High School Students Learn Real World Skills in Entrepreneurship Focus Program

On a Friday morning in late May, three young people huddle around a laptop, making last-minute tweaks to a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation. New, bright blue t-shirts printed with inspirational words and business names rest on a table nearby. Across the room, a large foam board model of Lincoln’s Haymarket displays representations of new businesses including some with an international flair: a restaurant from Guatemala, a craft store from South Africa, a cigar bar from Greece and a chocolate store from Switzerland. Down the hallway, students hear lectures and ask questions in traditional classroom configurations.

Located in the same building as the Southeast Community College (SCC) Entrepreneurship Center, the Lincoln Public Schools (LPS) Entrepreneurship Focus Program enables high school students to create plans individually for their own small businesses and in teams for Junior Achievement businesses. Simultaneously, the program uses entrepreneurship as a focus of English, math, social studies, marketing, economics, technology and human behavior classes. In math, for example, students might work on their businesses’ financials; in social studies, students might research demographics impacting their businesses. In the afternoon, students go to their home high schools across Lincoln to take additional classes.

This type of program is rare, said Deb Payne, program developer for business/marketing at Lincoln Public Schools and a teacher in the program.

“People come here from all over the country to take a look at us and see how we are doing,” she said.

The program can point to successes that include academic achievement, young leaders, business competition winners and emerging small-business owners.

In February 2010, two LPS Entrepreneurship Focus Program students, Tanner O’Dell and DeVante King, each won $1,000 at the 1^st Annual Make It Happen Student Quick Pitch competition in the Skybox Suites of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Memorial Stadium.

King pitched his idea for customizable athletic wrist bands called “U-Bands” in front of judges, business people, students and other community members in an evening session. The next morning, he spoke on a student panel about the LPS Entrepreneurship Focus Program in front of about 400 people at the Nebraska Summit on Entrepreneurship.

“It was a lot of preparing but it was a good experience, I think,” King said. “I feel a lot more confident after doing both of those things.”

Kandace Freeman, another LPS Entrepreneurship Focus Program student, also spoke on the panel at the Nebraska Summit on Entrepreneurship. This year, she led a public relations project with another student. The group of eight students wrote a business plan for marketing the LPS Entrepreneurship Focus Program and presented the plan at the Nebraska state meeting of DECA, an international organization of marketing students.

“We didn’t make it to finals,” she said, “but we were pretty proud of ourselves. It really helped the program.”

The students’ public relations efforts, which included radio and newspaper interviews, gained eight new students the following semester. Freeman said the group hopes to raise the total enrollment from the current 45 students to 65 next fall.

Freeman, a graduating senior, plans to study social science education at Doane College in Crete to prepare for a career as a history teacher.

“Before I came here there was no way I could get up and stand in front of people and talk,” she said.

O’Dell, a sophomore, won the Quick Pitch contest with his idea for a “Chef’s Table” restaurant, where dinner is a surprise. He said he wants to start this business in the future and may attend culinary school or business school after high school. Now he is writing small business and marketing plans for a business he wants to start while he’s still in high school. He has reserved domain names for a Web site and Twitter and Facebook profiles for the business. He is preparing to present his idea to civic and business groups in a search for funding.

“I actually just got my logo finished yesterday,” he said.

O’Dell said the LPS Entrepreneurship Focus Program allows students to focus on their passions, encourages students to think “out of the box” and guides students to create businesses they can take out in the real world.

“I get to come here and share all of my ideas, and it’s just overall a better atmosphere for the way I learn personally,” he said.

In addition to attending events like the Quick Pitch competition, the Nebraska Summit on Entrepreneurship, UNL’s engineering week and SCC’s Business Expo, students learn from and network with local business community members. The SCC Entrepreneurship Center Business Incubator is located in the same building, so students visit businesses downstairs and business owners give presentations to students upstairs. In addition, the incubator has three spots for high school student businesses.

This year for an economics class, students tracked the Lincoln Haymarket Arena project, following the news, listening to speakers, and talking to business people in the Haymarket.

Based on their research, students created a display board representing the types of businesses they thought should be in the Haymarket, importing businesses and services that could come from other countries. At the end of the semester, students gave presentations about their research and ideas. Representatives of the Lincoln Chamber of Commerce attended the presentations, asking and answering questions.

Facilitating this type of interaction between the students and the business community is key to the program, Payne said.

“We are all about real world experiences,” Payne said.

Payne said the idea for the LPS Entrepreneurship Focus Program had been percolating among high school marketing teachers in Lincoln for a number of years.  However, it was discussions among the Krieger Family Foundation, Lincoln Public Schools, and other business leaders that started the ball rolling in the spring of 2005.  A committee of people from the business community, Lincoln Public Schools, Southeast Community College and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln began discussions and found ways to partner, launching the program four years ago. One benefit of the partnership includes the dual credit students can receive for some of the LPS Entrepreneurship Focus Program classes at Southeast Community College.  Some of the Southeast Community College credits can then transfer to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

This semester, two student groups created businesses for Junior Achievement projects, one selling “Inspiration T’s” and another selling advertisement space on stress-reliever footballs they handed out at the UNL Spring Games. For both projects, students handled logistics and permissions, developed financial reports, and bought and sold stock in the companies. Both companies were profitable; after selling the stocks, the stock owners – the students—walked away with money in their pockets. However, both groups chose to donate a portion of the proceeds to local charities. One of the groups chose to donate 50 percent of their proceeds.

“They are very generous kids,” Payne said.