Teaching High School Students about Business

This is one of my ideas I really like, though it’s never made it towards the top of my priority list to try it out. I remember exactly when I thought of it. I was driving from Seattle to Sacramento going south on Interstate 5 passing through all the small towns in Oregon. At one point I saw an old outdoor movie theater, it still looked like it was usable and I thought that would be a great way to teach high school students about business!

Everyone who works is either working for themselves, or running a business, or working for someone else. How many of us ever actually understand what is involved with running and sustaining a business? How many people understand taxes, and compliance, and safety, and human resources, and hiring, and budgeting, and marketing. And how much all of these things cost and how quickly they add up. I’ve worked in two small businesses as Director of Operations (COO so to speak) so I have some idea, but it wasn’t until I worked at that level that I understood the details.

What if we could bring that level of knowledge into those entering the workforce to begin with. So they understand what the business owners are going through and can be sympathetic to them and so business owners trust and respect their works because there is some mutual understanding?

So the thought was to revive the outdoor movie theater as a business run entirely by high school students with involvement from business people in the community. The whole thing would be a class students would get credit for. The school year would involve classroom work of teaching about business combined with actual doing work on the business from creating a plan for the next year, to setting up a budget to hiring, and so on.

The students would be responsible for everything. They would choose the leaders (President, Vice-President, Accountant, etc), they could choose titles, they could choose pay, they would do the hiring (and the firing). For every position held by an upperclassmen, they would work closely with at least 1 underclassmen to train them to potentially move into that role as they progressed through school.

As part of this project, I also thought it would be a great way to get business people from the community involved with the students. Some could be advisers to help oversee the project, some could help with the teachers, some could be supervisors, some could be mentors for students. This would be a way of passing on knowledge about running a business from those doing it to the next generation. I think it could also help bridge the divide that sometimes seems to be there between different generations.

On the whole it seemed like a great way to provide give and take between the students (the next generation) and the community, and to bring some basic business knowledge to the new workforce.