How They Did It: Turning an Educational Space Into a Profit Center

Aidex Staff

The most common obstacles we hear when working with educational organizations are these age-old phrases:

“Where is the money going to come from?”
“I just don’t think we have this in the budget.”
“It’s going to be difficult to find the funding for equipment like this.”

And we understand! It’s consistently a challenge for schools to solidify the funding for equipment they’d otherwise love to obtain for their students. That’s why some of our partners have discovered ways to generate some return on their investments — by using their equipment to raise funds for their schools.

Take Hoopeston Area High School in Hoopeston, IL for example: they use their Roland VS 300i and Hotronix Fusion Heat Press to create banners, decals, and apparel to sell to clients including their own athletic department, other schools within their corporation, and small businesses within the community. Three classes at the high school collaborate to generate products. The students have created a business model, defined a workflow that sees the creation process from design to sale, and now understand much of what goes into running a business. A Hoopeston Student uses a heat press to create apparel

Hoopeston has seen so much success in this endeavor that, after beginning operation in February of 2018, the equipment will have paid for itself by the end of 2018.

Of course, the benefits of this program aren’t just limited to the revenue brought in. Creating these products for real clients has inspired students even after graduation:

“A couple of students have graduated and still come back to help us,” explains Kevin Root, Marketing and Accounting Teacher at Hoopeston. “They now want to start a printing business of their own after learning to do it here.”

Hoopeston students hope to expand their business by creating banners for other area schools in the community and increasing production. Their dream-big goal?

“We’d love to generate enough funding to purchase a bigger Roland printer so that we can create large-scale items and do more with the equipment. We’d be able to teach students an even wider variety of skills and instill that passion for entrepreneurship that much more.”

WHAT THEY USE: