Summary: Over 200 students from the Wooster City School District learned the ins and outs of running a small business in a fun and unusual way.
On May 1 lemonade stands were popping up like daisies throughout Wooster as over 200 students from the Wooster City School District participated in Lemonade Day.
Over 200 students in third through ninth grade ran their own lemonade stands for the day to help teach them the fundamentals of running a business.
Youre never too old to run a lemonade stand, said Richard Lee, the Personal Finance Literacy and Entrepreneurship teacher at Wooster High School and co-organizer of Woosters event adding its a fun activity for students that teaches them life lessons in the process.
Armed with a Lemonade Day Entrepreneur Workbook that teaches skills ranging from customer service and communications to economics and problem solving and a booklet containing recipes to make lemonade from scratch, the budding student entrepreneurs set about setting up their own lemonade stand business.
Students were able to keep profits earned during the event but were encouraged to donate a portion of the proceeds to the charity of their choice.
For Wayne Elementary School students, those charities included the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation and the relief efforts in Japan.
According to a Wayne Elementary School parent assisting with the effort, the school community set a goal of raising $1000 for its charities. Thanks to a series of lemonade stands set up in prime locations including Wal-Mart and Buehlers by mid afternoon they were well on their way to meeting that goal.
Wayne Elementary School students also set up lemonade stands on the campus of the College of Wooster, where they were joined in their efforts by COW student teachers currently teaching at Wayne.
The Wooster Lemonade Day event is part of a program that originated in Houston, Texas in 2007. By 2010, more than 100,000 stands were set up across the United States, including cities in North Carolina, Indiana, Connecticut and Illinois. Students sold more than 5 million glasses of lemonade, earning $6.8 million, $2 million of which went to charities.
Lee and his event co-organizer Derek Bode, an Industrial Technology teacher at Wooster High School, first heard about the program during a meeting in Columbus regarding National Lemonade Day. A representative from the Burton D. Morgan Foundation, which supports entrepreneurship, was also in attendance.
When representatives from the district and the Foundation met at the beginning of this year regarding an existing grant, the idea of Lemonade Day was discussed. It was at this meeting that the idea was born to have the Foundation be the primary sponsor of Lemonade Day and incorporate Northeast Ohio as one large group.
According to Wooster City School District Board of Education member Susan Marlar, the Wooster City School District was among several Northeast Ohio school districts including Parma City Schools, University School, Seton Catholic School and Emmanuel Christian Academy, that participated in the event.
According to district officials local organizations including Buckeye Container, Wayne Savings, PNC Bank, Wooster Area Chamber of Commerce, NobleTek, Seaman Corporation and Wooster Hydrostatics also acted as local sponsors for the event.
Lee hopes that Lemonade Day will become an annual event in Wooster.
Were looking forward to growing this program each year to include more and more students, families and community members, said Lee.
For the first year weve had a lot of interest from students and their parents, which is wonderful, said Wooster City Schools Superintendent Michael Tefs.
Hands-on learning is so important for students, and if you can make it fun, all the better, Tefs added.
For more information on Lemonade Day visit www.lemonadeday.org.
