Each month, the students spend hours in preparation.
Essential skills students at Greenwood Community Middle School work with their teachers and guidance counselor to read each recipe, carefully adding the correct amount of sugar and flour into their concoctions. They then carefully frost their cupcakes and cookies or measure out ingredients to prepare a snack mix for the teachers and faculty of their school.
Maneuvering a push cart up and down the hallways of the school and brewing coffee and hot chocolate in the Keurig and chatting with the middle school teacher can take hours. Bit by bit, the essential skills students at Greenwood Community Middle School are learning some of the skills they will need to live independent lives after they leave school.
The Woodmen Cafe just started its second year at the middle school. Essential skills students bake cookies or cupcakes or prepare snack mixes and deliver them to the faculty and staff at their school. Students are responsible for taking the orders, filling the orders and pushing a cart up and down the hall ways of their school getting the staff what they ordered about every other week.
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In doing the bi-weekly task they are hitting educational goals and providing a service to the middle school teachers.
For example, some students may need to work on social skills and making eye contact. Another student may need to work on math and measuring. Running the cafe would help with all of those goals, assistant principal Jennifer Brinker said.
The cafe started as a way for students to learn those skills and was modeled after a similar set up in Center Grove schools, Natalie Grissom, speech pathologist at Greenwood Community Middle School said.
Grissom was looking to find ways to integrate the students more into the general school population and for ways to introduce the teachers of the school to students in the essential skills curriculum, she said.
“I wanted them to be out in the building and for other teachers to know them the way I know them,” she said. “It is getting them out with their peers.”
Every other week, the students have a cooking activity to help them read recipes and read directions. Grissom thought that could be easily adapted by having them sell the treats they make in the cooking curriculum, she said.
By baking the treats and filling the orders for Woodmen Cafe, they are also learning the basics of life. They were taught to wash their hands before and after handling food and to wear gloves when they are preparing orders.
When the time comes to fill orders and to cart them around the school, they fill them with precision and take the jobs seriously, Yolanda Santos, guidance counselor at Greenwood Community Middle School said.
Each student takes a different job each week. Some put the baked goods in bags to be handed out. Some count out the number of hot chocolates and coffee pods they need and prepare the cart. Others hand deliver the treats and keep track of the donated money that keeps the cafe running.
All are skills they need, Grissom said.
“There are so many skills that are embedded in this activity,” she said.
Running the cafe has aspired some to be bakers or to work in shops when they finish school, which is one goal fulfilled, Santos said.
“We are giving them that chance to think about things they can do in the future,” she said.
