Entrepreneurship class offered to high school students

During the Spring semester of this past school year, high school students had the opportunity for the first time to take a class on entrepreneurship and business planning at Carroll County High School. The class, which is called "Entrepreneurship", is a business-related course offered through the Business department and counts as an elective course in the student's educational curriculum.

In the course, students learn all about the aspects of entrepreneurship and the proper steps to take in order to become successful in starting their own business. The class goes over the skills necessary to start a business with each student creating his or her own business plan and learning how to successfully improve upon it. For six weeks in the course, students are not only taught about entrepreneurship, but are taught a lot about financial literacy such as economics, banking, credit, and insurance factors.

Even though each student creates his or her business plan individually, there are several business projects throughout the high school in which all students of the class work on as a group. These group projects work on fund-raising programs for different academic departments throughout the high school such as developing a business plan for the program, brainstorming different ideas, executing marketing strategies, and finding out the statistics on costs and profit. Two of the group projects the students worked on this year were developing a business plan for the greenhouse sales in the Horticulture department and selling and marketing food items for the Food Services department to sell to students, faculty, and staff.

The goal and focus of the Entrepreneurship class at CCHS is to build up all the skills necessary for students to create and start up their own business and to get a feel of what it takes to become successful in developing a business plan. Plans for future classes is to get more involved with more local businesses in Carroll County and hopes that these businesses will inspire students to use their skills and talents taught in the course to start their own business in the county area.