There was a time when middle school students relied on their parents for financial support, often in the form of few dollars of weekly allowance, but a new program in Cedar Grove is letting students as young as fifth grade turn original business ideas into real money.

More than 100 Memorial Middle School students of all ages are participating in the series of TREP$ workshops, which aim to teach the children about entrepreneurship and what its like to establish and operate one's own business.

Students in TREP$ - which derives from the word "entrepreneurs" - are expected to create their own product or service that they will try to sell for actual dollars. The program will culminate in a marketplace on Friday, March 4 where the young businesspeople will either walk away a bit richer or learn some harsh lessons about trying to making it on your own.

According to the TREP$ website, the program was created by New Jersey teachers Hayley Romano and Pamela deWaal and has spread to a number of local schools. Parent Amy Brancato, who is a teacher in Bloomingdale, has taken the lead in establishing the program in Cedar Grove, which she first saw in action in the district she teaches.

The Cedar Grove Chamber of Commerce is actively involved with the program and at the Feb. 3 meeting, a number of volunteers from local businesses provided feedback to students on their pitches.

Students in grades five through eight packed four classrooms and the media center during the workshop earlier this month for the chance to exchange business ideas with actual business people at the workshop.

Joe Iraci, of Iraci Associates Insurance, and Bill Brancato, of AGL Welding Supply Compan were so impressed with the ideas of fifth graders Joseph Kang, Shane Benson, Francesca Carchia, Alissa Psaryanos and Grace Brolly, that they said they were going to start taking tips from the students.In addition to formulating their own products and services, the students in TREP$ are learning lessons about business and picking up the proper vocabulary by doing homework assignments dubbed "bizwork."

Joe Lipman, owner of Cedar Grove Travel and a chamber of commerce trustee, said he started out in business at a young age by cutting lawns and was excited by the opportunity to help entrepreneurial students make money from their own ideas.

"We saw TREP$ as a great opportunity to have our son participate in an enrichment program. We believe in being in your own business. It's part of the culture of our household," said Jolie Ruffalo, a parent and, along with her husband Dr. Robert Ruffalo, owner of A T.E.A.M Approach Physical Therapy Center.

My name is Tommy and I am an 11 year old from White Rock School. At first, I wasn't sure what to do for a business. I knew my aunt made bookmarks and thought that would be a great idea.  I called my aunt and started the ball rolling.  It was PERFECT! I gathered my supplies and got to work. After a couple of days with the work progressing, my Mom found a vendor show and signed me up. On the day of the vendor show, I sold for four hours and in the end, made over $50 in sales. My business took off from there.            I went to another craft show the next month, and I made over $70.

Even though I made money at both shows, my favorite part of the whole business was participating in the TREP$ Marketplace. I made a profit of over $150!  A lot of people came up to me and said "These are so nice" or "I love these." It felt great to know that at least one person liked my bookmarks.  Some people asked me how I made them, but to tell them the whole process was like pulling teeth from me.  I had to keep my trade secret.

          My business wasn't too hard, the challenge was to find the right setups for my bookmarks. There were so many different combinations of parts that it was a brain boggler to think of what to put together that would sell.  I also had to think of what season it was to form my "holiday" types of bookmarks. 

This was my favorite business experience ever and I do plan to continue the business. My parents keep getting more impressed at the progress that I make with every show that I participate in and I can't wait for more shows to go to.  Since I finished the TREP$ classes, it's going to be easy to do my next show with everything I learned.  It's going to be awesome!!!!

My name is Dylan, and me and my friend, Patrick are the co-founders of Cocho Cards. We are both fifth-graders at Ryerson Elementary School in Wayne NJ, and we have been good friends since kindergarten. When we started going to TREP$, we decided to go into business together and we already knew what that business would be. That's because back in third grade, we created our own trading cards. We were bored with Pokemon and other kinds of card games, so we started drawing our own characters on small memo pads and collecting them in plastic bags. We drew tons of them and we named them Cocho, and then we made up rules for playing card battles.

For TREP$, we wanted to call our company Cocho, and we wanted our products to be the trading card packs, coloring books and action figures. That ended up being too many products for us to make. The coloring books would take too much time to draw and put together, and the figures would be too expensive and hard to make.  We also realized that drawings on memo paper would not make very fun trading cards and kids wouldn't buy them. I really like drawing on the computer with a program called Paint, and I already made a pretend Cocho video game for fun. So my Mom thought I should keep going and make as many Cocho characters as I could on the computer. She said she would buy card paper and help me print them. Patrick and I picked all of our favorite characters from our collection, and I ended up drawing 48 different Cocho cards on the computer. The best part for me was drawing the cards on Paint. My Mom printed them and helped me cut them into trading card size. They came out very colorful, so I thought that kids would want to buy them now.

We also bought little plastic bags to package each pack of seven cards. Patrick made instructions for how to play the card game and we printed a sheet for each pack. We did some other things to help sell our card packs. My Mom baked sugar cookies and we decorated them with the Cocho logo, then we offered a free cookie with every card pack purchase. Patrick made shirts with the Cocho name on them and I made employee name tags. We also made a poster with sample cards, and I put my computer drawings on my laptop to get people's attention at the marketplace.

We were very happy to sell most of our card packs at the marketplace, and the principal of our school and the mayor of our town complimented us on how creative our business was. Our friends were also impressed to see these cards, since they have heard about them since third grade. We made $50 profit, which we split. We were even happy to have a few leftover packs so we could play with them! Since both my Mom and Dad are entrepreneurs with their own businesses, I hope I can do the same someday. TREP$ helped me realize everything that goes into running a business, and it was a lot of fun.