In the News

Educators have always known that skills like creativity, flexibility and resilience are foundational to student success. But the COVID-19 pandemic has reinforced how important it is to equip our pre-K-12 students with those skills.

Early educators focused on the social and emotional development of the whole child, in particular, have been swimming upstream against a rising tide of accountability. As a result of this focus among policymakers (and sometimes parents) on high-stakes assessment, educators have deprioritized teaching human skills, such as critical thinking, collaboration and adaptability...

Vista Ridge High School INCubatoredu 2020 National Pitch Winner, Walk-Thru, is featured in this news segment on KVUE in Austin. 

“Every time someone has a connotation of vegan in their minds, and then they taste our cookies, they’re like, ‘Man, this is good!’”

Carl Veus and Franko Cardozo, Nagen’s founders, are showing Southwest Florida how delicious dairy- and egg-free desserts can be with the bakery they cooked up while enrolled in the entrepreneurship program at Lorenzo Walker Technical College. Lorenzo Walker’s hands-on program helps students establish and expand on revenue-generating companies. Collier County Public Schools offers students entrepreneurship education in middle school and high school.

The INCubatoredu program is a two-semester high school challenge that offers students an entrepreneurial experience under the guidance of volunteer coaches and mentors from the local business community. Student teams identify a real problem, develop a product, establish a business plan, and pitch the idea to a group of judges at “Pitch Night.”

Retirement community seniors need to get out more.  That’s what a team of five in-coming seniors at Vista Ridge High School believes, and they   want to provide them with the opportunity through the lenses of virtual reality.  “This is a very novel idea,” team director Amod Daherkar said. “We’re not reinventing the wheel, a lot of this technology already exists, but it’s just not being implemented in the right way.”

Franko Cardozo and Carl Veus, the founders of Nagen Vegan Bakery, worked with Project Graduation to distribute a two-pack of their cookies to every single graduate in the entire Lorenzo Walker Technical school system.

Like most of the working world, students in our entrepreneurship courses made the overnight adjustment from in-person collaborative sessions to Zoom meetings, instant messaging, email, Google Classroom and the Google Cloud for Startup’s platform to build their businesses from a distance. 

Some Barrington High School entrepreneurship students have learned how to deal with business curveballs that resulted from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Instead of an affair in Barrington High's auditorium where the finalists typically pitch their startup companies in a setting similar to ABC's "Shark Tank," this year's business incubator winners were announced in a Zoom teleconference Thursday. Three of the five finalists received a combined $20,500 in investments from private sources.

After a start-up company created by a group of Barrington High School students was put on hold due to the coronavirus epidemic, the teens behind the project decided to get creative and find a way to give back.

We will soon get to a time - if we are not already there - when we talk about life pre-pandemic and post-pandemic. I had initially planned to publish this interview last month, pre-pandemic. Then my focus, along with the rest of the world, shifted. I began to write about the impact of COVID-19 on schools, higher education institutions and businesses. The time didn’t feel right for this story.

But as the impact of the pandemic sinks in - both the devastating loss of life and of jobs along with growing anxiety over the future of work and the economy - the themes of this interview struck me as especially timely, as we consider what the pandemic means for students preparing for an uncertain future.