VIDEO: JAGC Continues to Change the Education Status Quo

A look back at an impactful year -- video link below

Author: Tyler Adams
Work Readiness
Published: Wednesday, 05 Jun 2024

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Students holding their created projects.

Image caption: An interactive classroom experience leads to fun learning. (And many smiles, as well.)

IN THE CLASSROOM

For the second straight year, Junior Achievement of Greater Cleveland was a valuable anchor partner for the Greater Cleveland Career Consortium and their PACE initiative (Planning And Career Exploration) -- helping to pave the way to a revolution in education delivery for Greater Cleveland students. By being an anchor partner, JA's critical finacnial literacy and work readiness programming is becoming a standard for thousands of area middle school and high school students.

Our JA in a Day program delivery -- half-day formatted engagement opportunities with multiple JA lessons taught at a single school -- remained strong this past academic year, as well. A popular choice for industry partners and office-wide participation, students as young as kindergarten were once again met with hundreds of positive adult influences in their classroom who taught them the fundamentals of their community's economy, citizen responsibility, entrepreneurship, budgeting, and more in a fun and interactive format.

Image caption: While it was a simulated stock market, participating students felt the energy and excitement of a real trading floor.

THROUGH EXPERIENCE

Junior Achievement of Greater Cleveland's flagship experiential learning experiences, JA Stock Market Challenge and JA Inspire, returned and even doubled in capacity during the 2023/2024 academic year. Each program added an additional event to reach more students in more places with their progressive learning opportunities.

JA Stock Market Challenge introduces students to basic concepts about how the stock market works and the impact of current events on the stock market. The program concludes with a single-day competition where each team of three to four students is issued $1,000,000 of “mock stock” and must buy and sell shares in fictitious companies throughout a simulated 60-day trading period. Trading is fast, fun, and furious with a new day starting every 60 seconds. The goal of each team is to achieve the greatest rate of return on investment by the end of the simulated trading session. In addition to its December event, JA Stock Market Challenge expanded into a second event in April, allowing more students to become more financially savvy in a single year.

JA Inspire is not your average career fair. It is a full-day holistic career exploration experience. Junior Achievement of Greater Cleveland's goal with JA Inspire is to not only give students the perspectives and opportunities of the many career pathways available to them, but also give them the skillset and confidence to own their economic success. JAGC does this by combing in-class programming (including a Career Interest Inventory that allows students to explore career pathways based on their desires and interest), a Career Walk featuring dozens of local industry partners representing a variety of career clusters, and Workshops that may focus on the importance of investing their first earned dollars, personal branding and storytelling, entrepreneurship, and everything in between. And this year, JA Inspire grew from its Cleveland-based event to an event in Lorain County, as well. With plans to continue growing this program, JAGC in poised to continue changing the career exploration status quo.

Image caption: Students only know what they know, and bringing them to the industry gives them a better sense of what is possible.

ON SITE

In addition to Junior Achievement of Greater Cleveland's experiential learning opportunities and as an effort to expand career exploration efforts, JA Job Shadow grew substantially in 2023/2024. Fellowship programs with the Cleveland Guardians and The Sherwin-Williams Company returned while new industry partners spanning manufacturing, architecture, agriculture, and more opened their doors to JAGC students to give them hands-on, real-world career exploration. As the emphasis for experience-based learning continues to grow, so will the priority of expanding JA Job Shadow partnerships all throughout JAGC's four-district service area.

A GLIMPSE AT THIS PAST YEAR

View this video to feel the impact for this past academic year.