BusinessTech Academy - Santa Fe High School

Work that leaves the building

You work real data, not practice data

Sanitation and health complaints in San Francisco, 311 rat sightings in New York, county data in Los Angeles. The same sources a working analyst uses.

See the investigations

You write, shoot, and cut it

Thirty seconds, start to finish, one brief each. Twenty-seven made so far — nine winners and eighteen nominees.

Watch the ads

You ship software people use

Written in class, running in the browser, on the open web with the student’s name on them.

Play the arcade

You build hardware you wear out of the room

Soft circuits, addressable LEDs sewn into a hem, boards stitched into a plush toy, machines built on the bench.

See what students built

You can run the place

A President, two Assistant Directors, and a general board with real domains — under written bylaws, with a succession line into the chair.

How the Board works

You are judged on work, not tests

Every unit is a project with a real audience. There are no tests — there is work that has to hold up, published under your own name.

Work

You arrive as a mentee. You leave as a mentor.

That is not a slogan here, it is the schedule. The ladder is built into who teaches whom, and it ends with a project seniors carry from January to the last week of school.

Year one

You arrive

New members are handed to a named peer on day one, never left to attach to an adult. You take a role at the seminar table in your first week, because everyone speaks before anyone speaks twice.

Then

You discover your compass heading

You pick a pathway and practice at being a researcher, a practitioner, and a professional. The work gets published with your name on it, which changes what you hand in.

By the end

You leave as a mentor

Officers carry two periods: their own course, and a mentorship period in a lower Academy course. The President graduates each spring and a rising Assistant Director steps into the chair.

A 3D-printed lightsaber hilt set with rhinestones, a board and screen at the emitter, and a lit blade

The senior spring project

A lightsaber, and rocketry

Seniors finish on the bench. A hilt printed and set by hand, a board and a screen at the emitter, a blade that lights — and rockets built and flown. The last of the work, ending in something you carry out of the building.