Six Kingwood High School business students are gaining real-world experience while helping local nonprofits tell their impact stories through a new partnership with The Fundraising Accountant Community. The students are serving as Key Performance Indicator (KPI) Interns, a management accounting internship for students enrolled in the Business Practicum course. After a successful pilot with a small group of students last school year, KPI joins Humble ISD’s growing network of work-based learning partners, providing valuable opportunities for students enrolled in practicum and Career Prep courses to gain real-world experience.
The KPI Internship gives Kingwood High School students hands-on, real-world experience in management accounting by pairing them with nonprofit organizations. Through the partnership, student interns will learn how to help track and communicate the key performance indicators that tell the story of the nonprofits impact on the community. The program gives students practical accounting experience while local community nonprofits receive valuable support to help expand their mission with donors and stakeholders.
"This partnership is about more than just accounting skills," Laura Abel, Accounting Teacher at Kingwood High School, said. "It's about giving our students a genuine, real-world introduction to what a career in accounting can look like, and it helps the nonprofits in our own community use numbers to show their impact and tell their stories more effectively."
The program builds on Kingwood High School's Accounting and Financial Services Pathway. Students often take Dual Credit Accounting, in which they obtain both high school credit and college credit for accounting through Kingwood High School and Lone Star College. That knowledge is helpful as interns in the Practicum in Business course — creating a pipeline that takes students from classroom instruction to real-world application.
“This partnership is a game changer,” Tricia Bledsoe, Executive Director of Mission Northeast in New Caney, said. “Thanks to the partnership and an intern’s work, we now have board and leadership reports that not only explain where our money goes in plain English, the KPIs help us see the future and our trends. Accounting and finance used to be scary, now I know exactly where we are - and how to use those numbers to treat donors like investors and show the actual impact of the work that we do.”
Kingwood High School senior Jacob Colburn said students enrolled in the internship partnership because they are interested in financial services careers and are excited about learning to create reports that help communicate the important work of nonprofits.
“We wanted to help out nonprofit organizations so we could give back to the community, Colburn said. ”We are learning to take the numbers and synthesize them so that the language used in reports is more human.”
Their teacher Laura Abel added, "We are grateful to Stephen King, CPA and founder of The Fundraising Accountant Community, for picking KHS as a beta team. He’s created a new partnership to connect students with worthy local nonprofits. It will have a ripple effect among students and our community."
Abel also thanked Meredith LeBlanc, Principal of Kingwood High School, for her support of the partnership; Larry Wilson, Humble ISD CTE Director, and Dr. Melissa Leigh, Senior Director of Personalized Student Success, for putting students first in course options; and Dr. Roger Brown, Superintendent of Humble ISD, whose guidance at the district level opens doors for students to gain this kind of real-world experience.
Organizers are hopeful that the success of this year's full launch will pave the way for the KPI Internship partnership to expand to other schools across Humble ISD, giving more students across the district the opportunity to gain real-world accounting experience while supporting the nonprofit organizations that serve their communities.
Photo Caption: A new partnership with The Fundraising Accountant Community gives Kingwood High School business students real-world experience while helping local nonprofits tell their impact stories. Six students will be Key Performance Indicator interns, helping build dashboards and reports for nonprofits including Family Promise of Lake Houston, Mission Northeast of New Caney and Venture House of New York City. Pictured at the launch of the internship are (from left) Assistant Principal Kristi Vannett; Christy Tarkington, Humble ISD Office of Community Engagement; Principal Meredith LeBlanc; Stephen King, The Fundraising Accountant Community; students Nicole Munoz, Lauren Hobley, Madison Dement, Sawyer Stanton, Emi Tomochek, and Jacob Colburn; Kristie Ondracek, TXCPA Houston; KHS Teacher Laura Abel; Mark Allen, TXCPA Houston, and School Board Vice President Robert Scarfo.