Lake Forest High student-managed café wins at state level

FELTON — Some high school students are getting creative by developing businesses to address problems in their districts.

And one such group at Lake Forest High School has been awarded for it.

The school’s financial services class participated in the Barracuda Bowl Entrepreneurship Challenge for Junior Achievement of Delaware, walking away with the Business of the Year title April 11.

The group was led by Lake Forest High’s Teacher of the Year, Wendy Rust.

The competition mimics TV’s “Shark Tank,” and participants must identify a problem in their school community, then create a business to provide answers.

In doing so, students come up with business plans, manage finances, keep track of sales and more.

At the Barracuda Bowl event, they present their idea to a panel of judges and ask for a monetary amount of funding to get the business going.

Then, at a later date, the groups find out if they will receive that funding and, therefore, if they can start their startup.

The group of Lake students created “LF Kafenio,” to provide snacks and coffee to classmates during the day to boost their energy.

“The idea for our business came from recognizing that there were students in our school that were hungry, and they were struggling with staying awake and staying productive in class,” said Elora Kline, one of the founding students of the enterprise. “So, we came up with the idea to start with coffee to help them stay awake and snacks to be able to help them focus.”

Since their building doesn’t have a coffee shop nearby, LF Kafenio was one way to solve that issue.

“A problem we noticed is that we live so far away from other coffee places, so we realized that we need something here,” said Fallon Fields, another founder of the café.

The students said this experience has taught them how to run a business, as well as skills needed as they apply for jobs.

“I feel like I have learned a lot, and I am happy that this was my team,” Fallon said. “It’s been great, and it’s been fun. I have gained experience that I can use for jobs, and I even applied for a job and talked about the café, then got hired.”

They did face some challenges, though, with juggling various extracurricular activities along with LF Kafenio.

“One of our problems was that we all play sports, so we never had much time to figure out who was going to work,” Nicholas Gosnell said.

They made it happen, however, and want to keep going.

“We are continuing this next school year,” Fallon said. “We have already started developing the hiring process and how to train more people to add to the team.”