Junior Achievement of South Florida

Junior Achievement (JA) was founded in 1919 by Theodore Vail, president of American Telephone & Telegraph; Horace Moses, president of Strathmore Paper Co. and Senator Murray Crane of Massachusetts. Its first program, The Company Program, was offered to high school students on an after-school basis. In 1975, the organization entered the classroom with the introduction of Project Business for the middle grades. Since then, Junior Achievement has gradually expanded its activities and broadened its scope to encompass an ever-widening student population.

Junior Achievement of South Florida was founded locally in 1959 by the Fort Lauderdale Rotary Club and served just 373 high school students during its first year. Programs now span grades K-12, with age appropriate curricula designed to teach elementary students about their roles as individuals, workers, and consumers and to prepare middle grade and high school students for key economic and workforce issues they will face. Junior Achievement programs reached 44,000 Broward and South Palm Beach County students during the 2009-2010 school year.

Programs

Junior Achievement of South Florida offers age-appropriate curricula to ensure that students understand their roles as future members of the business community. The programs are divided into three categories: elementary, middle school and high school.

Elementary

The elementary school programs include six sequential themes for kindergarten through fifth-grade students and one capstone experience. Students learn the basic concepts of business and economics and how education is relevant to the workplace. The activities build on studies from each preceding grade and prepare students for secondary school and continued learning. Fifth graders can have the opportunity to work at JA BizTown, a facility on the Broward College campus.

Middle school

The middle school programs emphasize the value of workforce readiness, entrepreneurship, and financial literacy. Students are also introduced to many economic concepts and facts about the working world.

The programs at this level expand upon the concepts that were learned in elementary school and help teens make good decisions about their futures. Junior Achievement's lessons are meant to supplement standard social studies curricula and develop communication skills. 8th graders have the opportunity to work beyond JA BizTown to JA Finance Park, also on the Broward College campus.

High school

The high school programs teach students about concepts relating to entrepreneurship, financial literacy, and work readiness. Students are encouraged to make informed decisions about their future, and foster skills that might be useful in the business world. Volunteers aid in these goals by bringing real-life business experience into the classroom, to reinforce the lessons that are taught.

JA World Huizenga Center at Broward College

Since its inception, Junior Achievement has been committed to "experiential learning." Taking it to the next level, Junior Achievement of South Florida created the JA World Huizenga center at Broward College that houses two new programs: JA BizTown and JA Finance Park. This dramatic shift forward will significantly transform how every local student is taught to view the world of work, free enterprise and their possibilities for success in it. Through the experiential learning derived from both BizTown and Finance Park, students achieve advanced levels of engagement, reflection, and personal responsibility.

JA BizTown

JA BizTown is a miniature city that allows fifth-graders the opportunity to assume roles as proprietors, civic leaders, and consumers. It greatly increases students’ knowledge of the free enterprise system as they learn how to fulfill the goals of satisfying customers, paying-off business loans, and realizing a profit at the conclusion of the business day.

JA Finance Park

JA Finance Park expands upon the lessons learned in JA BizTown by giving students an identity to manage that includes marital status, number of children, annual income, education attained, and job type. Students take these characteristics into consideration as they prepare budgets that take into consideration housing, food, furniture, insurance, education, automobiles, investments, and more. Providing a real life experience of managing an income and learning to live within your means offers a strong and important lesson on the value of staying in school to maximize earning potential.

External links

• Official site, Junior Achievement of South Florida