On any given day at Innovation, Design and Entrepreneurship Academy at James W. Fannin, students are dreaming up ways to solve problems most adults barely notice.
One group imagines a vending machine stocked not with chips and candy, but with deodorant, lotion, pencils, pens, sanitary pads, and even hoodies that meet dress code. 
Another team wants to redesign the lanyard for student IDs so it feels more like an accessory. Another looked at the hallways, and spearheaded a campaign to decorate them with student art to improve campus culture.
Kathryn Cates, the teacher who is turning entrepreneurship into a way for students to reshape their own world, calls these simple ideas that solve real problems students face every day. For Cates, entrepreneurship is less about churning out CEOs and more about teaching students that their ideas have weight in the real world.
“What’s cool about entrepreneurship is that it’s so full of creativity. It’s asking kids to be natural problem solvers,” she said “It’s telling them to look at the world and think about the problems that exist. The students get really excited about that because they want to address the issues that they see around them, even if they’re small.”
A Dallas native, Cates has deep roots in Dallas ISD—both her mother and grandmother are proud graduates of the district. After college, she later spent more than a decade teaching in a large, urban public school system in Portland, often in serving low-income communities. Over time, she moved into a support role that looked a lot like assistant principal work—professional development, mentoring, discipline, and restorative justice.
When Cates first arrived at IDEA, her job looked like a patchwork of roles: government, economics, yearbook, a semester of psychology, and a year of entrepreneurship. She later added librarian duties when the campus faced budget cuts.
Cate was already weaving economics and the “business side of history” into her teaching whenIDEA wanted someone who would commit to students and to the program for the long haul.
He agreed to pursue her business certification, passed the exam easily, and stepped in as the entrepreneurship teacher.
“My goal has been really to make kids feel passionate about entrepreneurship, because what entrepreneurship teaches is not just running a small business; it’s really a set of skills that you need in order to kind of do anything in life,” she said.
The program Cates leads is a four-year journey. Freshmen start with the basics of the U.S. economy and capitalism, and sophomores begin conceiving business ideas. By their junior and senior years, students are actually building prototypes, conducting market research, and preparing for the workforce through practicums.
“What’s exciting to me is that I think it’s an opportunity for kids to come up with an idea in their head and then to feel supported to make that idea actually come into reality,” Cates said. “That is not something we often get to do with kids in the classroom.”
In her classes, students research markets, write business plans, and present to adults from the community. Cates urges them to treat that work as real job experience they can put on a résumé. Over time, she has watched students who once shut down at the first sign of struggle start to accept feedback, revise their ideas, and try again.
“I want to inspire students to graduate and to go and put the things that they dream of into the real world,” Cates said. “I think my greatest legacy would be to see kids in 20 years bringing innovations and changes to our world.”
