Faced with public schools’ limited funding for extracurricular activities, Kushal Kadakia and a group of fellow students decided to start of local school store through their DECA chapter.
Kushal Kadakia starts things. Among them: his own, student-operated school store.
Founded in 2013, Clear Lake DECA School Store serves the dual purpose of providing students an opportunity to apply the skills and knowledge they learn in the classroom to real-life, as well as help fund extracurricular activities.
The store is entirely student-operated, creating opportunities for developing decision-making skills, human resources, accounting and marketing experience, and sharpening entrepreneurial skills. At the end of two-and-a-half years, the store has raised $10,000 that has been recycled directly back into the school, either to support the store or to help fund student activities so that no student has “to worry about money holding them back academically,” says Kadakia.
Kadakia currently serves as the president of both his local school DECA chapter as well as his DECA district, which includes between 3,000 and 3,500 students. When he leaves to attend Duke University in the fall, a new team will take over operating the school store.
Kadakia plans to pursue a double major in public policy and biochemistry at Duke. He would like to eventually go into biotechnology, and has a passion for applying business and marketing skills to help bring biotechnological innovations to the market so that people can have access to them.
Starting the school business had its obstacles. The students first had to make it financially profitable by learning how to innovate and market it to the student body, and then had to lobby administrators in the second year of the business to gain the right to sell food on campus outside of association with the cafeteria. The students succeeded, and the process has “helped us to really expand career technical education not only across the school but across the district,” says Kadakia.
“The school store is a school-based enterprise where everything you learn in the classroom comes together to be applied in the real world,” he says.
Their success in starting a business to help support student activities and learning “lets us know that money will never be a barrier to letting us broaden our academic horizons.”
“The best business can start in your own backyard,” says Kadakia.
There is always opportunity to create something new and dynamic, he says, and even though you start small, there’s always room to expand and innovate.
