Lawrence High School sophomore Amy Mowery has a plan to make $200,000 a year after she graduates from college. If you don’t believe her, she’ll show you.

Mowery is one of 21 Lawrence High students taking part in the school’s first-year Youth Entrepreneurs of Kansas program. As part of the one-semester class, Mowery and her fellow students learned about the free-market system. They created a detailed business plan for a start-up company.

For Mowery, who created a business plan for Blu Creek Kennels, the question isn’t so much whether she wants to start it, but when she will.

“I know this is what I want to do when I graduate college, but I have learned that it is harder than what I thought it would be,” Mowery said. “When you own a business, you have to work harder than if you are working for someone else. You have to be a strong-willed person and independent person. But I still want to do it.”

Lessons like those were what Liz and Charles Koch of Wichita had in mind when they founded the program 10 years ago, said Shelly Chenoweth, executive director of Youth Entrepreneurs of Kansas.

“One of the things we hope the program does is take some of that entitlement attitude out of students,” Chenoweth said. “We want to get across that when it comes to a job and money, none of us are entitled to anything. We all have to work hard for everything.”

The program also aims to open opportunities to high school students that they previously might not have considered.

“With the system we have today, it says go to school, go to college or vo-tech, and go get a job,” Chenoweth said. “Nowhere along the way is anybody telling students to start a business.

“We think it is important to present that opportunity to students because it builds those critical-thinking skills that allows them to realize they can determine their own future.”

The program has 635 students in 12 schools across the state. LHS teacher Helen Seeley decided to bring it to LHS after attending a seminar about the nonprofit group last summer. She said she thought the students were learning valuable lessons about the business world  and about themselves.

“Hopefully, this will take out some of the surprises if they decide to start their own business,” Seeley said. “I think we’ll have quite a few good future entrepreneurs come out of this class, but I think we probably have some students who realize starting a business isn’t for them. But it’s good that they learn that now.”

Students created detailed plans for a variety of businesses including a home-based candlemaking company, a window-cleaning firm, a recording studio, a tattoo shop, an auto dealership and a lawn-care service. They also visited similar businesses and surfed the Internet to gather data to create sales, expense and profit projections.

For example, Mowery knows that her dog-care business will take four employees and that she’ll need to care for about 16 dogs a day and provide training services to meet her goal of generating $200,000 in before-tax revenue.

But Seeley said she hoped the class taught students that they needed more than a good plan to start a business. She said she hoped it would teach them that intestinal fortitude also was required.

“I think they’ve learned that starting a business is risky business, but that there’s also the potential for huge rewards,” Seeley said.