STUDENTS SHADOW BUSINESS LEADERS

SCOTT CITY -- It didn't take long for Adrian Strahan to learn that being a police officer took more work than just writing traffic tickets.

Strahan spent a day "shadowing" a Cape Girardeau police officer as part of a business project with the Future Business Leaders of America club.

"It's a lot harder than I thought," she said. "There's a lot of paperwork and hardly ever enough time to get it done."

Some 16 seniors participated in the Business Shadow project at Scott City High School March 8. The project is sponsored by FBLA and will be submitted to a statewide competition later this week.

The project began eight years ago as a way to develop a partnership between the school club and its Business of the Year, FBLA sponsors said.

Shadowing a specific business lets the students see if this is a field they want to go into, said Donna Lutes, a business teacher who coordinated the project.

"You get to see a lot of little things, not the obvious," she said. "With teaching, no one told me about the extracurricular activities. You don't think about those things."

Senior Robbie Vetter spent the day with an engineer from Bloomfield Excavating. "There were three jobs at once," he said. "So I went back and forth to them."

Strahan and Kara Westrich, another student, compiled student accounts of a day spent with teachers, engineers, finance officers and hospital technicians for the report. Some of the businesses included Southeast Hospital, Magna-Tel, Medicap Pharmacy, Manpower Temporary Agency, Drury Lodge, KBSI-TV Fox 23 and Clippard Elementary School.

This is the second year that the shadowing project included businesses outside of Scott City.

Last year, the business shadowing report won first in state competition, Lutes said, adding that it did not place in national competition.