Mars life skills program now a model for other schools
MARS — The cafe that Mars Area High School made with grant funding in 2017 has developed into a full life skills program where students work in the coffee and snack hub and can then retreat into a homelike “apartment” to cook food and do laundry.
These duties help students with disabilities to learn through doing — they can start as ninth graders stocking shelves at the cafe, getting ice and making hot chocolate to eventually running the cash register and managing newbies once they hit 12th grade.
Courtney Stewart has worked in the Rocket Fuel Cafe since she was a freshman at Mars Area High School, which taught her to be better at “talking to more people,” not just the people in her classes, but strangers she has never talked to before.
“It gives me the skills like money and stuff,” Courtney said. She said she got a job at Wendy’s, which has duties she is familiar with thanks to the Rocket Fuel Cafe.
Maegan Fabanich, autistic and emotional support teacher at Mars Area High School, said there are 10 to 15 learning support students, so the cafe has a full crew staffing it most mornings when it is open from around 7:50 to 10:45 a.m. The cafe’s hours are set to go until lunch periods start, according to Fabanich. Students use real money to pay for their orders, not the credits used in the regular school cafeteria.
But a lot of work for the cafe takes place behind the scenes.
Earlene Allshouse, life skills teacher at Mars, helps keep the cafe stocked. She takes students to a grocery store once a week, where they use the count they take through regular inventory checks to make sure they get enough supplies to last through the coming week.
The students also have to work with a budget to keep the cafe stocked. The money comes right from the cash register.
“In reality, it just funds itself,” Fabanich said of the cafe. “A cup of coffee is $2. That goes right back and that's how we buy our supplies.”
While the Rocket Fuel Cafe staff members don’t get a paycheck, Fabanich said they get a free snack or drink for every shift they work. The special education department sometimes funds a pizza party or catering for them.
The students — and teachers, from time to time — on the other end of the counter experience the Rocket Fuel Cafe as if it were a Starbucks. They order their drink or food, pay the cashier and then get it served to them all right there. The cafe also resembles a typical coffee shop. It has a sitting area where people can enjoy their treat. It even has decor done by the cafe-working students.
But the cafe space is just the most recent development created by the life skills program. It came from humble beginnings as a coffee cart students pushed around the school to deliver drinks and food to teachers. Fabanich said the life skills and learning support teachers toured other simulated workplace programs — Seneca Valley High School, for one — to see how to best incorporate a workplace for Mars students.
Now, the high school is an example for other schools to follow. The program’s leaders are looking to work with outside businesses, too.
“Pine-Richland came, Hampton came,” Fabanich said. “We were just talking about partnering with community restaurants … seeing if we could kind of get out into the community and see if we could do a community-based partnership with them.”
The high school cafe already has an outside business involved in Tanner's Bakehouse, a bakery in Butler Township. However, Fabanich and Allshouse said they are also preparing their students to make the first move when it comes to transferring their skills.
The simulated apartment that has been built in one of the high school’s classrooms is there to teach learning support students more skills required for independent living. It has a washing machine and dryer, fully-functioning kitchen, a dining room and bedroom, which are all there to teach these life skills.
On Thursday, Sept. 17, some of the learning support students were preparing for interviews at Chick-fil-A, and had already picked out clothing from the simulated apartment to wear.
The simulated apartment itself was created with a $150,000 state education grant, so everything in it is new equipment, according to Allshouse.
Allshouse, Fabanich and Shane St. Esprit, a speech therapist at Mars, said the simulated environments learning support teachers create for their students shows a change in the program’s focus over the years.
Fabanich said the high school special education teachers now try to prepare their students for their post-high school lives. Working a simulated job and in a simulated apartment are ways to get students to experience real life with the safety net of teacher supervision.
“It's all just promoting functional, and real-life skills for our students in the high school setting, so they're ready to transition to the outside world, like post-secondary,” Fabanich said. “There's eight of us, I think up here at the high school in special education, and we all work very closely together where we're integrating our students with all needs into the regular public.”
And although they were working what was ultimately a service job Sept. 17, the students at the Rocket Fuel Cafe were all smiles.
Anthony Graham, who has worked in the Rocket Fuel Cafe for a few years, has a reputation for serving up smiles to his customers, Fabanich said. The senior said he has learned how to restock the shelves, make coffee, run the cash register, clean the space and even teach the younger students how to do most of those tasks. He also works in a flea market when not at school.
“Have a nice day,” Anthony said, when asked how he ends his interactions with customers.
