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Mar 7, 2007 10:29 pm US/Pacific
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BUILDing a Solid Future for Students
Jefferson Award Winner: Suzanne McKechnie Klahr
by Barbara Rodgers
(CBS 5)
They're running their own companies, selling everything from t-shirts to iPod covers to greeting cards. And they're still in high school. The woman making it possible is Suzanne McKechnie Klahr, who started an organization called BUILD in 1999 at the peak of the dot-com boom.
"I felt this real frustration about what was happening with folks from Stanford who were able to get all this money for these hair-brained dot com schemes, and then my clients in East Palo Alto couldn't secure just a little bit of capital to expand an existing business," Suzanne explains.
Suzanne was a Stanford law student then, volunteering on projects in the economically depressed city of East Palo Alto. She originally set out to work with adults, but found it was the young who needed her most.
"I just just love their energy and their passion," she says. "They sort of felt like school wasn't for them, but business was. So I made a deal with them that if they really focus in school, then what I would do is I would work very hard to get them and their business off the ground."
Through running their businesses, students make remarkable leaps in academics. One hundred percent of BUILD's graduates go on to college. Fifty kids so far, and another 300 are currently in the program, which now includes some Oakland schools. Suzanne says their businesses make on average a couple thousand dollars a year, money that goes into a fund for college scholarships.
We asked 17-year-old Enrique Rodriguez what kind of student he was before he got into BUILD.
"The truth?" he answers cautiously. "Possible a high-school drop out. Truth."
Now Enrique is college-bound.
Sixteen-year-old Rochelle Conley plans to major in law at a four-year college. When we asked her if she'd thought about that before she got into BUILD, she laughs.
"Not really!"
Suzanne's commitment to the students doesn't end when she leaves the BUILD offices. She and her husband and young child also live in the East Palo Alto community.
"Although I can never say that I understand everything that my students have to go through," she says, "At least I can say, well, I've moved here because I'm not running away. This is something that I plan to do for a long time and I want to be a part of your community."
For building not only good businesses and better students, but also a stronger community, this week's Jefferson Award in the Bay Area goes to Suzanne McKechnie Klahr.
(© MMVII, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)