Ep 155 | Current students, future leaders? FBLA

SPEAKER_01 0:00

We also have a little bit of notoriety around the school of success at the district level, success at the state level, even success at the national level. And so students see that success and they want to be part of it. And so they join, whether it's their freshman year or their senior year. We have lots of members that they don't join until their senior year. And then they kind of look back and say, Man, I wish I would have done this earlier.

SPEAKER_00 0:26

Welcome to the Voices United in Education podcast. Each week we showcase the teachers, administrators, and community members who go the extra mile to contribute to the success of every student in Escambia County. You'll meet the real people behind the titles and learn about the amazing resources to support every student's success. Our children are our future. That thought is a given. We look at them and we see humans growing into adults. What we don't often have the foresight to see is future business owners, future bosses, and future leaders. But my next guest is not only seeing the future, he's helping build it. He's the IB business management teacher at Pensacola High School. And today he's going to share how FBLA, future business leaders of America, is giving kids real experiences that translate into confidence, connections, and leadership. Believing in our kids and investing in our community, Jacob Hill. Thanks for being here.

SPEAKER_01 1:27

No problem. Glad to be here. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:29

So, okay, FBLA. I had that in my high school. So I think we need to, I don't know, myth bust or confirm myths. I'm not sure. Is this mostly for kids who are definitely interested in business? Like I picture them walking around high school with little briefcases and ties.

SPEAKER_01 1:43

Absolutely not. Well, that would be a very scary sight if we had all those students walking around. No, this is we've got STEM students. I mean, there's lots of students out there that are focusing on science or focusing on math, or they're going to be engineers, or a lot of our students have just been accepted to colleges or just did signings for colleges. So they're going off to study all kinds of things, but they know that the importance of basic business background is there. And especially everyone needs leadership. Everyone's got to have those leadership skills and being able to network with other people and speak to them. These are all these are skills that everyone needs, and especially our students.

SPEAKER_00 2:18

So what's the draw for kids then? What brings them into FBLA? Because I don't imagine that, you know, the average freshman or sophomore in high school is going, you know what I need? Leadership abilities. Let's go sign me up.

SPEAKER_01 2:34

That's probably true. Most of them don't think about it. There's some, there's definitely some things that our older students push to them. We do have a yearly trip to Orlando, Florida, and they get to go to Universal Studios. So that right there is like flags are going off, and they're like, ooh, that could be fun. But it is our, it's our biggest student organization at Pensacola High School. So we have we currently have 139 members. So I don't do a lot of this as FBLA. My students do that, especially after their freshman year. They already know what FBLA is in terms of what it's going to bring into their lives. A lot of them are doing it. Maybe their parents are pushing them for their college resumes. Some of them want to have that practical business experience. I had a young girl, she just joined as a senior. She had never done FBLA before, but she knew as looking towards her future that she wanted to open up her own business. And so once a year, we joined with a Studer Institute and we go to Entrecon, which is a two-day small business conference. And this girl, she knew that we went and she wanted to go to that conference. And she didn't know if she could go just on her own. And so she joined FBLA so that she could attend conferences. The competition, the fun times at Universal Studios, it didn't apply to her at all. She knew that she wanted to go to local conferences so she could make those business connections already. She's already planning out her five-year plan of when I graduate from college, what am I going to do? I'm going to be here in Pensacola and I need to have those local business connections.

SPEAKER_00 4:02

So there's partially the students that are like, oh, my friends are doing this. This is the biggest club in the school. And then there's the other students who have their 10-year plan, and this is going to support that.

SPEAKER_01 4:13

100%. I mean, you literally have students that are like, I just want to go to state and have a fun time. And I mean, that's what student organizations are about, having a fun time. But the others are looking ahead, or at least maybe sometimes their parents or their aunts or uncles or their grandparents are looking ahead for them and saying, hey, this is something that you should be interested in doing. We also have a little bit of notoriety around the school of success at the district level, success at the state level, even success at the national level. And so students see that success and they want to be part of it. And so they join, whether it's their freshman year or their senior year. We have lots of members that they don't join until their senior year. And then they kind of look back and say, man, I wish I would have done this earlier.

SPEAKER_00 4:52

So tell me about those competitions since they are such a draw for students. What happens? What are you competing in? What do you win?

SPEAKER_01 4:59

Okay, so the competitions is a big part of FBLA. A lot of the students like it. We have a lot of IB students, a lot of IB students' friends that are also part of it. And so they like this competition atmosphere. There's over 75 different competitive events from UX design, human resource management, sports and entertainment, hospitality, accounting, finance, public speaking. There's so many different events that students can be a part of. And so once a year they go to UWF, University of West Florida, and we have our district leadership conference where they compete in front of judges from Navy Federal Credit Union. Great partner there with our judges as Navy Federal. And then if they make it past districts, which most of our students do because they're awesome, then they make it to State Leadership Conference, which is in Orlando, Florida, every year at the Hilton there. So we had 139 members, 110 of them went to state this year. So I brought along with some great adult chaperones and teachers, I brought 110 students from Penn School High School to Orlando and they compete once again at state level with 5,000 students at that conference. There's about 14,000 FBLA students in the state of Florida. So 5,000 make it to state and they compete there. And then at the state level, which is once a year, sometime in the spring, they can then win again and they are cash prizes at that point, and they can move on to national leadership conference, which this year, this summer, is going to be in Anaheim, California. And so we have 21 students that made it to National Leadership Conference from Penn School High School, and they're heading out to California this summer. Wow. Yes. A lot of them have been outside the state. Many of them have never been outside the state. So even just that simple act of bringing these kids to another state, it's just opening their horizons for the future of what could be.

SPEAKER_00 6:48

Well, and the community partnerships also open up a lot of doors because they're in front of the people who are sending in resumes wish they could get FaceTime with.

SPEAKER_01 7:08

Penn Schola Chamber of Commerce has been a friend of FBLA for a while. And so that just opens up the whole new world of all of these people that are part of the Penn Schola Chamber of Commerce. The president has been an advocate for us of if we have students that want internships, reach out. A few of the law firms in town have also been advocates for us as well, and especially financial partners, because sending 110 students to Orlando, Florida, is not cheap. But our probably our biggest partner, and it's within our Escambia County School District, is the Escambia County Public Schools Workforce Division, which is headed up by Director Steve Harrell. I love Steve, not just for the fact that he speaks Chinese, which I also speak Chinese, so we can talk a little bit together, but he is an advocate for our students. He will make any decision. And he's his philosophy is always money should not be a problem. If we can make it work, he's going to make it work. And so, workforce, not only do they provide the funding for our adult chaperones to go on these trips, but they provide these huge charter buses with gas prices going up, they are not cheap. And they're not just providing them for us, they're providing them for all of Escamby County public schools, which is we have other schools that do FB LA, Tate, Washington, and then also a few middle schools, which I'll talk about middle schools later because that's an exciting thing for this year.

SPEAKER_00 8:24

Okay, I definitely want to hear about that. But let's talk about the cost because we've got all these awesome community partners that are contributing. But I'm wondering, are there also costs for the kids slash parents left over?

SPEAKER_01 8:38

Yeah. So I mean, I mean, a lot of those costs do fall on the kids' shoulders, but I always say to the kids, if money's an issue, come and talk to me. And I've built enough rapport with the students that they feel extremely comfortable coming to me and saying, Mr. Hill, I really want to go to state. I think it'd be beneficial for me. I really want to compete. I did so well at districts. Can we do something? And so at that point, we either so we ask each of the students to pay dues, and most of them are able to pay the dues at the beginning of the year and gets them like a shirt and gets them to be part of it.

SPEAKER_00 9:10

And that's like what $40?

SPEAKER_01 9:12

$40 to $45, depending on if they turn it in on time or not. So um Roger that.

SPEAKER_00 9:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:17

And then at state, it's about $250 for the kids to go to state, which pays for their hotel, their registration, and all the fun stuff.

SPEAKER_00 9:25

That's actually really good because I know the hotel that you're talking about. And it's, I think $250 night would be a deal.

SPEAKER_01 9:32

Yes, 100%. Yeah. So they're staying for three nights. Now we pack them in four to a room. There's no you're sleeping in your own bed in your own room by yourself. No, everybody's four to a room, and that helps out with the cost a lot. And then if there's a student that comes to me and says that they don't have enough money, my first step is to look into our internal budget, our FBLA budget. We've kind of built it up through different fundraisers as a chapter. And I see, okay, do we have enough money to just help them out a little bit? And then if it's one of those extreme natures or extreme situations where we don't have the money or they're asking for everything, then I start going to some of these community partners that I know, business owners of. A lot of them are parents of FBLA students. So they're already paying for their son or daughter and they see the value in it. And usually it's the ones that have been doing FBLA for a year or two or three years. And I go to them and said, Hey, the student needs a little help. What can you do? What can your corporation, what can your company do here? And most of them are willing to step up in a heartbeat and help out.

SPEAKER_00 10:32

Because they know the value.

SPEAKER_01 10:33

A hundred percent.

SPEAKER_00 10:34

Okay, Chinese.

SPEAKER_01 10:35

Oh, yes. Yes, yes. I love the food. No, um, yes.

SPEAKER_00 10:40

So you used to teach in China. Where else have you taught?

SPEAKER_01 10:43

So I taught for two years, about a year and a half in Bulgaria in Eastern Europe and Sophia there. I taught for a private international school there. It was fantastic. Learned there that I really liked teaching, but because of the EU situation, we kind of had to get out of Bulgaria because it was just it was much easier and much cheaper for these schools to hire British people that could speak English instead of Americans that they had to pay for a visa for. So my wife is my wife was the professional teacher. I never thought I was gonna be a teacher when I was younger. But my wife, where's the easiest place to get an English teaching job? And the answer was China. So we ended up in China, and my first year there I taught English for business, and that was good, but I realized two things. One, I really love teaching, I really love teaching business things, and two, I really hate teaching English. So I got a job with a British university while I was over there for the next nine years. So I taught for University of Central Lancashire with a like a partnership program in China, and I taught business, just business in English, of course, but I taught business classes, accounting, marketing, international business, stuff like that.

SPEAKER_00 11:44

Have any of your FBLA students shown an interest in work outside of US?

SPEAKER_01 11:51

I mean, every year we're having FBLA and my IB business management students thinking about moving overseas, thinking about doing business overseas. I have a student that's wanting to move to Thailand very soon, or he's a graduate of two years ago. He wants to move use his certification that he got in my class, which was an Intuit QuickBooks certification. He knows that if he's in Thailand, he could possibly do accounting online using that certification. So just using things together, I have a student going across the pond to St. Andrews in Scotland for school this next year.

SPEAKER_00 12:22

Does your experience internationally shape the way that you help the students kind of develop their own interests or their own professional persona at all?

SPEAKER_01 12:33

Yeah, I would say 100%. I think that the ability to look outside of a small place. I mean, Pensacola is a great city, and then we got a lot of things happening here, but it really is just a small part of this world. And so getting them to look outside of Pensacola for school. So a lot of them are going outside of Pensacola for university or for higher education, but also looking outside of Pensacola for business opportunities in the future, that there's these whole markets that often a lot of my students come into my class or come into FBLA thinking that China is the place where we get our products from, knowing that almost two billion people live there. And those are possible customers for them in the future as well.

SPEAKER_00 13:12

Interesting. So you're really expanding their way of thinking to be outside of themselves and outside of Pensacola, which I can kind of see, you know, value in that because when you're a kid, you only know what you know and you just don't know what you don't know. And so that international piece is probably a real gift. I wonder if they even know that it is a gift that what you bring to the table is pretty easy.

SPEAKER_01 13:35

I didn't move, I didn't go outside of out of the United States until I was 18 years old and it was to Canada. So it's like right across, and I'm from Ohio, so it's not that far of a trip up there. So to have a teacher and to meet these people, I mean, our world is so much more international than it was when I was a child. But in a few weeks, my officers, my current FBLA officers, are going to be meeting with Chinese diplomats through Gulf Coast diplomacy. So we've partnered with them. We've met with people from Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. And then in a couple weeks, we're going to meet with these Chinese diplomats. I mean, where else? I would have never thought that I would have editor ever had that opportunity when I was a child.

SPEAKER_00 14:10

Yeah. Yeah. We've had Jenna on the show, and I just love her program. She does great stuff.

SPEAKER_01 14:16

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 14:16

I would infer through what you've said so far that the leadership development opportunities for students are through these unique interactions where they have a chance to not be seen just as a student. But I'd love to hear your take on what it is specifically about FBLA that develops the leader within the kids.

SPEAKER_01 14:38

The ability to speak with anyone and everyone and show them a decorum of respect, to show them a decorum of that they are prized, that their views matter. I think that's something that we all get. And it's some because it's something that is modeled by teachers at Penn School High School, by advisors of FBLA, the students have the opportunity to see their advisors and to be pushed by their advisors to do things. I don't let my students take a back seat when it comes to these opportunities. When we go to Entracon, they're not just student representatives. When we go to conferences, they're not just student representatives. They are equal parts just as much as the person who's been in the business for 40 years, because they have something to offer that that 60-year-old does not have. And so just giving them that and empowering them, and then also showing them, okay, here are some things that you need, like when you're greeting with someone, when you're talking to someone, these are some common mistakes that youth make that we need to improve on, ways in which we need to dress so that people take you seriously. I speak almost every meeting about the halo effect. If someone sees a halo around your head, then they automatically think that you're an angel. So if you're dressed in a business professional suit or at least you look really nice and your hair's done and your shoes look good, then they probably think that you're more professional than you actually are sometimes. And you can kind of fake it till you make it type of thing. And that's a skill that students maybe that I didn't learn until I was into my later years in college, but that these students, as freshmen and now middle schoolers, are starting to pick up.

SPEAKER_00 16:12

Yeah. I read also that charity work is key to the FBLA student experience. Why is that important?

SPEAKER_01 16:21

Because we have been given so much opportunity, especially the size of our club. We are 139 students. If we're not affecting our community in some way, we're doing something wrong. And so we reach out with some of these partnerships. And sometimes they're they seem a little bit selfish to the students because we're being honored or we're being noted at state leadership conference for them. But as they get to do them, they realize that there's something bigger than that. And so we've been part of Keep Pensacola or Keep Florida Beautiful, whichever one you want to call it. So we're part of that. We have done March of Dimes, we've done end Alzheimer's Walks, all these great things. And then we've done our own community service type activities that we can do because we're 139 students and we have so much connection. So you think of 139 students, that's 139 sets of parents, that's 139 friends that they can bring along. And so you can multiply that effect so much to really accomplish a lot of things.

SPEAKER_00 17:20

Can students get scholarships because of their FBLA involvement?

SPEAKER_01 17:24

So there's scholarships that are through the FBLA, whether through national or state, that our students have applied for and have gotten for different things. There's scholarships for universities. There's not a whole lot of scholarships though, like FBLA gives a scholarship just because they try to keep their costs so far down and that money has to come from somewhere. But the ability to stick on a college resume, FBLA, that you're a competition club, and especially those that push themselves into leadership roles, whether they're officers at our chapter level, officers at our district level, or last year we had an officer at the state level. I mean, she was in charge of 14,000 students at the state level. And if you could see the way she spoke the year before she became a state officer to the year after she was a state officer, was incredible. I mean, she was always really good, but the amazing job that she did on that stage in front of 5,000 students, in front of 5,000 high school students was just incredible. So not only the officer positions, but also those competitions, the fact that you're competing and you're winning in these events at district, state, and national level, it really speaks a lot to colleges. And there are certain organizations that a lot of colleges know about, and FBLA is one of them. You stick that on in a resume for Ohio State University, and someone's going to notice it's FBLA either because they've heard of it or someone might say, Oh, I was in FBLA when I was in high school. And so there's sort of an indirect or casual networking that happens.

SPEAKER_00 18:53

Is this only at Pensacola High School?

SPEAKER_01 18:56

No. So Tate High School has been our sister school for a while. Their advisor up there, Tommy Mayer, fantastic guy, teaches computer game design. So he is in a completely different world than I am as a business guy. But he has a very large chapter as well. They're about 60. Washington, Pine Forest have kind of come along. And then we have also other chapters. I'm the I'm not only the PHS advisor, but I'm also in charge of our district. And it's not our school district, but our FBLA district, which is Escambia, Santa Rosa, Okaloosa, and Walton counties. And so we have Walton Senior High School and Navarre High School and Milton High School and Gulf Breeze High School and then a plethora of middle schools as well.

SPEAKER_00 19:35

Okay, let's talk about the middle schools.

SPEAKER_01 19:37

I've been waiting to talk about it because it's it was the dream of my officers, which is where you want the dreams to come from. So last year, my high school officers were at state competition and they were seeing these students talk about that they were in FBLA for five, six, seven years. And they always say the same thing. The seniors say it, they wish that they would have joined FBLA as a freshman. And now I have freshmen and sophomores saying, I wish I could have joined FBLA as a middle schooler. And it's just not here. Bellevue Middle School had a chapter a few years ago, but it lived and then it died. And so nothing really happened about it. But through the Askamie County Public Schools Foundation, we were able to win one of the grants for excellence this year. So I was one of the award winners for grants of excellence. And through that grant, we were able to start this idea of opening up our own middle school chapters around the district. So we went to Bellevue, we went to Beulah, we went to Workman, we went to EDS Episcopal Day School, we went to CLA Creative Learning Academy, went to all these different schools, went to other schools as well that just weren't ready to do it yet. But those three public schools and those two private schools, they got on board. Now the reason they got on board was I sent them our high school students. So my high school students, some of them officers, some of them not officers, some of them sophomores. They went to these middle schools and they were the advisors at these schools. Now, of course, there were teachers there, but these students were able to do what I did and probably do a better job of it because they actually understood the middle schoolers better than I did. And they were able to step into these schools and be the advisors. And they learned so much and they developed so much in this way. And through the grant, we were able to sponsor these students for their dues. So Bellevue, Beulah, Workman students didn't pay any dues. They were free this first year. And then when they went to state leadership conference, the ones that made it, we were able to pay the registration at state and then also pay for part of their hotel. And then my middle school advisors, what I call my students, we were able to give them a scholarship to go to state leadership conference as well. So through this grant, we were just able to do this huge work in the community.

SPEAKER_00 21:45

As a parent, what do you think the benefit is for a student starting FBLA in middle school versus a student starting FBLA in high school?

SPEAKER_01 21:54

Well, my son is a sixth grader. And so he joined FBLA this year. So his eyes are Are already open to the possibilities because sometimes you get involved in an organization, whether it's college or high school or FBLA, and you get involved in your junior and senior year, or maybe you do it your freshman, sophomore year, but you don't really see all the opportunities that you have. And being part of it, it just exposes you. You hear at state leadership conference, you hear at district leadership conference, you hear at these different things. These are opportunities that you may have. And it just opens up that time gate that you can do those because you don't know what you don't know. And I, to be honest, as an advisor, this is only my fourth year. Um, I'm not a super expert, I'm not a super veteran to this. I just fell in love with it. And so I try to tell my students things, but there are lots of things that I don't know either. And so them sitting down and talking to other students and networking with other students. I mean, my son was networking at state leadership conference with seniors. He's a sixth grader and he's networking with seniors and he loved it. And he said, Can I do this? And can I do this? And can I do this intuit thing that they do on in fall? And I'm like, I have no idea what you're talking about, but I'm gonna look it up and we're gonna try it because it's something that I had never heard of. Because there's literally there's so many opportunities within just the world of FBLA, but I don't know about them. And so we only do maybe 10 to 15% of the things, not through any fault of my students, just because we don't know about them, but as they find out more things and just those added three years is gonna be so much.

SPEAKER_00 23:27

Wow, that's such an amazing example of how a student, a young student, a sixth grader, starts to see himself as a part of the world instead of you know the world just kind of there and and he's really becoming a part of the community. Are there any other students that you want to brag on? I know you said just four years that you've been doing this, but any success stories that you feel like you want to share?

SPEAKER_01 23:52

I mean, the competitions that they win is incredible. I mean, the the ability that they have to win these competitions are awesome. We've had national winners and data analysis, and then they've used that to go on to a university. We had a winner of future business leader this year. She's going on to study at Yale this year. And it's and I'm not saying that FBLA is like the only thing that is speaking into their lives because I'm not sure if she was great because she was great before she came to FBLA or FBLA made her greater. I like to think it's a little combination of both, but we have students going to these amazing universities, and I really think those essays that they're writing, those interviews that they're taking, the networking that they're having at some of these application things, I think it's being strengthened by their development in FBLA. And I do, I think that those are some awesome things. I think another great story of one of my students is one of our community service projects. So it's kind of hand in hand with our middle school opportunity. And we notice that a lot of our middle school students don't have business professional clothing. Because when you come to an FBLA event, not the normal club means you can come in a t-shirt and shorts, but when you come to an actual event, you are dressed business professional. Now, this is not a business professional that a lot of us think about in terms of the new business professional. This is old school traditional business professional, so suits and ties and dress shoes. And so a lot of these middle school students don't have those things. In fact, my son did not have those things. So we knew that some of them were coming from economically disadvantaged homes. We knew that they just didn't have them. The middle school teachers just didn't have the opportunity to get those things. And so one of my students stepped up, one of my officers, my senior officers, said, We need to do something about this. And so this was our big community service this year from our chapter was we created an FBLA clothing closet. And so all 139, once again, large number of students, large number of parents. I said, Okay, everybody's bringing in stuff. You're bringing in suit jackets, you're bringing in pants, you're bringing in shirts, ties, whatever you got, bring it in. And our principal at Penn School High School, Miss Gordon, luckily, or not luckily, kindly gave me a spare room where we were able to create a business professional clothing closet. And so it's really exciting to see that the making of the middle school chapters, that was definitely like I missed out on this. A little bit selfish reason, but they helped out. They're like, I wish I could have done this. But the clothing closet has nothing to do with them. And to see one of the students grab a hold of the passion of this is what FBLA meant to her, and therefore what it could mean to a middle schooler, but the barrier of professional business clothing, it just shouldn't happen. And she saw that and she ran with it, and she got a team and she just asked me what we could do, and I just helped her out as much as possible. She got donations from lots of local businesses because some of our clothing was not the right size. We needed something more, and so she went out and got business donations along with her team. And so there's money sitting there, and there's a bunch of clothes sitting there for us middle school or high school students that need those professional build business clothing so they can participate in FBLA.

SPEAKER_00 26:55

I love that. I'm really starting to see another benefit layered into all of this, which is if I was a parent and I wanted my kid to have the coolest friends, I would be like, yo, you're signing up for FBLA. Because I mean, I know you're giving me the highlight reel.

SPEAKER_01 27:13

Yeah, of course.

SPEAKER_00 27:14

But still, I think, you know, this is like one of those questions that parents ask is like, how can I connect my kid to the right people so that they are on a good path? And this seems like a good path on so many levels. As we wrap up, can you tell people if they're listening and they're a parent or maybe they're a teacher at a school that doesn't yet have FBL? Like, what's the next steps?

SPEAKER_01 27:40

But so I would say the easiest thing is contact me, contact workforce, contact your administration, just mention FBLA and it will come across. And then we can get a chapter going at your school, especially if you're a teacher and you think that I can't take on something else. This is gonna be a lot. It's not as much as you think it is, and I can send students that are gonna come help you, but it especially if you're a parent, talk to the administration. This is something that every school can do. And there are other organizations like it. I just think FBLA is the best.

SPEAKER_00 28:09

Awesome. Well, I will link everything in the show notes. Yeah. Thanks for listening. Be sure to subscribe and share. Voices United in Education is a production of Scambia County Public Schools.