Through the INCubatoredu program, students enrolled in the entrepreneurship class work with business professionals to get experience creating and building a business. Students looking to work in business or start a business can get a head-start through this class.

“[Students] form a team and work together and they’re going to try to get a business created and off the ground,” entrepreneurship teacher Dustin Gunter said.

With 25 students in both fifth and sixth periods, students prepare their businesses with teams of four to five peers compiling ideas. Projects range from creating an app, to designing websites, to actual products.

“We are looking at a teenage Linkedin,” senior Ireland Miller said. “Something that could help teens and college students find a job easier.”

Students will be partnered with mentors to help guide them through their journey as entrepreneurs. The mentors and coaches are local business professionals around the community with experience in various fields.

“There’s quite a few [mentors] that actually come over to the school,” senior Hunter Broughton said. “There’s one who is actually a patent lawyer, and one who’s actually an entrepreneur who has actually made a couple of businesses and sold them for a lot of money. So we don’t know yet who we are choosing.”

Depending on how well students do at the end of the year, students can sit in front of a board of advisers and pitch their business products and ideas to get approval for funding from the advisors.

“If a person chooses to create a partnership with them and wants to do that, that’s totally up to them,” Gunter said. “It’s a real-world deal that they will negotiate with each other.”

Students not only develop life skills that will help them in their everyday life, but are also experiencing entrepreneurship that will help them later on in their careers.

“It is a real-world entrepreneurship class that basically integrates business professionals and entrepreneurs in the real-world and with our students,” Gunter said.

INCubatoredu is a nation-wide program that gives students practice with entrepreneurship.

“It is not like any other class I have ever taken,” Broughton said. “It’s actually like real-world application.”