland Cooperative Extension, who know something about how hard life can be when you’re from a low-income family.

The game seemed simple. We were divided into seven “families” of varying size. Mine was the Smith family, consisting of a granddad in poor health; his son, who works two jobs; and the son’s 11-year-old child, a boy in middle school. They all live in a two bedroom apartment in suburbia.

Each family was given 13 cards signifying basic households needs -- housing, utilities, food, clothing, health care, etc. -- and a bunch of beans. The object? Put your beans -- all 20 of them -- where they’re most needed. The only problem, of course, is that there’s too many needs and not enough beans.

For example, do we buy a used vehicle for the family breadwinner (at a cost of three beans) or hope there’s public transportation to get him to his two jobs (one bean)? If we choose the latter, we’re assuming this suburb has adequate bus or rail service that happens to mesh with our breadwinner’s work schedule.

How about housing? If we assume we can live in public housing, it will cost us only one bean; renting will set us back three. What about food, insurance, furniture, clothes, and -- dare we mention it -- the occasional gift?

Two things stood out. To conserve beans, we Smiths made a lot of assumptions, one of which was that there would always be willing relatives around to help us with laundry, clothes, and other needs. Of course, we couldn’t afford a phone and could barely scrounge for a TV, which leads to our second observation. Being low-income in America (but not necessarily below the so-called poverty line) can be an isolating and disempowering experience. No wonder the poor don’t vote as much as the rich, for example; they’re too busy trying to get through the day.

What does this have to do with you? If you have any low-income children in your school district, and practically all of you do, you know the answer: It means everything. Your students come from a variety of backgrounds, with a variety of needs, hopes, dreams, and concerns. Your job -- a most complicated of jobs, if there ever was one -- is to educate them all.

The Family Spending Game can be found at: http://ffsn.wsu.edu/documents/SpendingGame.pdf.

Lawrence Hardy, Senior Editor