My students need materials to create a small on-campus business. For example: we need a coffee pot, cart, paper products, and uniforms for beverage sales.
Our students are in a high school Special Day class. Their academic skill levels range from 1st to 7th grade. Even with these academic challenges, our students come to school each day eager to learn and improve their abilities. One of our goals is to develop a practical entrepreneurial skill set.
Although challenged academically, our students are eager to develop their independent living skills.
Our high school students are fully included in the school's culture and have mild to moderate learning differences. Most of our students are from a low socioeconomic background. Areas of success are sports, art, work, drama and hands-on learning projects. As a group they operate as a small learning community helping and supporting each other both in class and in their extra curricular activities. This is significant, as they are part of a student body of over 1800 high school students. Teaching entrepreneurial skills as part of an independent living curriculum will result in a student with broader career opportunities after high school which is the ultimate goal of our program.
My Project
The vision of the project is to create opportunities for our students to develop basic business skills through hands-on learning in a safe and non-threatening environment. This will be done through the sale of morning beverages to staff members before school begins. Students will learn to take pre-orders, prepare and serve hot beverages, distribute them and collect the money. Through this process, the students will learn hospitality including food service handling, basic accounting using assistive technology, inventory and ordering, profit sharing and social communication skills. This request for funding will cover the initial start-up costs, for example, the purchase of a food cart, coffee machines and various sundry items. The profits will be used to sustain the business throughout the year.
Our students have multiple barriers that can hold them back from achieving success after they leave high school, including learning disabilities and low socioeconomic demographics.
These are factors that have been proven to negatively affect ones quality of life as an adult. Our intention with this project is to give students the skill-set and confidence they need to create their own entrepreneurial endeavors after they graduate so that they can have a richer and more rewarding quality of life.
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As a teacher-founded nonprofit, we're trusted by thousands of teachers and supporters across the country. This classroom request for funding was created by Mr. Giammona and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.