SCOTT, La. — Students, faculty and community members gathered for the ribbon cutting of The Wreck Room—Acadiana High School's new student-run spirit shop.
"They do everything from the inventory to marketing to accounting...organized all this, tagged everything. We look at price points, penny profits," said Alexandra Hebert, the director of the business academy at Acadiana High.
Hebert said they even brought in professionals to teach the students about product placement for better profits.
"I mean, it's really everything that it takes to run a business is what they're experiencing," she said.
The experience is meant to set up these students for success after high school.
"They're going to hit the floor running when they get to college, for sure," said Laura Guichard Latiolais, an assistant professor of accounting at UL-Lafayette. "We focus on the hard skills all the time, right? They learn a topic. They take a test on it, but what this offers here and what they're going to have that upper edge on compared to everybody else is that soft skill."
Those are soft skills, like communication and budgeting.
"All those hands-on experiences that sometimes college students don't even experience until after they graduate," Latiolais said.
The Wreck Room could be the first in a trend of in-school business internship opportunities coming to Lafayette Parish, according to LPSS Superintendent Francis Touchet, Jr.
"Just here in Lafayette Parish, Northside High School is looking at opening one, Carencro High School is opening one, and again that is because of what they've seen...here at Acadiana, so this is a win-win, not only for Acadiana High School, but it's a win for Lafayette Parish moving forward," Touchet said.
