Our mission is to help underserved teens transform their lives - to develop the skills and confidence they need to succeed educationally, personally, and professionally - through the experience of running their own business in their schools.
Our objective is to bring our student-centered business curriculum to an ever-increasing number of underserved teens by creating a package of curriculum, teacher training and support materials that can be used effectively by classroom teachers with minimal YEA staff involvement.
YEA serves students in some of Massachusetts’s neediest communities. At YEA’s three vocational school businesses in Roxbury, Allston and Marlborough, and three middle schools in Framingham, the majority of the students are considered at-risk due to income, language barriers, and/or special needs. According to Massachusetts Department of Education 2008-2009 statistics, for 62% of students in our Boston schools, English is not their first language or they have limited English proficiency. Seventy-one percent of these students are considered low income. And while 35% of students in all our schools receive special education services, at Horace Mann School for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, 100% of the students have special needs.
Few of these teens have been exposed to the world of business or even held a job. They also often lack the role models, social and life skills, attitudes and information necessary to become fully integrated into society.
In their first jobs, these students would face considerable workplace hurdles in the best of times. But as YEA teens they will enter the workforce with a leg up. In this three-year program, each teen assumes a new role with increasing responsibility in the business each year. They experience different types of jobs, at the same time learning to be part of a team and to lead. The exposure to the demands of work, the expectation of accountability, the necessity to work cooperatively and the reward of a job well done (along with real wages paid) combine to build stronger students, employees, and citizens of their communities.
This year, we opened a new teen-led business at Madison Park Technical Vocational School (Roxbury, MA), modeled on another YEA teen business. This will allow up to 40 underserved teens from Boston’s only vocational school, to run a YEA business. It is also a chance for YEA to replicate an established YEA business in a new and very different school community. This is the first step in our three-year replication initiative, begun in July 2009. As part of this plan we will be completing our Stairway to Success curriculum package, and formalizing our partnerships with businesses and individuals, and higher education to help make us more sustainable, and allow us to help more underserved teens on the middle and high school levels. During the next six months, we will be taking the hands-on curriculum used at the Digitize graphic design business and using it at Madison Park Designs, making any modifications necessary, and recording the reasons behind the modifications to build elements of the full Stairway to Success curriculum package including a teacher support manual. We are working with a new teacher at Madison Park, so we are using the experience to determine the level of support is needed for teachers in a new YEA business, and creating a professional development package for use prior to launching a new business. This will include sequencing the curriculum over the three-year period teens are engaged in their YEA business. The YEA Project Advisory Council, a small group of experts in urban education, distance learning, and evaluation protocols, will review this material, making recommendations to result in a final package, which will include lesson plans, worksheets, interactive podcasts, and multi-media projects, in eighteen months. At the same time we will be implementing a revised evaluation protocol, based on our existing, rigorous protocol, and refined by a YEA volunteer, an expert in evaluation from Northeastern University.