Junior Achievement of Southeast Texas

Since 1945, Junior Achievement of Southeast Texas' purpose has been to educate and inspire young people to value free enterprise and understand business and economics to improve the quality of their lives. Junior Achievement of Southeast Texas is part of a global organization that operates in 123 countries and reaches over 10 million students. Our programs are taught by classroom volunteers from the business community in your area, across America and in countries worldwide. Providing children with positive adult role models, who help students develop practical life skills and a positive attitude needed to successfully vie in our free enterprise system, is a hallmark of Junior Achievement.

Junior Achievement of Southeast Texas will provide authentic, relevant, and engaging experiential pr

Goal One: To pilot the 3DE by Junior Achievement, an innovative instructional model that uses competency-based case methodology and has proven effective at raising graduation rates.

Goal Two: To create an entrepreneurial mindset in young people, JA will expand programming to develop the next generation of entrepreneurs, especially in areas of the community that are underresourced.

Goal Three: JA will reinvest in authentic learning by building a new JA Discovery Center as part of a forward-looking plan aimed at preparing students for the workplace of tomorrow.

Junior Achievement of Southeast Texas has partnered with Deloitte to develop a talent management strategy to ensure we create opportunities for our team to grow, both personally and professionally. Through this pro bono engagement, we have helped staff create personal development plans and expanded our internal and external training programs. We implemented a series of cross-training opportunities during the pandemic and have restructured our team to meet the future needs of the organization.

Because our programs were delivered in person prior to the pandemic, the past year has taught us to live one of our core values, that of exhibiting resilience. When our schools shut down, we worked with JA USA, our parent organization, to convert our programs to digital offerings. This transition had been underway but was accelerated due to the need. We were able to offer digital resources to educators and to parents directly. We had fortuitously implemented the MS Teams suite two months prior to the pandemic; however, our team merely dabbled in its capability initially. Once the pandemic hit, we moved quickly to learn its capability and that of Zoom and Google Classrooms. Wherever our stakeholders were at, we were able to meet them. We also implemented more new program models in the past 12 months than we had in the previous five. Some worked well, some did not, and we learned from both sets of experiences. We also utilized the opportunity to make significant internal changes to be ready for the 2021/2022 school year. The board had identified three key strategic imperatives in the 2018/2019 school year, and we worked to ensure each of these moved forward in a positive direction. We are pleased to report the growth of our entrepreneurial programming, piloting the first 3DE school in our community, and continued progress on developing a plan to build a new, state-of-the-art JA Discovery Center, home of JA BizTown and JA Finance Park, two of our experiential programs.