boerne isd

Local Students Get Real World Small Business Experience through

New Class Offering Do you love watching Shark Tank? It’s so exciting see- Each group has two mentors from the local ing the new products and businesses that these creative community that guide them along the way. In addition individuals have come up with! Will they get a deal to the mentors, there are also coaches, such as CPAs, and be on the road to success or will their product attorneys and other professionals with specialties that fail to impress the judges and they’ll be sent home come in and help the students with topics they need to disappointed? know to successfully start and run a business.

This school year, Boerne ISD has created its “The community has been so helpful to these very own version of Shark Tank with its high school students,” added Breuer. “From all of the help we Business Incubator class! In this class, talented and have received from the mentors and the coaches and creative students from Boerne High School, Champion Jefferson Bank was so generous as to give each of the High School and the BISD Virtual Campus all come four groups $500 that they could use for things they together to participate in this fun environment that needed to get their businesses started like website gives them the tools to both create a product and launch domain names, hosting packages and email marketing a business! services to be able to get their products online and in

Coach Jennifer Breuer teaches the Business front of real customers!” Incubator class and guides the students along their This is the first year for the Business Incubator journey of becoming young entrepreneurs. “The class, but Breuer hopes that as the program grows students are broken into small groups and challenged there will be an expansion of the class to also include a with the task of finding a problem and then coming up Business Accelerator class that would follow Incubator with a solution to that problem. The result is that each where the students could continue to grow and develop group will then create a business out of this process,” their businesses. said Breuer. Currently there are four groups in the class and the

PITCH NIGHT IS THURSDAY, APRIL 29TH, 2021 @ 6PM CHAMPION HIGH SCHOOL AUDITORIUM

students have come up with ideas for Vandangles, which is a jewelry business, Port-a-Plate to solve those pesky eating in the car problems, AceMade that has created a gravity-fed magnetic golf ball dispenser for your golf cart, and Sole Cold that is making inserts for athlete’s shoes to deflect the heat of the hot turf. “Each group has really put in the time, effort and research needed to see their businesses succeed. It is rewarding to watch as these kids create their very own small businesses from the ground up,” added Breuer.

As for the students, all of who are enrolled in the Business Pathway at BISD, they say that they wanted to take the class to gain realistic application of starting and running a small business. They know that getting to have this real world business experience will be invaluable to them for their future.

The end result of the Business Incubator class is a reallife Shark Tank-like experience. On April 29th, the students will present their businesses in front of a live audience and a panel of judges where they will compete for cash prizes and scholarships that have so generously been donated by local sponsors! BBM

**THE BUSINESS INCUBATOR CLASS IS STILL FUNDRAISING FOR THEIR BIG EVENT! If you would like to contribute please contact Jennifer Breuer at jennifer.breuer@boerneisd.net

PICTURES (top to bottom): Some of the Incubatoredu students and Coach Jennifer Breuer; the Vandangles website; Port-a-Plate prototype rendering; AceMade prototype.