First Results from Dyett High School are In - The Eagle Entrepreneurs are Rocking

About 10 months ago, with the support of Beulah McLoyd, the amazing Principal of the newly-reborn Walter H. Dyett High School for the Arts, a group of Chicagoland entrepreneurs and the team from 1871, along with some other talented individuals and organizations, set out to see if we could help make an impact and a difference in our community and in our city beyond the 4 walls of 1871.

We wanted to see if the excitement of entrepreneurship which we’ve all felt could be taught and shared with a group of 9^th grade high school students and whether it would help them, not simply in this new course of instruction, but far beyond it as well – in their other classes – in their overall enthusiasm and interest in learning – and even entirely beyond their school activities.

We wrote a book, we raised some funds personally to design and construct a new digital active learning classroom, and we taught the initial course for several months to the first 20 students. And we asked the school to help track “our” Eagle Entrepreneurship students and see whether there were any demonstrable changes.

We have just started this year’s class with another 20 students (some of last year’s students helped us kick off the new class as well) and we have just been supplied with the tracking results for the initial cohort which appear below:

This is just the beginning, but it’s an important first step. And it shows what a small group of interested and committed individuals can accomplish when their heads and hearts are in the right place.

I want to take this opportunity to thank everyone who helped make this modest dream a reality in just a few months. It was a great team effort and one which continues to this day. So thanks to: Beulah McLoyd and her team at Dyett, to our generous entrepreneur donors including especially the Skender Foundation, to Barbara Pollack and Ken Brown and the folks at Steelcase, Forward Space and Interface who made the new classroom come to life, and to my team at 1871 who pitched in to help with the classes, the materials, and the logistics.  H.A.T.