Self-starting middle schoolers in Southern California will soon have reason to celebrate. A pilot institution called The Incubator School is set to open its doors next year, providing a place tweens and young teenagers to learn how to build their own businesses.
Writes Teresa Watanabe in the L.A. Times:
The school is scheduled to open next year with an initial class of 225 sixth- and seventh-graders drawn from diverse ethnic and economic backgrounds. The students will learn such real-life skills as financial literacy and time management and they will combine academic learning with hands-on tinkering. They also will work with entrepreneurial mentors in the Westside's growing Silicon Beach and be guided to produce their own start-up business by 8th grade. The school will eventually expand through 12th grade under current plans.
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As a pilot program, educators and administrators at the school will be given full control over curriculum, budget, staffing and training, among other decisions. The school was dreamed up by Sujata Bhatt, a teacher with 11 years of experience, who came up with the idea while advising a New York tech startup. Wanting to provide students chances to learn early on how to advance along with the digital world, she took her idea to the board, who approved it this week.
"There's a disconnect between a textbook-based world, the excitement of problem solving and the energy and innovation of the digital economy," Bhatt said, according to the L.A. Times. "The reason students disconnect from school is that it's not connected to the real world."
A part of the L.A. Unified School District, Incubator School has support but, as of now, no location. Original plans would have inserted it into Venice High School, but pushback from parents and students there has proved challenging.
Image via Facebook.
