When 126 high school juniors and seniors in northern Rhode Island started a summer program to beef up their math skills on Aug. 13, they began learning from entrepreneurs as well as teachers about the importance of using math to run a business.
One of the entrepreneurs scheduled to show students how to pitch a business proposition was 18-year-old Anthony Defilippo, founder and CEO of Earth Custom Designs. The Providence nonprofit sells native Mayan jewelry from Guatemala. Half of the sales at six Providence stores support the artisans and the rest goes to support the village schools. He founded the business through the MET Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship E-360 Program in Providence, he said.
Dubbed the Pathways to Graduation Summer Program and held in eight sessions at Rhode Island College, this first-ever summer day camp is intended to do two things: engage students in a fun way and help them refine math skills in preparation for taking the NECAP state assessments in October.
Rhode Island high school students need to be proficient in New England Common Assessment Program math testing in order to graduate.
Students meet from 9 a.m. to noon each weekday through Aug. 22 and spend half the time on math and half the time building a business plan, a pitch and researching what social enterprise is. The social-enterprise component is used to identify what some of the societal problems are in their community that they’d like to see solved.
Smithfield Superintendent Robert O’Brien and fellow superintendents initially identified as many as 1,000 students in 10 school districts who could benefit from a program like this.
What O’Brien knew he didn’t want was a program that offers “the same old summer-school drill-and-kill classes [without] any practical application.”
Joseph Nasif Jr., interim executive director at the Lincoln-based Northern Rhode Island Collaborative, said there’s “a lot riding on this” hands-on approach to teaching math. NRIC is a public, nonprofit educational institution established in 1987 to provide special-education programs and services to member school districts in northern Rhode Island.
Brandon Lane, an independent consultant and director of youth programs for the nonprofit Social Enterprise Greenhouse, recruited Defilippo and others and participated in professional development on Aug. 6 to help teachers tackle the eight-day summer program. Lane said he wanted to convey to teachers the importance of following a passion while learning to apply math skills.
In the business world, that means learning how to calculate projections and assess probability, among other things.
“You have to just sort of let every kid develop their own ideas,” he said. “Until they do that, they won’t really buy in.”
The Rhode Island Foundation provided a $46,000 grant and the NRIC has made up to $10,000 available for the project, which is the culmination of collaboration between school-district superintendents in 10 towns, RIC, Lane and Adam Greenman, executive director of the Rhode Island After School Plus Alliance and Education Initiative of the United Way.
“Every day there’s a math lesson built into the program,” Greenman said. “The direct instruction is done in a way that is embedded with the business plan so students are taking what they’re learning and immediately applying it to their own project.” •
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