The school boards of Columbia and Richmond counties agreed Tuesday to work with the Junior Achievement of Georgia to open a business education center for sixth and seventh graders.
The agreement is tentative, but if fully approved, building the education center would cost taxpayers about $4.5 million, according to a presentation by John Hancock, the chief executive officer of Junior Achievement of Georgia.
The two school boards would split the costs, and the center would be built at a facility in Evans on Columbia Industrial Road and Riverwatch Parkway where the school district currently parks school buses. The property also has an empty warehouse.
The non-profit international organization teaches young people about business and has education facilities called Discovery Centers where children learn about finances, starting a business, getting a mortgage and other business related skills in a mock town. In Georgia, Junior Achievement has five Discovery Centers.
Hancock said building the Discovery Center in Columbia County will take about 18 months and it could be open by September of 2023. It would serve 15,000 middle school students from throughout the CSRA, according to the statement from the district, and will house two programs. One will be JA BizTown, in which sixth grade students experiment with entrepreneurship in the context of a simulated economy. The other program will be JA Finance Park, in which seventh and eighth grade students will be challenged with “life situations” to work through to develop economic and household management skills
Children get finance lessons in class and then spend about four-and-a-half hours at the Discovery Center practicing the skills they learned in class in a realistic setting. They can open a business, apply for a loan and hire employees as part of the hands-on exercise.
“These kids really need this kind of…life education,” said Charles Walker, an elected member of the Richmond County Board of Education.
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Board member Helen Minchew objected to children from other, smaller school districts being able to use the facility for free when Richmond and Columbia would have put up the money. Hancock said all the other Discovery Centers allow children from smaller school districts to attend for free. He said Columbia and Richmond students would get priority because their districts would have paid to open the facility.
Hancock expects to hire seven or eight employees to staff the Evans facility, and his organization would cover the operating costs, which he estimated to be about $800,000 a year.
The Columbia County School Board issued a statement concerning the partnership.
“We are very excited to be able to offer our students a culminating experience that extends this area of learning to the real world through partnerships and connections with our local communities,” said Superintendent Steven Flynt in a statement from the district.
Joshua B. Good is a staff reporter covering Columbia County and military/veterans’ issues for The Augusta Press. Reach him at joshua@theaugustapress.com Skyler Andrews contributed to this story. Reach him at skyler@theaugustapress.com
