“These partnerships are NOT about field trips,” said Ellie Peavey, head of the C-NS Career Center. “They are about thinking and learning.” Her audience contains about 21 students who are seated in a conference room at Dumac Business Systems in East Syracuse. The company, which has been around for over six decades and operates in 46 states, is an industry leader in point-of-sale systems used in the grocery and restaurant sectors.
During the presentation that followed her warning, the students did something atypical of high schoolers: they spoke, actively participated and seemed to have an interest in what was being said.
“We cannot afford to lose customers; and in these economic times the quick service restaurants are seeing more business. So we need to be at our best,” explained Steve Williams, VP of Quick Service Major Accounts. He hopes that the C-NS students he’s addressing will be able to help. Dumac presently provides its systems to over 12,000 restaurants across the country. Their systems track things like the time it takes for an employee to serve a customer, the traffic flow through drive-thrus and the amount of stock needed on hand for any given time of day. Those assigned to work with Dumac will be specifically doing customer projections for quick serve traffic during different time periods of the day and year for brands like Wendy's, Arby's and Burger King.
“Essentially, we have challenged the students to apply what they have learned and to think ‘outside the box’ on how we can project sales,” said Tom Hahn, VP of Marketing and Human Resources. By predicting the sales, Dumac can help business owners better control their employees’ scheduling and the ordering of supplies and food.
The students participating in this run of the program are from two eleventh grade math Honors classes at C-NS. In total there are 46 students who will work along with their parents, teachers and a member of the Career Education Advisory Council to meet, and maybe even exceed, the goal set up by Dumac’s staff.
The two teachers, Amy Furletti and Amy Baum, are excited to see what their students accomplish. Though this is not the first year either of these teachers has had a class participate in the Collaborative School/Business Partnership. Last year they worked with Ram-Tech Engineers of Syracuse, P.C. and will do a second project with that company later in the school year. Additionally, Plumley Engineers, P.C. has signed on to do their own project. Regardless of the who the partnership is with or what the exact assignment entails, students in these classes are learning how to apply the math they learn in the classroom to the career fields represented by these companies.
How things got started
Often a company will be looking for some sort of community outreach and wind up at the Career Center’s door, but in this case it was more about proximity. Williams and Peavey are neighbors and one day during a casual conversation they began discussing the project. Peavey has been doing this type of collaboration for several years now with different companies and classes of students. After gathering some basic information, Williams presented it to Dumac’s senior management, who felt it was worthy of the effort.
“We agreed to the partnership first, and foremost, as a way to give back to the community. The idea of helping young high school students learn more about the working world as well as to help them realize how to apply some of the things that they are learning in school was important to us,” explained Hahn. Thus far, at about the halfway point on the project, everyone at Dumac is pleased with the interest shown and the efforts put forth by both the students and their teachers.
“Our ultimate goal is to give them a glimpse of real work life. Hopefully the experience will allow them to stretch their minds and think about different ways to accomplish things,” said Hahn.
Seems that just having this opportunity is already bringing the real world into the classroom.
Mar
30
C-NS students tell Dumac "We'll take care of it"
Melissa Renahan 03/30/09
CATEGORY: K-12 Education