A Fine MATCH Between Business and Education
Allston-Brighton TAB
December 6, 2002
By Phoebe Sweet
"Cycle of poverty" and "portfolio diversity" are phrases seldom heard in the same place at the same time, but both are on the lips of faculty and students at the Media and Technology Charter High School on Commonwealth Avenue.
In Jennifer Meyers' 11th grade Entrepreneurship Academy, students are using one to combat the other.
MATCH, a charter high school that recently moved into the old "Ellis the Rim Man" building, has a goal of 100 percent college attendance for its students. But with three quarters of MATCH's 160 students receiving free lunch and many of them falling below the poverty line, soaring tuition costs seem more than a little out of reach.
That's why MATCH has opened its own Sprint PCS Wireless store in front of the school. Entrepreneurship students, with the help of teachers and volunteers, staff the store and put their wages and commission directly into a scholarship fund that can't be touched until they enroll at an institution of higher education.
The money is invested for them until they graduate.
MATCH Executive Director Alan Safran said Monday that he hopes the "taste of entrepreneurship" students get through the collaboration with Sprint will motivate them to go to college, come back to Boston to start their own businesses and eventually "raise their neighborhoods out of poverty."
During Monday afternoon's Entrepreneurship class, Meyers and Safran handed over a check for $1,267.28 to Citizen's Bank representative Chris Suraci.
Suraci will give the money to Putnam Investments, where it will be funneled into stocks, bonds and a money market account.
"I'm really moved by this," Safran told the 11 students who are participating in the program this year. The money, he said, is "symbolically important and it's tangibly important."
With college tuition costs rising at a rate of five percent yearly, Citizen's Suraci told the MATCH kids, they would have to diversify their investments between high and low risk options in order to maximize profits while safeguarding against loss.
"The hope is that we will be able to keep up with inflation," said Suraci.
Suraci explained that Putnam would invest in a mutual fund that would diversify their stock holdings.
Meyers estimates that the kids will leave MATCH with somewhere between $3,000 and $6,000, depending on how many years they work in the store, how many hours they log each year and how many phones they manage to peddle.
The kids work in the store for eight to 12 hours each week and 100 percent of their pay is invested for them.The amount of each student's scholarship will depend upon his or her sales record and time spent in the store.
Eventually, the store will be staffed by 11 to 12 11th graders and led by five 12th graders in management positions. Those five students will get "high level managerial experience that other high schoolers don't have," said Meyers.
Students are also responsible for marketing. "We have to come up with creative ideas and put them into action," said 16-year-old Stesha Emmanuel.
Emmanuel is considering Howard University and classmate Tiffany Shavers, also 16, is thinking about Duke University. The girls plan to pay for college with scholarships, financial aide and hard work.
"We'll be working our way through college," said Shavers.
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