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Friday, Mar 29, 2024

Assist–Web Site Aims to Link Up Schools With Businesses

If there’s been one major push in public schools for the last few years, it’s been for more business involvement. But with all the talk of job-shadowing programs, and the need for donations of paper and pencils, schools and businesses have had a frustrating time trying to link up. That may soon change with the launch of Big BEN, the Business Educational Network, a Web site backed by the Economic Alliance of the San Fernando Valley that would serve as a key resource for bringing schools and businesses together. “The biggest problem in getting the schools involved with business is matching the needs,” said Kenn Phillips, director of education and workforce development at the Economic Alliance. “Big BEN is an online matching of a business’ resources to a school’s needs.” For example, if an elementary school principal needs a volunteer to read during lunch for a literacy program, he or she can log onto the site and post a listing. Meanwhile, if a business had extra computers or outdated stationery, it could post the material on the site and a school in need could respond. Through Big BEN, which is located in the education section of www.valleyofthestars.org, schools and businesses are given a password that allows them to go online and search postings, or type in a service or resource they need or are offering. One person at each school and one person at each business will be designated a point person for the Web site. Yvonne Chan, principle of Vaughn Street Elementary School who is familiar with the Big BEN proposal, said having a specific person in charge is important to the site’s success. “Public education tends to have too many committees,” Chan said. “Someone has to have knowledge of the school’s needs and maintain the site because businesses won’t want to do it if they don’t have an equal partner.” The postings will expire after a specified number of days. The site will start out involving the Valley’s 25 public high schools and expand to all public and private high schools by next year, Phillips said. The pilot site launched in February with a dozen area high schools. In March, businesses will sign on. Earl Roth, a career counselor at Canoga Park High School, will be one of the first school liaisons to use the network. “It’s an interesting concept,” Roth said. “It’s tying businesses and schools together in an almost instant situation, which is where we’re at in the technology world.” In the past, when Roth wanted to find business people to volunteer as mentors or donate resources, he went to hour-long chamber of commerce meetings and solicited members, or put out blind phone calls to a number of businesses. The process was largely unsuccessful, and not because of a lack of interest on either side. Earlier this year, Canoga High School proposed a mentor program, in which business people would come in once a week and work with students one on one. The program has been stalled, though, because of a lack of volunteer mentors. Roth is hoping Big BEN will change that. “In our first push, we were only reaching people who we already knew or were involved with the (Canoga Park) chamber,” Roth said. “Now, we can expand that probably tenfold.” Phillips, who came to the Economic Alliance from Boeing Co., where he headed the company’s educational outreach programs, said he and other business people had many of the same problems in reverse when trying to reach schools. “With a teacher’s in a class, you can’t call them. You can e-mail them, but when you’re looking for a point person to contact, it gets difficult,” Phillips said. “And a lot of businesses are not interested in doing a program with just one school, they want to do it for a number of schools.” That means phone calls to find the public schools in a certain area, as well as calls to the individual schools to find contact people. With Big BEN, a business simply posts a listing for a program and interested schools can respond. “I used to get calls from schools that didn’t know what Boeing did in terms of education, and they made numerous calls just to get to me,” Phillips said. The idea of linking businesses and public agencies is relatively new. Larry Kosmont, president of Kosmont Partners, a consulting firm, launched a business-to-government site last month, eCitydeals.com. The goal is to cut down on red tape and link cities and businesses that otherwise might not find each other. Through the site, cities can hold auctions, procurements and make other public-private deals. Phillips foresees schools having the ability to look online for speakers from different types of businesses, and businesses being able to identify specific needs, such as a teacher in need of a display case. “It allows them to communicate better,” he said. “That’s what this is a vehicle for.”

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