Intro to Business is summer school’s big winner

As summer school comes back to York, one class, Introduction to Business, has proven itself very popular among students, with roughly 95 kids enrolled in session one alone. 

The course has four different classes, each taught by a different teacher. In addition, because of the Covid-19 pandemic, the numbers for this year are different than in past sessions. 

“In general, our overall summer school enrollment is lower than in previous years,” Mike DiNovo, summer school director, said.

However, regardless of the year, the class has always been at the forefront of the summer school courses.

 “In general, the past few years, Intro to Business has probably been the most in demand summer school course, along with a couple others,” Dinovo said. 

Longtime business teacher John Billerman also spoke on the number of students normally enrolled in ‘Intro to business’ summer school, believing there to be roughly 150 kids in a non-covid summer school. 

To understand why the class is so popular, Billerman agreed to be interviewed. Billerman has been teaching various business classes at York for 28 years, and he’s taught summer school for over 15 of those years. According to Billman, the course covers financial topics that would be important to students. 

“It’s a variety of things–they have to learn some things about themselves and how they integrate into the economy,”  Billerman said. “We tied it into financial literacy and how in their own lives they can manage their money well and places they can manage their money into, and we bring it back into career exploration.”

In addition, Billerman also spoke on what he hoped students would take away from the course. 

“It’s kind of a sampling of other classes or departments, so kind of getting a broader interest in maybe some other [business] classes they might be interested in , some career idea in business, or related to business, hopefully finding out about education beyond these walls as well,” Billerman said.

While the course encourages careers in business, some students may not take courses based on interest, instead taking them for academic reasons. A survey was sent out to those enrolled in Intro to Business, and out of the 95 kids taking the course, 57 responded. Out of those 57, 80.8% were freshmen, making them the vast majority. 

So how do students feel about the class? 28.1% said they enjoyed the class a lot, and 56.1% said they somewhat liked the class. The other 15.1% said they didn’t really like the class, and 1.8% said they hated the class. When asked why they took the class, 63.2% said they took it to fill a credit, while 26.3% said they took it because they actually wanted to take it. 

The credit that so many students want to fill is the consumer economics credit. The credit is a requirement to graduate, and according to DiNovo, it’s important for it to be part of a student’s curriculum. 

“Generally, having a sense of financial citizenship is helpful for all of our citizens,” he said. “Things like how are we gonna make money, how are we gonna spend money, and the value of money, too.”

Sophomore Paul Reedy shared what aspects of the class he enjoys. 

“My favorite part of the class was learning all the different procedures of creating and running a successful business,” Reedy said. 

Of the three students who elaborated, all three said there were no other classes they considered taking for summer school. Furthermore, 47% of students said they would want to take more business classes in the future; however, this was contrasted by the 45.6% who said they were unlikely to take another business course. 

Another question that was given to students was whether or not they felt they had learned anything in the class, and, if they had, what did they learn? 94.7%, including sophomore Hannah Morey, said that they felt they learned something.  

 “Almost everything that I learned in this class will be valuable in the future,” Morey said. “We learned all about budgeting, taxes, insurance, credit, and many more useful things.”

Finally, students were asked if they would be willing to recommend this class to a friend, and why or why not. 91.2% said they would recommend the course to a friend, an overwhelming majority.  Freshman Saveen Shah is part of that majority.

“I would [recommend it] because it is a very good learning experience,” Shah said.  

And, it’s not just freshmen. Morey also found the class very worthwhile.

“ I would recommend this to another person because I found the topics we learned about to be extremely useful for the future, and I believed that some of the class was fun and interesting,” Morey said.