Rodney LaBrecque says that, when he arrived at Wilbraham & Monson Academy as head of school in 2002, he was told by his board of directors that the institution had an identity problem.

“Members said that we were just like everybody else, that we looked like all the other schools — Suffield, Williston, Deerfield. And in truth, we all had the same programs, and we did look alike,” said LaBrecque, who has spent much of his seven years at the helm working to create a way to distinguish the now-205-year-old landmark in a high-stakes competition for top students from across the country and around the world.

Specifically, that way is the school’s Center for Entrepreneurial and Global Studies (CEGS), an initiative that has manifested itself in a number of ways in a few short years. They include the new Mark R. Shenkman Trading Center, a working laboratory, as LaBrecque calls it, where students learn about stocks, bonds, trading, and making well-researched decisions; a curriculum-in-progress focused on business and entrepreneurship; and even the baseball bat displayed on the conference table in LaBrecque’s office.

It’s made of maple harvested from some of the school’s 350 or so acres, and was manufactured by an Enfield-based company. Development of the bats, like the cutting boards created from the same maple trees, as well as a game created by students called Blocks Rock!, are just a few examples of how the school is working to teach students about everything from entrepreneurship to environmentally friendly business practices.

“In the CEGS program, students are taught to understand global economic and financial issues, as well as the need for sustainable development and shared global prosperity,” said LeBrecque. “Students are also taught to think and act like entrepreneurs, including utilizing opportunity evaluation, critical thinking, and flexibility in all areas of academic life.”

As he and Walter Swanson, director of International Programs at Wilbraham & Monson, led a tour of the new trading center, LeBrecque said his informal goal is to achieve status as “the University of Chicago of prep schools.” By that, he meant a reputation as a clear leader in business education.

“They’re the best … their faculty is known worldwide, and students want to go there because they have such great learning opportunities,” he explained. “We want that same status, and I think we’re getting close. We have a lot of kids who are choosing to come here because of what we can offer; they want to be part of something new and different.”

In this issue, BusinessWest looks at how LaBrecque and others at WMA intend to go about attaining such a reputation, and how, if they do succeed in that mission, the school will certainly have rid itself of its identity problem.

Foreign Concepts

While talking about the CEGS and its progression and evolution, LaBrecque and Swanson repeatedly referenced an upcoming trip that several students and a few faculty members will be making to the Amazon and an ‘eco ranch’ there.

Students at WMA have been taking organized trips abroad for decades, they said, but until very recently, such excursions would best be described as sightseeing tours to destinations such as the Mediterranean.

Trips in recent years to places like Brazil, Bangkok, Seoul, South Korea, and Taipei have been anything but, although there has been plenty to see and do, noted Swanson, who has been on several of the sojourns. And their itineraries speak to the broad mission statement for the CEGS: “students learn to be global citizens,” it states, “in the face of increasing globalization, mounting social inequities, and threats to environmental sustainability.”

“When I took a group to South Korea two years ago, we met with the minister of trade, who is an alum,” he continued, noting that the school takes clear advantage of such relationships to give students access to places and people they wouldn’t enjoy otherwise. “We also visited a Hyundai plant, a shipyard, also owned by Hyundai, and other sites of historical and cultural importance. And we tie it all back to issues that are important to this school — namely the basic understanding of the importance of the global economy.”

This, in a nutshell, is the essence of the CEGS, a program created out of a clear need for a new niche for WMA, said LaBrecque, and it was born essentially from answering the question: ‘what’s missing from high-school education?’

He asked that same question eight years ago when he was with a start-up school in San Francisco at the height of the dot-com bubble, and the subsequent bursting of that bubble. The answer was fundamentally the same — that what was missing was a focus on economics and entrepreneurship.

“Schools do art well, and they do math, and they do theater and music and English … you have all these schools that have specialties,” he explained. “But no one at the high-school level was looking at economics, meaning economics with the big ‘E.’

“Most schools had one course in advanced-placement economics,” he continued, returning to his comments on how WMA couldn’t distinguish itself from other schools when he first arrived. “We all had 12 or 15 AP courses, with an emphasis on writing, history, and the liberal arts. So we started defining a program based on what was important in America that was being missed by high-school education.”

This introspective hard look revealed a huge gap when it came to global economics, he told BusinessWest, as well as a tremendous opportunity for a school that could find a way to close that gap.

“It was and is our belief that economics really underlies just about everything that goes on in America’s relationships with other countries,” he said. “And from country to country. So if you understood economics better, you’d understand how the world worked better, and therefore you’d be in a better position to be successful no matter what your career would be.”

With that guiding philosophy, school administrators and faculty members set about creating a program that would blend economics with entrepreneurship, said LaBrecque, noting that the two are clearly intertwined. Working in partnership with Babson College, the academy essentially took that school’s world-renowed entrepreneurship program and scaled it down to the high-school level.

“We wanted to incorporate entrepreneurial thinking,” he explained, “which, to me, is a fundamental, creative way of looking at the world, no matter what your discipline.”

Swanson agreed, and said the various components of the CEGS have common denominators that tie back to that mission statement, especially the part about creating global citizens. “We’re working on lots of new programs that focus on the development of entrepreneurial thinking in the context of economics and entrepreneurship.”

In many ways, this is a fresh approach, a new model, he said, adding that the common threads are experiential learning and that focus on students becoming global citizens. And this is reflected in everything from the trip to Brazil to the baseball-bat and cutting-board ventures, which grew out of a recognized resource — timber — and a desire to harvest it in a way that would valuable lessons.

“We didn’t want to just go logging the school’s property,” said Paul Ekness, a faculty member and creator of the broad Global EcoLearn project at WMA. “Doing so just didn’t seem educational.”

Entrepreneurship Ingrained

Instead, the school and its CEGS set out to blend business opportunities from harvesting a portion of the academy’s heavily wooded real estate with real lessons in both entrepreneurship and management of environmental assets.

“We had different goals for the forest,” he said. “We wanted to write a multi-faceted story, including work to make it more healthy as far as habitat, but we also had some economic goals; we wanted to develop some of the resources on campus and, in doing so, try to train the students in global, sustainable use of management policy.”

There were several ideas forwarded regarding the timber — everything from maple syrup to picture frames — and several have moved forward.

The first is the Dream Bat Co., developed in concert with an Enfield bat maker, while the second is the cutting-board venture, launched in partnership with Ponders Hollow Custom Moulding and Flooring in Westfield. Meanwhile, other products, including flooring, trim work, and pallets, are being produced from oak and maple trees on the campus, and they’re showing up in other regions of the country, overseas, and even on the WMA campus in some new faculty housing.

The timber initiatives are providing lessons in business and the environment, said Gayle Hsiao (pronounced ‘chow’), a WMA faculty member also spearheading the Global EcoLearn Project, noting that both embrace the CEGS mantra of acting locally and thinking globally.

Ponders Hollow makes use of everything that comes off the campus, including sawdust and wood chips, and nothing is wasted, she explained, adding that the school is working toward its green certification for forest management.

Meanwhile, students are getting lessons in everything from marketing to new-product development to environmental protection, she said, noting that the timber project has added components to the curriculum of classes in everything from business to biology.

And this versatility explains why administrators at WMA are now working to develop formal models for programs like Global EcoLearn that other high schools and even colleges can emulate, said Hsiao.

Another venture likely to become a model — albeit one that may be difficult to replicate in the current economy — is the trading center.

Opened just a few months ago, the facility, in simple terms, simulates a stock-market trading floor, and it’s one of the first, if not the first, centers opened at the high-school level, said LaBrecque. Complete with an LED stock ticker and 65-inch-high LCD monitors, the center was funded by, and is now named for, alum Mark Shenkman (class of 1961), founder, president, and CEO of Shenkman Capital Management Inc., a New York-based investment advisory firm that provides research and management services in high-yield markets.

In a word, the 16-seat center “empowers” students, said LeBrecque, adding that the facility provides almost-real-life experience with important and far-reaching decision-making.

“It is like a laboratory, but instead of science, it’s economics,” he explained. “Students don’t just talk about it — they get to do it.”

What they get to do is buy and sell stocks and bonds and essentially manage a portfolio, he explained, adding that, before students can make any trades, they must thoroughly research possible moves and justify them.

“There’s a lot of documentation and analysis involved … students have to do their homework,” he explained, adding that, while the trading center usually focuses on the present tense, it can be programmed to simulate other periods in time, such as the stock market collapses of 1987 and 1929 and the energy crisis of the early 1970s.

“Students learn by doing; this is a working laboratory,” he said, adding that this phrase essentially applies to all components of the CEGS, be it the forest, the trading center, the classroom, or the eco ranch in Brazil.

The Bottom Line

LaBrecque acknowledged that the desire to be known as the “University of Chicago of prep schools” is a somewhat obscure reference. Many do not know of that institution’s reputation in the realm of economics and the accomplishments of its faculty members.

But whether that title is ever achieved — or fully understood — is irrelevant, he continued, adding that the larger mission is to give WMA a new identity, something to make it stand out at a time when prep schools are fighting tooth and nail for top students. In seeking such an identity, the school started with the questions about what was missing from most schools’ academic programs.

And in answering that question, it has managed to ensure that valuable lessons and hands-on experience in business and entrepreneurship are no longer missing, but have instead been found.

George O’Brien can be reached at obrien@businesswest.com