The Morrison Area Development Corporation has recently become involved with the CEO Program at the Whiteside Area Career Center.

The mission of the CEO program is to prepare our youth to be responsible, enterprising individuals who become entrepreneurs or entrepreneurial thinkers and contribute to the economic development and sustainability of our area.
It is our hope that these young entrepreneurs will follow in the footsteps of many of the entrepreneurs in our community and will reside in or return here to run their business, raise their families, and give back to their community.

During the CEO program students are immersed in real life learning experiences. Program highlights include:

• Year long class offered to high school juniors and seniors.
• Students come from a wide variety of academic and socio-economic backgrounds and are selected through a rigorous application process.
• Students receive 2 high school credits.
• Each student starts and runs their own business and completes three business plans.

Located in Northwest Illinois, CEO students come from seventeen participating Whiteside Area Career Center (WACC) schools in five different counties.

WACC is one of about sixty regional vocational systems in Illinois. The systems were organized in 1986-87 to coordinate and provide regional career and technical programming among its member, collect and report data to the Illinois State Board of Education, act as the flow-through of federal and state resources, and market career and technology education throughout its region.

For more information on CEO visit their website at http://wacc-ceo.org/index.html.