The San Francisco Chronicle does a piece on each winner of the Jefferson Award administered by the American Institute for Public Service, a national foundation that honors community service. We caught the one on Suzanne McKechnie Klahr, who founded Businesses United in Investing, Lending and Development, BUILD, in a Menlo Park high school. From there it spread to eight high schools on the peninsula and in Oakland, and now involves 300 kids in grades 9 through 12.

Suzanne had just graduated from Stanford Law School. She saw businesses start and fail all around her. She saw dramatic differences in access to capital. She applied for and got a fellowship which provided her with the funding to start BUILD. Her plan was to work with adults hoping to start a business, and teach them the skills to be successful.

What came in the door surprised her: four East Palo Alto teenagers sick of school and firmly intending to be dropouts. They said they'd heard she would help people start a business and that's what they wanted. So she struck a deal: she would help them, but they had to stay in school and do well at it while they learned to be entrepreneurs.

The program allows them to learn the basics while they're maintaining high grades. They have to meet high expectations for behavior. As they progress through the four years, they develop a business plan, secure seed capital through a pitch to a venture capitalist, and run their own business.

So far BUILD's students have developed a record company, a party planning business, a lip balm company, several T-shirt manufacturers and website designers, a lamp company, and many others. One hundred percent of graduates have gone on to college.

Three of the instructors have won awards as Entrepreneurship Teacher of the Year, and five students have been named Youth Entrepreneur of the Year, both by the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship.

The foundation itself is pretty interesting: it's a national group that has been around for 20 years, founded by Steve Mariotti, who was then a teacher at a public high school in the South Bronx. It has been in San Francisco since 1994.

Though BUILD is not available in San Francisco, local kids can find the National Foundation's programs at Balboa, Galileo, Ida B. Wells, International Studies Academy, Life Learning Academy, John O'Connell, Thurgood Marshall, and Wallenberg. So if you know a local kid who's tired of school and wants only to make a million dollars, there are ways to get there!