In the News

On this episode of Getting Smart Podcast Victoria Andrews discusses student entrepreneurship with an awesome group from Frisco ISD. Tommy Thompson teaches Marketing, Entrepreneurship and Finance Classes, as well as the DECA sponsor in Frisco ISD. Before teaching he worked in the corporate world for 18 years, started his own business, and served as an industry volunteer in the INCubatoredu program at Centennial High School which he now teaches. 

At this very moment, women across the United States are sitting on million-dollar ideas, like a product that fills a niche or a service that solves a unique challenge. And increasingly, women are turning those ideas into entrepreneurship opportunities. Women accounted for 49% of business startups in 2021, a 28% jump from two years earlier. 

Toward the end of the 2020-21 school year, I developed a plan. Come June, I’d walk out of The Colony High School near Lewisville, Texas, leaving behind a 14-year career in education, then return to corporate America. It wasn’t so much the stress of COVID-19 and remote instruction that did me in, but the monotony. I found myself teaching the same courses, serving on the same committees, feeling the same anxieties — year after year after year. Plus I realized I was becoming more flustered when the least little thing didn’t go as planned in my career education and training classes. I wanted my lessons to be perfect. I wanted to be perfect...

This fall, thousands of students at 196 high schools nationwide -- and even four high schools in Australia -- will start their own companies as part of a business incubator class launched nine years ago in Barrington.