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Students Make a Business of Learning

by Ashley Ball

"This school has no chance." That was Alejandro Piñeda's reaction after his first visit to Fremont High School Business Academy in Oakland, California, a small academy operating within a larger high school.

Piñeda, a student at California State University, Chico, had been asked in early fall 2002 to mentor the academy's students through his membership in a national organization called Students in Free Enterprise, or SIFE. SIFE enlists mentors from the academic and business worlds to help university students create socially conscious, profitable businesses. The university students, in turn, work with high school students involved in Students for the Advancement of Global Entrepreneurship (SAGE), the secondary school branch of SIFE.

When he visited the Fremont High SAGE team in October of 2002, says Piñeda, he learned that "Fremont High was ... known for its high violence and extremely low test scores. The school sits in an area that divides the South Gang with the North Gang, [both of] which end up meeting in between to fight for territory."

He watched as teacher and Business Academy Co-Director Amy Carpenter outlined the action plan for the coming spring's statewide SAGE competition, a yearly event in which students present their projects to a panel of 80 or more judges. "All but two students were either sleeping, listening to their CD players, or talking to each other," Pineda recalls. He was close to writing them off. But on the way to tell SIFE Director Curt DeBerg he wanted nothing to do with Fremont, something stopped him.

Students Motivate Their Classmates

After all, the academy had produced a winning team just the year before. Fremont students were involved in SAGE both through required business classes and voluntarily, on an extracurricular basis. The Fremont SAGE team had won top state honors in spring 2002 for its Business Operations Management Business Academy Student Team (BOMBAST) project, which had nearly halved the school's 70 percent truancy rate. Noticing that students were leaving school for lunch and not returning, SAGE students had partnered with local restaurants to run a food cart on campus. Fresh burritos and sandwiches kept students on campus during lunch -- and more important, after.

Nidya Baez and Veronica Garcia, the two students who were paying attention on the day of Piñeda's visit, were veterans of that team. They wrote to Piñeda, telling him they wanted to motivate their classmates. "Many students in the class did not know what SIFE was about in the fall, until we really hustled to teach them," explains Nidya. [Ed. note: The secondary school program, originally started by the Chico State SIFE team, was known as Cal-High SIFE until it spread beyond California in 2003 and was renamed SAGE. When the Fremont students mention SIFE, they are using the old name for their secondary school SAGE program.]

"I have a drive to just show everybody here at school that students can actually do something," Veronica says. "You have those certain adults that look at Fremont students and they're like, 'You guys are not going to do anything. You guys are lazy.' ... With SIFE we have the opportunity to show them we're not stupid."

Commitment and Collaboration