|
Examples
of student entrepreneurship are richly diverse. Schools and students
are operating restaurants, child care centers, summer camps, rental
libraries, word-processing businesses, hardware stores, grocery
stores, and ice cream parlors. They are providing odd-job services,
tennis coaching, and computer training. They are conducting agricultural
experiments, energy and safety audits, and market research. They
have developed directories of business services and produced television
shows with local commercials. The following paragraphs provide further
illustrations of this diversity, and also introduce several resource
agencies that can provide models, information, materials, or other
kinds of assistance (see below resource information).
The
Southwest Educational Development Laboratory
not only produces these issues papers, it also works with schools
and communities in five southwestern states to help them establish
partnership projects.
Entrepreneurial
programs are only one of a number of school-community development
strategies employed in SEDL’s rural
Collaborative Action Team sites. In, Mora, New Mexico, a recently
adopted CAT site, school staff members are working with students
to plan a small business incubator project. One initial goal is
to provide outlets for the sale of local crafts. In a rural Louisiana
middle school, students are designing logos for t-shirts, silk screening
the shirts themselves, and selling the finished product. In Balmorhea,
Texas, teachers and students are beginning to explore possibilities
for using the school’s new woodworking center to make products
needed within the community.
The
PACERS Small Schools
Cooperative operates on the premise that the school is the
most important institution in rural communities, and that the future
of those communities is intertwined with the school’s success.
Entrepreneurial projects include the development of businesses through
which students build and sell solar-heated houses; build, sell,
and operate greenhouses; practice organic farming and sell the produce;
and operate aquaculture systems. Most PACERS schools publish newspapers
for their communities; students manage the newspaper as a business
and rely on advertising to cover printing and distribution costs.
Schools
affiliated with the Center for School Change at the University
of Minnesota also have embraced entrepreneurship. In one community,
students operate both the grocery store and the hardware store.
In another community students own and operate an ice cream soda
fountain; the school has developed curriculum materials to teach
marketing, accounting, journalism, and entrepreneurship through
student experiences with the soda fountain. students in a community
located near a state park operate a shop where they provide bike
rentals and bicycle repair services and supplies.
The
School at the Center
project at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln has developed curriculum
units addressing student entrepreneurship. In a mathematics and
applied construction unit, students learn basic remodeling skills
and can apply their skills through working as an apprentice while
building affordable housing. Students also make repairs in the homes
of elderly citizens.
REAL
Enterprises, Inc., first established in North Carolina in the
1980s, has grown into a national organization. Through the program,
students develop business plans and often actually implement small
businesses. A local community support team, composed of local entrepreneurs
and small business owners, helps with planning and support. The
following excerpt from a report on an Oklahoma REAL project offers
a good illustration of the kinds of student enterprises supported
via this program:
"A
second-year REAL student announced on the first day of class that
she had planted 30 acres of birdseed millet and wanted to market
it for her REAL project. Since [she] had raised and marketed Gilbeigh
cattle and several craft projects the previous year, the rest of
the class knew she meant business and decided to join her. As we
started contacting bird supply stores, feed and seed stores, and
landscaping shops, we found a warm reception and a real need for
bird houses, bird feeders, squirrel feeders, and other kinds of
feed. We also found a demand for hay bales and corn shucks for yard
decorations" (Denise Coldwater, in The REAL Story, Spring
1996, p. 4).
Entrepreneurship
offers special benefits to rural communities in need of enterprises
that bolster the local economy and encourage residents to support
their home-town businesses. The most powerful argument in its favor,
however, is that entrepreneurial education reflects the power of
what reformers describe as authentic learning. As a student
editor of a school-community newspaper explains, "This work
is definitely preparing me for the real world ... You
can learn so much more by doing something than you can by staring
at a teacher in front of a chalk board." (PACERS Cooperative
Newsletter, April 1995, n.p.) A high school vocational director
working with the REAL Enterprises curriculum sums it up perhaps
most effectively:
We
have kids who come to school early in the morning and who stay late
because they’re working on their businesses, they’re using
the phone, the faxes, the stuff like that we
provide
. . . Suddenly [kids] realize why they need to take accounting,
why they need the math and communication skills. Not to make a pun,
but what used to be abstract becomes REAL. (The REAL Story, Spring
1996, p. 1)
|
