Dave,
I'd be interested in hearing from other folks as well on how they handle this issue. In the past, I didn't create a model, but just documented in the model of the class that has the id (in your case whatever has the status attribute). So at the top of the model, I just made a little table showing me the statuses.
If you wanted to be able to programatically be able to access those statuses, you could create a method that is just a case statement with each of your id's. The method could be on a specific object or maybe at the application level if you uses statuses in multiple places.
What do other people do in these cases? You would hate to hit the database for something like this...
Thanks, Tom