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Students look at needed and potential business ideas for Rumford and the area 

Mountain Valley Senior English class tackles business proposals for a class assignment

A drive-in movie theater.  An indoor go-kart race track. A computer gaming center with high speed internet lines. A smoking materials store.  A massage and day spa. There were among the business ideas coming from the Senior English classes of teacher Jeff Bailey at Mountain Valley High School this month.

Bailey gave his students the task of coming up with a business idea, including describing it and doing an ad or pamphlet for it.  To rate the ideas, Bailey gave an imaginary $100,000 in grant money to the rest of the class with the instructions to award the money to each of their fellow students' proposals according to how good they seemed to be.   Every idea had to get at least $500, and the students had to award the entire $100,000 by the end of the class.

What did the students see as a strong business idea?  A movie theater was the idea that came up the most often, once as a suggested drive-in, and twice as a movie theater combined with a babysitting service to allow parents to go to the movies without worrying about their kids.  An indoor sports facility seemed a good idea to several students, one who suggested indoor playing fields, another who suggested indoor go-kart racing and a third who suggested a shooting range with gun shop attached.

Showing that not everybody thinks like an entrepreneur, a few students inadvertantly described businesses at which they would like to shop, rather than businesses they could start.  Bailey admits that, as English rather than economics homework, his assignment did not require the sort of information that might be found in a real business plan, such as cost analysis or budgets or cash flow projections.  But it did bring out a couple of serious proposals, including one young man who described in professional detail how to set up a high-speed internet and computer gaming center, and one young woman who described a massage center, noting that she plans to become licensed as a massage therapist and follow through on the idea.

(There is no identification of students in this story or in the photos due to Mountain Valley High privacy policies.)