Roslyn High School had a grand reopening of their school store on Sept. 16. The store is managed by Roslyn’s Distributive Education Club of America students under the guidance of business teacher Sallykaye Kaufman.
DECA officers interviewed Life Skills and ESL students for positions in the store.
Each prospective employee filled out an application and received a list of interview questions so they could prepare in advance.
This enables the Life Skills students to interact more fully with the overall student body and helps the ESL students practice their English language skills in a workplace environment. It also provides the Life Skills class a chance to prepare for jobs in the community by offering an opportunity to engage in proper social interaction and solving job specific situations.
Students and staff can purchase a variety of Roslyn High spirit items and apparel, school supplies, review books, toiletries (like tissues and Chapstick), candy, snacks and beverages. The store also has a t-shirt press for designing custom T-shirts.
In the near future, they plan to carry greeting cards designed by students and helium balloons. Periodically they will also sell fundraising items for various clubs throughout the school, such as rubber bracelets for cancer collections by Youth Against Cancer. Students receive community service hours for working in the store.
“We are also compiling a training manual as we train students of various abilities how to receive stock and count inventory, arrange merchandise, use a cash register, and maintain the store’s cleanliness,” said Kaufman. “These are the same skills that our special needs students would learn at the BOCES Retail Program, but now they can stay in the building rather than take a bus to another location.”
The store will also be used as a lab for other business classes such as entrepreneurship and fashion marketing and the special education class “Math and Money in the Marketplace” so students can apply classroom concepts.
In addition, the store will be open for events like basketball and volleyball games and Back-to-School night so that parents and members of the community can make purchases and see the store in action. It also helps to increase involvement of the students in the athletic department.
The revenues earned will go toward maintaining the store and to DECA for helping to fund competition costs, said Kaufman.
The DECA students get experience managing a school business enterprise and will apply for bronze status with National DECA this year.
