Business Careers will change its name to Northside School of Innovation, Technology, and Entrepreneurship, or NSITE, starting next school year. The NISD school board and BC administration announced the change on Oct. 24.
ABOVE: Business Careers freshmen work on their school-assigned laptops in pre-AP BC English teacher Briton Merkley’s seventh period class. BC freshmen will graduate as NSITE freshmen after the name change for the school goes into place next year, as the magnet school attempts to more accurately depict the work they do with technology and other fields.
Many students expressed confusion in person and on social media as to why the magnet school, after years of operation as Business Careers High School, was soon to change, causing a rise of rumors and reaction.
Business Careers Principal Randolph Neuenfeldt confirmed that the only students to be affected by the change are the current freshmen. No other students will experience major changes. The change of Business Careers to NSITE will start at the beginning of the 2019-2020 school year. He addressed questions and concerns and explained the need for the change.
“The name change is something that came up from an entire process that started about a year ago,” Neuenfeldt said. “Between administration, staff, students, parents, people from our board, we came together in a group, looking at, ‘what is Business Careers? What are the things that define us as a school?’”
Neuenfeldt believes those questions lead to the realization that a name change was necessary.
“The name ‘Business Careers’ was incredibly accurate for when the school opened in 1991,” Neuenfeldt said. “However, when you look at what we do today in the program, more than half of our students are studying things in the IT field.”
He explained how the process required lots of time and decision making to narrow everything down to key points.
“What we came up with was technology, programing, cybersecurity education, and we came up with entrepreneurship because when we teach business and finance, it is a model of learning by doing,” Neuenfeldt said. “It is more than just sitting in a classroom and learning things through a textbook.”
The changes will allow future seniors to participate in a year-long project, letting them come together to create a business of their own to understand firsthand what it is like to own a company, according to Neuenfeldt.
“All students, which is our entrepreneurship, programming and cyber security, are going to come together in a senior capstone course,” Neuenfeldt said. “It will give students an opportunity to run a virtual business, and throughout the course of an entire year, your business is going to start from ground zero. You are going to identify what service or product you offer, you are going to apply for and assume roles of the company, whether you are the CEO, CFO, the HR department, accounting, if you’re building the website, part of the marketing team, or IT. It provides really valuable experience in a number of ways.”
For current Business Careers students, the looming change raise a number of potential worries and questions, which Neuenfeldt addresses.
“One of the misconceptions with this is when something changes, something is wrong. That is not the case at all,” he said. “The change is because we are so proud of what we are doing. We want to convey that to the community better.”
As far as students currently enrolled at Business Careers students are concerned, not much will change practically besides the name.
“The changes curriculum-wise are going to be large by the time our current freshmen are seniors, but for our sophomores up, not much is going to change,” Neuenfeldt said. “That should ease a lot of concerns that people have.”
Many current BC juniors wonder if even after attending Business Careers for three years, they will have to graduate under the name “NSITE” next year. Neuenfeldt addressed these concerns directly.
“I am working so that next year when the juniors graduate, it will be a Business Careers graduation and Business Careers will be on your diploma,” Neuenfeldt said. “It’s not final, but when it is, I will share it with all the juniors.”
Neuenfeldt further reassures current Business Careers students that they have nothing to worry about.
“The intention is not to turn your world upside down,” he said. “The intention is that from this point moving forward, we are more efficient in marketing what we do to the community, and that we send a really clear message of who we are, what we do well, and who we are here to serve.”