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After a three-year hiatus, the Junior Achievement Company Program will again be up and running for southeastern New Brunswick high school students this fall.

The return of the hands-on entrepreneurial initiative was announced at a press conference at Moncton City Hall yesterday morning, with members of the business community, school superintendents and Mayor George LeBlanc in attendance.

"Moncton is really a very entrepreneurial community and we had a great opportunity here," says David Hawkins, president of CouleurNB and a corporate sponsor of the program. "It just feels so much like the right thing and so much like the right place to do this and to do it really well."

The extra-curricular activity gives high school students the opportunity to conceive and implement a business plan, under the stewardship of a volunteer from the local business community. Offered free of charge to interested students, the 18-week-long program will begin in October. Also running in other areas of the province, it had been cancelled in this region about three years ago.

"Basically, Junior Achievement took a hiatus for a period of time from delivering the Company Program, because we didn't have the students coming into high school that were familiar with the program," says Britt Dysart, chairman of the Junior Achievement New Brunswick Board of Governors. "The main reason was, about three years ago, we noticed a decline in our in-school programs to the point where we were only reached about 100 to 150 students in the southeast."

During the past three years, such classroom activities in the lower grades have grown to involve more than 2,000 students, Dysart says, which should create more interest in Junior Achievement among the region's high school students. Their goal is to have three groups, one working in French and two bilingual, of about 15 to 20 students each. Junior Achievement is also looking for volunteers to act as mentors.

"It's a program that the Moncton business community and the two school districts, anglophone and francophone, have been really hoping that we'd be able to reintroduce in the south-east region. This has been a Moncton community effort to present the case that there is the critical mass and there is the interest to make the relaunch successful," Dysart says. "I think it's a great day for Moncton students that we're able to bring it back. The volunteers get as much out of it as the kids."

David Savoie, now a partner and project manager at Acadian Construction Ltd. in Dieppe, participated in the Company Program as a high school student in 1992. He says the experience was rewarding and he is excited that Acadian will now be acting as a sponsor.

"For me, it opened up the entrepreneurship and business world to my eyes. When you're in high school, you're not always thinking of that kind of stuff. It gelled everything together for me to go through the program," he says of his school group, which created a company that sold reusable cloth lunch bags. "I think it allows the students to get tied to the business world in an easy an accessible way and it gives the business people a way to give back."

Hawkins says the hands-on experience helps develop students' business skills and gives them a chance to see if a career in business is right for them.

"They get some teamwork skills and I think that's a very important dimension of it," as well as teaching leadership, planning and financial responsibility, he says. "They get a lot of exposure to all of those things on a very small and intense basis. It would be awful easy to become a 21-year-old and have none of that experience."