Non-profit to assist ag students in career prep

A digital rendering of the Perdue Henson Junior Achievement Center, set to begin welcoming students in October. The facility will offer students a simulated experience of working in different industries, including agriculture, as well as financial literacy and career instruction. (Image courtesy Junior Achievement of the Eastern Shore)

SALISBURY, Md. — An Eastern Shore nonprofit is hoping to give students a simulated experience of what it’s like to work in agriculture — and many other industries — this fall.

Junior Achievement of the Eastern Shore, which teaches financial literacy, career preparation, and entrepreneurship to students, is opening its new, 25,000-square-foot Perdue Henson Junior Achievement Center in October. The multi-million-dollar facility hopes to give more than 10,000 Shore students an opportunity each year to learn what it’s like to work in several industries, balance their own budgets and understand how a local economy works.

“It’ll be like they’re living in a city,” said Tori Stephens, program coordinator at the Salisbury nonprofit. “It’s a very interactive experience.”

The facility will feature 18 different storefronts for simulated businesses sponsored by actual Shore companies, including Delmarva Power, Chick-fil-A and Wor-Wic Community College. Another storefront, Bay Friendly Farm, will offer an agricultural education sponsored by a series of regional industry partners, including the Delmarva Chicken Association, Maryland Grain Producers and the Maryland Forests Association, Stephens said.

Details of the facility’s agricultural offerings are still being worked out, but could include lessons ranging from borrowing money from a local lender, such as Horizon Farm Credit, buying seeds and crop inputs for farm acreage or even measuring the diameter of trees for a logging operation, she said.

The facility is directed at students from fifth grade through high school and spread across three programs: BizTown, Finance Park and a career center. Students will complete 13 in-school lessons from a Junior Achievement curriculum to prepare them for their visit to the facility. BizTown will lead fifth- and sixth-grade students through a simulated, free-market environment that will include banking, city services and insurance — all in storefronts leased by regional businesses.

Finance Park will show middle- and high-school students how to run their own finances and explore career options — an education that includes a so-called “life scenario” in which students are given a family, a job and income to theoretically manage. High school students will also visit a career center that can help students find regional jobs, apprenticeships or internships. It will offer a leadership lab, an incubator for young entrepreneurs and even retirement planning preparation.

“It really prepares you to just be a responsible citizen in society,” Stephens said.

The facility’s agricultural partners want to help students see that a career in agriculture isn’t just farming, she said. Businesses and associations collaborate.

“They all work together within the ag industry,” she said. “It’s not extremely siloed.”

Construction on the facility began last summer and is expected to conclude next month. It’s one of 58 similar facilities nationwide, mostly in cities and suburbs such as Atlanta, Washington, Montgomery County, Md., and Wilmington, Del. The Shore facility would be one of the smallest within Junior Achievement USA, the Shore nonprofit’s parent organization, which works to prepare young people for careers in a global economy.

The facility was funded through the nonprofit’s relationships with the Franklin P. and Arthur W. Perdue Foundation, Richard A. Henson Foundation, Community Foundation of the Eastern Shore as well as local businesses and schools. The Perdue and Henson foundations each pledged $1.25 million to build the facility on the site of a former Kmart off Route 50. The nonprofit also received an anonymous $1 million donation too.