Achieve Academy promotes entrepreneurship

Achieve Academy in Warner Robins got it start as simply a home school, but over the years it has blossomed and expanded its mission. Since 2017, it has functioned as a private school under the current name.

“We have 30 students, three teachers and very small class settings,” said the academy’s founder, Tara Pvel. “We’re not a traditional private school in terms of the parents are not the parents that you would typically expect to send their child to a private school, but because of something that perhaps wasn’t working properly in their own home school or in public school, they looked for an alternative.”

One of the many valuable things that Achieve Academy teaches its students is the importance of finances. To do so more effectively, a program titled “Bored to Boss” as created.

“I was thinking of the complaint of my students when they have spare time,” Pvel said, detailing how she decided upon the program’s name. “They immediately get bored and don’t know what to do with that time. So, I figured that the way to be productive with that time of boredom is to use it to make them bosses.” Laughing, she added, “They’re really into it. They call it B2B as a nickname.”

The age group of the academy’s students range from four years old (which is their kindergarten program) to ninth grade.

“That’s our highest level right now,” Pvel explained. “Every year, I add another grade and another teacher. This is our first year doing accredited ninth grade.”

Bored to Boss is an entrepreneurial program, and in it, the school covers the theory of what it means to be an entrepreneur. As a part of the course, students have had the opportunity to interview business owners to gain insight shared through the real life experiences of people who have successfully traveled the path of business ownership.

“They spoke with the owners of Cake & Shake and the owners of Urban Air,” Pvel shared. “They spoke with someone who runs the sports camp called life League and an entrepreneur who, with his wife, has invented a way to predict the gender of a baby at seven weeks into pregnancy. It’s really just exciting things that the children have learned first hand about what it takes to be an entrepreneur.”

A few of those invaluable lessons, she went on the stress, are ones that include the rewards that come with courage, innovation and hard work. All of those things have worked together to culminate into these children becoming entrepreneurs.

“It’s based on whatever passion that they have. We worked carefully to let them talk about what they love to do because we feel like it should be something that is God’s gift to them—that thing that they are born to do. That’s usually going to be something that they love to do.”

Some of those passions have been discovered to lie in creativity, arts and cosmetics. Others are into things such as natural products.

“Some of them already have their entrepreneurial spirit. All of them have used their own passions and the training that we’ve given them to kind of come up with these companies of their own.”

On Decembr 15, at the Achieve Academy Christmas Market, the children will have the opportunity to showcase those products to the community. According to Pvel, the young entrepreneurs will get to keep 50% of their profit, and the other 50% will go to the school toward helping them to buy a collective item that all of the students will benefit from.

“It’s just teaching them all the stages, and during this Thanksgiving break, they are working on the manufacturing part of it. A lot of them chose to do something that will require them to actually make the product.” Further, Pvel stated, “I have a young student, eight years old, who is hand-making coasters, using a machine with the technology to put his own design on the coasters. His company is called, Just Coasting, and the coasters he makes are beautiful. The quality of the products these young people are putting together, I’ve just really been surprised by. We have one student that’s doing 3D Christmas ornaments. I thought that she would do something that kind of simple, but she did a very complex design. It’s just beautiful. I’ve never seen anything like it.

What Bored to Boss had done is to help draw out of the children what’s really already inside of them, Pvel insists. She said it allows them to put that into a creative way that they can benefit from even monetarily.

The Christmas Market will be held Wednesday, December 15 from 10 a.m. until 12 p.m. at the Curtis Event Center, located at 2050 Watson Blvd. in Warner Robins, and it will be free and open to the public.

Achieve Academy is taking students now for January. Parents can apply on the academy’s website at achieveacademyinc.com or visit the website to get more information.

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