Entrepreneurship Program for At-Risk Middle School Students

Introduction: At-Risk Students and the Dropout Crisis

According to the available literature, if at-risk students do not receive the academic support they need while in middle school, the chances are very good that they will drop out by the time they reach high school. While the high school dropout rate has declined in recent years, it remains far too high — an indication that at-risk students in both middle school and high school are not receiving the specialized academic help they may need to complete their basic education.

This paper reviews a program put into place in the Arkansas Delta involving 53 at-risk middle school students. The intervention was designed to engage these students with business and entrepreneurship concepts. The success of this intervention is seen as a potentially replicable tool for other schools, because when young people from low-income families who are considered academically at-risk become excited about participating in a profitable and engaging business venture, their attention to classwork and learning is positively affected.

National Context and the Case for Intervention

A national report sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, titled The Silent Epidemic: Perspectives of High School Dropouts, asserts that every year "almost one-third of all high school students — and nearly half of all Blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans — fail to graduate from public high school with their class" (Bridgeland, et al., 2006, p. i). What are the solutions for at-risk students whose futures hang in the balance when school feels neither interesting nor relevant to them?

Interventions such as group counseling in well-structured sessions can certainly help an at-risk middle school student stay in school and refocus on the relationship between academics and future employment. According to research published in the Journal of Entrepreneurship Education (Bevill, et al., 2009, p. 41), when at-risk students are given an opportunity to learn about running a small, profitable business, the experience can be "both exciting and rewarding."

The Arkansas Delta Entrepreneurship Program

The project discussed in this paper was designed and orchestrated by the SIFE (Students in Free Enterprise) team at a regional university's College of Business, and it was funded by a grant from Sam's Club. Eighty-three percent of the 53 at-risk students who participated in the research qualified for the free lunch program, and those same students were considered at risk for dropping out of school (Bevill, p. 35). The problem was not limited to poverty in one particular area of the Arkansas Delta. According to the authors, "less than 17% of Arkansans have a Bachelor's degree or higher," meaning the state's middle schools and high schools face a significant challenge in helping more students graduate and succeed in careers (Bevill, p. 36).

The SIFE team worked with teachers from eight schools in the delta during the fall semester of 2007. First, business-trained teachers in those eight schools introduced participants to "the concept of economics" and to various components of a business plan. The SIFE team provided teachers with "basic curriculum information" to use when briefing their students (Bevill, p. 37). Students were then given a pre-test to assess their existing knowledge of economics and business, and also to gauge each student's interest in pursuing education beyond high school. Following the pre-test, students were introduced to "concepts of natural, capital, and human resources used to produce goods or services" (Bevill, p. 37).

In addition to those foundational concepts, students involved in this project were taught topics relating to finance and entrepreneurship, including assets, liabilities, equity, revenue from sales, cost of goods, and other business concepts such as advertising — all presented in easy-to-digest materials. Students were also shown how to use Excel software to project budgets and produce graphs illustrating their progress. The students had an entire semester to learn about business and develop their own products for sale, making it a first-hand, engaging project for young people who had previously been identified as potential dropouts.

Conclusion: Entrepreneurship as an Academic Intervention

Some at-risk students are offered counseling for academic purposes, and some receive help with self-esteem issues, but perhaps not enough schools involve at-risk students in entrepreneurial opportunities of the kind that the Arkansas Delta project demonstrated. When students from low-income families are given a chance to see how they could be competitive in a small business enterprise, it provides real incentive to pursue higher education. Most importantly, this kind of opportunity has the potential to erase the "at-risk" label from their school records entirely.