LIFE SKILLS AND LATTES Boonville and Castle high schools have student-run coffee shops

life skills and lattes WRITER: MARISA PATWA

Imagine being back in high school in major need of some caffeine right before a huge calculus test, when a fellow student in an apron arrives to deliver a piping hot vanilla latte.

Sounds like a dream, right? Well, it’s a reality for Boonville and Castle High School students, who have the pleasure of being served from their school’s “coffee shops,” which are run by the respective life skills classes.

At Boonville, it’s The Hot Spot, under the leadership of Jennifer Meadors, and at Castle, it’s Special Cup, with guidance from Tiffany Absher.

“Life skills students are mentally and or physically handi-capped and they can not get a diploma,” Meadors said. “They still go to school and get a certificate of completion. So, they still do reading and math, but we also teach them more functional things, like skills they need for the types of jobs they might be able to get when they graduate.”

In fact, when the BHS students graduate, they spend a year in a program called Project Search.

“It’s a partnership with Deaconess,” Meadors said. “So, when they leave here, they are there for a year and they work in things like maintenance, cafeteria or cleaning, stocking the supplies.”

The venture initially started at Castle High School by original advisor, Kelly Cochran, with

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Absher taking over in 2017 after four years in the Evansville-Vanderburgh School Corp. While Meadors, who worked at CHS, before transferring to BHS, got inspired to start a similar kind of coffee shop class five years ago.

“We sell regular black coffee, hot chocolate, french vanilla and mocha and iced french vanilla and iced mocha,” Meadors said. “We put caramel in if they like it and sometimes seasonally, I’ll add in peppermint or pumpkin.”

Currently, they are mixing things up by serving fresh lemonade.

“We have strawberr y and blackberry lemonade,” Meadors said. “In the past few years, we’ve done smoothies.”

While students have the option of purchasing tasty beverages at BHS on the designated “Gold Days.”

“I send an email out and the staff asks their class, ‘Who wants to order Hot Spot today,’” Meadors said. “And then they take those down and email the orders back to me. They are then written on the cups, the students make the drinks and then they are delivered to the classes.”

At Special Cup, life skills students make shopping lists, label lids with drink titles, organize inventory, pour ice, prepare and serve beverages, mix coffee, count change and wash dishes.

While classmates have the

options of two kinds of cold coffee, vanilla breeze or mocha chill, and three forms of hot drinks, vanilla steamer, mocha steamer or hot chocolate.

“Students can add caramel flavoring to any drink they choose,” Absher said. “We also have a special flavor for every month, such as peppermint, cinnamon bun and pumpkin. We also have a sugar free hot chocolate option and chai tea.”

The main goal of these coffee shop operations is to have students learn authentic life skills.

“They gain spatial awareness by navigating the school building to deliver drinks,” Absher said. “Also, social skills are strengthened through peer interactions and Special Cup enhances inclusion throughout the school building by the life skills program working closely with their general education students and staff.”

Meadors agrees with the benefits the program structure offers students.

“It gives them a chance to meet different students in the school by doing this,” she said. “A lot of the general education students who would not always see our students get to learn their names and interact with them. When they see them in the hallway, it’s not the only time they see them. They also saw them in class delivering their coffee. It gets them to be more open.”