Community Connections School and Community: Partners for Learning FREMONT BUSINESS ACADEMY
"This school has no chance."
That was Alejandro Piñeda's reaction after his first visit to Fremont High School Business Academy in Oakland, California, a small academy operating within a larger high school.
Piñeda, a student at California State University, Chico, had been asked in early fall 2002 to mentor the academy's students through his membership in a national organization called Students in Free Enterprise, or SIFE. SIFE enlists mentors from the academic and business worlds to help university students create socially conscious, profitable businesses. The university students, in turn, work with high school students involved in Students for the Advancement of Global Entrepreneurship (SAGE), the secondary school branch of SIFE.
When he visited the Fremont High SAGE team in October of 2002, says Piñeda, he learned that "Fremont High was ... known for its high violence and extremely low test scores. The school sits in an area that divides the South Gang with the North Gang, [both of] which end up meeting in between to fight for territory."
He watched as teacher, and Business Academy Co-Director, Amy Carpenter outlined the action plan for the coming spring's statewide SAGE competition, a yearly event in which students present their projects to a panel of eighty or more judges. "All but two students were either sleeping, listening to their CD players, or talking to each other," Pineda recalls. He was close to writing them off. But on the way to tell SIFE Director Curt DeBerg he wanted nothing to do with Fremont, something stopped him.
Students Motivate Their Classmates
After all, the academy had produced a winning team just the year before. Fremont students were involved in SAGE both through required business classes and voluntarily, on an extracurricular basis. The Fremont SAGE team had won top state honors in spring 2002 for its Business Operations Management Business Academy Student Team (BOMBAST) project, which had nearly halved the school's seventy percent truancy rate. Noticing that students were leaving school for lunch and not returning, SAGE students had partnered with local restaurants to run a food cart on campus. Fresh burritos and sandwiches kept students on campus during lunch -- and more importantly, afterwards.
Nidya Baez and Veronica Garcia, the two students who were paying attention on the day of Piñeda's visit, were veterans of that team. They wrote to Piñeda, telling him they wanted to motivate their classmates. "Many students in the class did not know what SIFE was about in the fall, until we really hustled to teach them," explains Nidya. [Ed. note: The secondary school program, originally started by the Chico State SIFE team, was known as Cal-High SIFE until it spread beyond California in 2003 and was renamed SAGE. When the Fremont students mention SIFE, they are using the old name for their secondary school SAGE program.]
"I have a drive to just show everybody here at school that students can actually do something," Veronica says. "You have those certain adults that look at Fremont students and they're like, 'You guys are not going to do anything. You guys are lazy.' ... With SIFE we have the opportunity to show them we're not stupid."
Commitment and Collaboration
By Piñeda's next visit, in December 2002, the BOMBAST project was growing, and the students had created a peer tutoring program (Club FrEd, short for Fremont Education), as well as taking on mini-projects such as Voluntary Income Tax Assistance (VITA) and Business Student Empowerment Team. Through these projects, the students helped younger students with their schoolwork, enabled workers in their community to claim tax refunds, and taught fellow students about SATs, graduation requirements, and community service opportunities.
Students could work on projects solely during class or choose to commit more time. "We run BOMBAST from the daily classes," explains Nidya. "For VITA, students were trained in the classroom, and during tax time, students signed up to work after school and weekends. Club FrEd was after school. ... If we were project managers or team leaders, we had time scheduled in each class to follow up on the projects and teams. We [could also do] this during the SIFE meetings after school."
Tiana Seymore, a SAGE student, chose to commit. She became a student coordinator for the VITA [download PDF (67 KB)] project, working directly with an IRS taxpayer education coordinator to remedy the fact that $9 million had gone unclaimed in Oakland in 2002. This year, Tiana will take Veronica's place as executive director of the SAGE team.
Confidence and Curriculum
Ivonne Perdomo also benefited from the program. At the beginning of the year, the shy native Spanish speaker was what adviser Heather Wilson characterizes as "an adept follower," who rarely spoke out in class. Through her involvement with SAGE, she blossomed, winning a place on the six-person presentation team that led the SAGE members to a second state win and a victory over forty-three other teams -- some from as far away as Poland and Tajikistan -- in the international competition. "I learned not to be shy and to be confident of myself," says Ivonne.
To make sure students met California state standards, Carpenter adopted a curriculum from Global Education Partnership, or GEP, in 2001. GEP is a nonprofit organization that gives students in low-income communities access to educational resources with a business focus. The curriculum, "From Vision to Action," helps students define their communities' needs and determine how to address them, then develop an action plan. (Read a Sample Needs Assessment Lesson [download PDF (174 KB)] from the GEP curriculum.) GEP also helped to secure money, writing a $25,000 grant and raising extra money for special projects, such as stipends for students who participate in VITA and in peer tutoring.
Triumph on a Large Scale
By the 2003 SAGE state competition, the Fremont students had developed so many projects that one of their challenges was covering them all in the allotted time. Another was conquering nerves. Advisers Kevin McNulty, Carpenter, Wilson, and Piñeda worked with the students to develop a script and hired a presentation coach, Jamie Kennedy, to help students speak with confidence and enthusiasm. Kennedy used acting warm-ups to break down the "protective shell" of inhibitions that he says is typical of high school students. Piñeda recommended that the team never watch any of its competitors: "At at an age like theirs," he says, "if you see a team that you think is better than you, you will fall apart and lose hope."
Thanks to this devotion, and to hard work both in and out of the classroom -- Veronica mentions offhandedly that Carpenter and a teammate stayed up until four in the morning, perfecting a Power Point® presentation before one event -- the Fremont team was polished and natural. The students were judged the best in such categories as understanding "the importance of civic engagement in a democratic society" and using "technological skills to enhance the value of their projects" by a panel including CEOs of large businesses such as Walgreens and Radio Shack, as well as members of the educational and civic communities. (View the Complete Judging Criteria [download PDF (28 KB)].)
Nidya sees this as a larger triumph. "It's a tough world, especially in the business world. ... A lot of people are not used to urban students [succeeding]. I think they need to see that we are not just some rowdy group of students, but that we can be professional."
Leaving a Legacy of Empowerment
In fall 2003, the students will see the results of their biggest endeavor yet: the creation of a new school. The students of the Business Academy were instrumental in developing YES, or the Youth Empowerment School. At the request of Maureen Benson, now the YES principal, and Amy Carpenter, about fifteen of the SAGE students joined the two women last year in the planning and design process for YES, which is part of Oakland's Small Schools initiative. Funding will come in part from the Bay Area Coalition for Equitable Schools, or BayCES, an organization that helped students to write the formal proposal for YES which was presented to city and school officials.
The design team used its "From Vision to Action" method to plan the school, and that model will also play a part in the school's structure. Benson describes the school as being for students who want to become leaders, not necessarily those who are already leaders. The school will start out with only a hundred and twenty-eight ninth-grade students, and all students will go out into the community to gather data for an hour and a half each day.
"At the end of the ninth grade, with that knowledge, kids will be able to say, 'Here's what I'm really interested in, here's the project that I want to take on.' From grades ten to twelve, they'll be working on projects [that] came from a needs assessment of the community."
Optimism for the Future
Veronica and Nidya, who will both attend the University of California at Berkeley this year, are optimistic that the YES students will benefit from the opportunity to empower themselves -- just as they have.
Nidya says, "There are tons of students out there, not only here in Oakland but all over the world, that have this drive but can't access it. They don't have the resources or there's not an adult to say, 'Hey, let's do it.' And we had that. ... Now we can tell the world who we are and not accept it when they want to tell us we are something else. No. We're SIFE, and our programs are changing the world and our community."
For more on career academies, visit our articles An MBA for Kids and Engaging in Real-World Projects.
For information on becoming part of SIFE or SAGE, becoming a collegiate mentor, or obtaining funding for a SIFE or SAGE program, visit www.csuchico.edu/sage/.
After all, the academy had produced a winning team just the year before. Fremont students were involved in SAGE both through required business classes and voluntarily, on an extracurricular basis. The Fremont SAGE team had won top state honors in spring 2002 for its Business Operations Management Business Academy Student Team (BOMBAST) project, which had nearly halved the school's seventy percent truancy rate. Noticing that students were leaving school for lunch and not returning, SAGE students had partnered with local restaurants to run a food cart on campus. Fresh burritos and sandwiches kept students on campus during lunch -- and more importantly, afterwards.
By Piñeda's next visit, in December 2002, the BOMBAST project was growing, and the students had created a peer tutoring program (Club FrEd, short for Fremont Education), as well as taking on mini-projects such as Voluntary Income Tax Assistance (VITA) and Business Student Empowerment Team. Through these projects, the students helped younger students with their schoolwork, enabled workers in their community to claim tax refunds, and taught fellow students about SATs, graduation requirements, and community service opportunities.
Ivonne Perdomo also benefited from the program. At the beginning of the year, the shy native Spanish speaker was what adviser Heather Wilson characterizes as "an adept follower," who rarely spoke out in class. Through her involvement with SAGE, she blossomed, winning a place on the six-person presentation team that led the SAGE members to a second state win and a victory over forty-three other teams -- some from as far away as Poland and Tajikistan -- in the international competition. "I learned not to be shy and to be confident of myself," says Ivonne.
By the 2003 SAGE state competition, the Fremont students had developed so many projects that one of their challenges was covering them all in the allotted time. Another was conquering nerves. Advisers Kevin McNulty, Carpenter, Wilson, and Piñeda worked with the students to develop a script and hired a presentation coach, Jamie Kennedy, to help students speak with confidence and enthusiasm. Kennedy used acting warm-ups to break down the "protective shell" of inhibitions that he says is typical of high school students. Piñeda recommended that the team never watch any of its competitors: "At at an age like theirs," he says, "if you see a team that you think is better than you, you will fall apart and lose hope."
In fall 2003, the students will see the results of their biggest endeavor yet: the creation of a new school. The students of the Business Academy were instrumental in developing YES, or the Youth Empowerment School. At the request of Maureen Benson, now the YES principal, and Amy Carpenter, about fifteen of the SAGE students joined the two women last year in the planning and design process for YES, which is part of Oakland's Small Schools initiative. Funding will come in part from the Bay Area Coalition for Equitable Schools, or BayCES, an organization that helped students to write the formal proposal for YES which was presented to city and school officials.
