Brandon Lane isn’t your typical high school teacher.
He’s an entrepreneur by trade, and now Lane teaches kids about starting businesses at the Metropolitan Regional Career and Technical Center’s Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship in South Providence.
Lane, who studied entrepreneurship at Babson College, is passionate about helping kids develop an entrepreneurial mindset. He believes the problem solving skills that coincide with entrepreneurship are beneficial down the road — no matter the career path the student chooses.
The Met High School is a nontraditional public school that allows students to focus on areas and programs that most interest them. The aforementioned Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship has its own building in the middle of the South Providence campus. The 3,600 square foot building has student workrooms, office space, a conference room and incubator space.
“It’s a beautiful building,” Lane says.
All incoming freshman are exposed to an introductory entrepreneurial course. Then, students are invited to apply to a more advanced course that delves into writing and presenting business plans. The course ends with a business plan competition in front of investors. Students are then encouraged to continue building their businesses, and a few even end up taking younger students on as interns.
“That’s a rare thing,” Lane says. “It takes a special kid who understands the importance of mentoring young students. We have a few kids that do that. They are very dedicated to the business.”
The businesses range from culinary ventures to finance. For example, one of Lane’s students is currently managing a fund including shares from all 12 of Rhode Island’s public companies. The Met’s staff helped the student raise $2,500 to start the fund.
“Those are the projects that we are working on that really have dollars attached to them,” Lane says. “It gives them a deep sense of ownership — not like the stock market game.”
The Met’s entrepreneurship program has been around for 11 years, but the physical building has stood for six years. According to its website, Dennis Littky, co-founder of The Met schools, launched an entrepreneurship program with the help of web entrepreneur Bill Daugherty, who is also affiliated with Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship.
When asked why it’s important to teach kids to have an entrepreneurial mindset early, Lane says it’s a great way to engage students in their education. It also gives them a sense of ownership over the projects they are building. Lane says he teaches the students to identify a problem and then think about the skills, knowledge and resources available to solve that problem.
“How am I going to make it for myself in terms of providing real value to the community and to stakeholders?” Lane says. “Actually going out there and making something viable and sustainable that creates either a social or economic impact to community.”
Even if the students don’t go on to become entrepreneurs, Lane says the skills the Met is teaching are transferable to other aspects of life.
“If you are not an entrepreneur when you leave here in the classic sense, that’s fine,” Lane says. “But if you can go into any job or organization and realize, ‘Here is a problem, I know how to connect the dots,’ you’ll be a worthwhile asset to any industry going forward.”
