Grocers’ Good Deed for Kids May Pay Off : Education: A model store in an inner-city school rewards students. It also helps build clientele for the future.

CINCINNATI â€”  By any measure, Kroger store No. 308 is far from the supermarket chain’s fanciest or most technologically advanced. It has just three aisles, stocked with only 500 items.

Still, if you ask officials at Kroger Co., the nation’s largest food retailer, to show off any of the chain’s 1,263 stores, it’s a good bet they’ll take you to No. 308. The reason: Just a block from one of this city’s most active drug-exchange corners, the imitation supermarket is staffed by industrious fifth- and sixth-grade clerks. Each week, they serve 550 elementary school students who are learning that going to class and making good grades can lead to tangible rewards.

Housed in a former classroom at Washington Park Elementary School, the store is Kroger’s effort to combine a good deed--improving inner-city education--with long-range corporate planning.

For more than 25 years, the grocery industry has had a mutually beneficial relationship with public education, supporting schools with scholarship grants, mentor programs and marketing campaigns to help them buy classroom equipment.

But new programs like Kroger’s, targeting inner-city youths, serve a practical purpose. Faced with increasing competition and slower sales growth, an expanding number of grocery chains have begun to shift their planning from the lucrative suburbs to heavily populated urban areas where shopping and services have declined in recent years. School programs help chains build a clientele and serve as a training ground for future employees.

“Doing good things and making a profit can go hand in hand,� said Allen Bildner, former chairman of the Kings supermarket chain in New Jersey who heads an urban initiatives task force for the Food Marketing Institute, a supermarket trade association.

Kroger’s experiment at Washington Park--one part of its 7-year-old “Partners in Education� program--is among the most innovative. Two years ago, the program set up the mini-store and helped devise a merit system in which students earn points for good behavior. They earn 30 points (or cents) for attending school and additional points for arriving on time, turning in homework and showing good citizenship.

With these points, up to $9 worth a week, students can buy cans of soda, cheese curls, peanuts, Pop-Tarts, sugared cereal, or more basic family necessities like soup, peanut butter, diapers, toilet paper, toothpaste and detergent.

Financially, Kroger’s investment in Washington Park’s students--$2,000 a month to stock the store plus a total of $35,000 in annual scholarships--is like a single stick of gum in a $100 basket of groceries. Kroger’s profits last year totaled $79.9 million on sales of $21.3 billion.

But teachers say the program has provided unusual motivation, partly because it allows children a chance to help out at home. Ninety-eight percent of the school’s students come from families on welfare or public assistance, and 80% live in homes with single parents. Historically, about one-third of Washington Park students become high school dropouts.

Some students, armed with lists from their parents, use their points to buy baby food, ketchup, detergent or diapers.

Helping out at home creates “a real sense of achievement in these kids,� said Washington Park principal Helena Paul. “It gives them a self-worth and sense of pride they probably don’t get any other time.�

Other chains are taking different approaches to helping at-risk youth. The Upstate New York chain Wegman’s has hired five full-time “youth advocates� for about 150 students age 15 and 16 whom the Rochester school system has identified as probable dropouts. The advocates help the students with every aspect of their lives, providing medical care and food if necessary, as well as tutors or part-time jobs.

“Our goal is to get these kids through high school,� said Allen Johnson, director of Wegman’s work scholarship program. “The bottom line is, these are our future consumers. If they are not educated, they won’t shop with you.�

When the program started in 1987, Wegman’s targeted 30 students. “We were able to retain 15. From a business standpoint we thought that’s not very good, but by educational standards we’re told that we were making tremendous strides,� Johnson said.