8th grade entrepreneurs make their (vegetable) stand as part of school biz project
Staunton News Leader
WAYNESBORO — The biggest lesson Skylar Sloat learned from a recent project in her eighth-grade entrepreneurship class was the value of teammork.
“When I started this project and actually presented it here I did it myself,” said the Kate Collins Middle School student. “It was 10 times more work than it is now, shared with everyone as a class. There’s a lot more ideas and it’s just more functional.”
Eric Dixon, who teaches the entrepreneurship class, wanted to bring real-world applications into his lesson plan. Two years ago, through a grant, Waynesboro Public Schools created an educational farm at Berkeley Glenn Elementary.
Students from Kate Collins Middle are partially responsible for the garden, from planting to harvesting to distributing the vegetables. Project Grows, a Staunton-based educational nonprofit organization, is a partner with the school division in the farm.
Dixon said there was a school-run vegetable stand last year that was moderately successful. The entrepreneurship class students were given the task of coming up with ideas to improve the stand for this year’s crop. And it wasn’t just busy work. The students were working at a pretty high level.
The presentation
Students were split into groups and asked to come up with a business plan that included market research, business management analysis and an executive summary. They presented the plans earlier this month to a group of school administrators and Project Grows staff members. The presentation was based off the business reality television show, “Shark Tank” where entrepreneurs make presentations to investors.
The best ideas were then combined into one presentation that students made to the Waynesboro School Board at the monthly meeting Tuesday, May 9. That was the teamwork Sloat mentioned.
One of the ideas in the combined plan that Sloat came up with originally was to offer printed recipes featuring a vegetable of the week that customers could take with them. Another idea she had was to offer tie dye aprons with a logo to be worn by those volunteering at the stand. In the combined plan there is an idea to also sell those aprons to any customer who wants one.
“Everything in the presentation is 100% them,” Dixon said. “All I did was play project manager with them and give them parameters of when they had to get things turned in. I steered them within the boundaries of what they needed to be doing.”
Another idea the group came up with for the combined plan is donating leftover vegetables each week to local churches with a food bank or other charitable organizations for distribution to those in need. They also plan to create social media accounts to advertise the stand, something that wasn’t done a year ago.
The students also analyzed what vegetables sold best last year and what days of the week had the most sales. The hope is to have two stands with possible locations included in the presentation. There were pros and cons listed with each location. There’s also a list of projected costs involved with the vegetable stands.
The students did a SWOT analysis that identified strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats to the business.
“An example of a strength is we have resources at Kate Collins and the high school such as clubs and other classes who are willing to help us make this business what we want it to be,” eighth-grader Kaitlin Krambach told the school board. “One of the weaknesses is that our name isn’t as recognizable as other businesses in Waynesboro that sell produce.”
Krambach also told the board that the demand for fresh produce is on the rise, but a natural disaster could wipe out their crops. It’s all things that need to be considered.
Student-led project
Nichole Barrows is the director of education with Project Grows.
“This is a fantastic example of how the Waynesboro education farm project puts student engagement at the heart of every step of the project,” Barrows said. “That’s what we want to do with this project. We want to have more than a farm. We want to have more than a garden. We want a learning lab where students are getting to experience food production from the seed in the ground to the harvest of it to where does it go after you grow it, how do we get this on to someone’s kitchen table?”
Despite the students being eighth-graders, Dixon was impressed with the work they put into the project. An Army veteran who is now a business teacher working on his MBA, Dixon said the students came up with ideas that he wouldn’t have thought of.
“If we allow them to do what they’re capable of doing and not force feed them,” Dixon said, “they can come up with amazing results.”