ITEM PHOTO BY OWEN O’ROURKE
Steven Bagnera from Home Depot installs a new ceiling in a section of the lunch room at Saugus High School.
By BRIDGET TURCOTTE
SAUGUS — Students will line up Monday morning for the grand opening of a new Learning Cafe at Saugus High School.
The Home Depot is converting a vacant space within the school’s cafeteria into a place that will benefit life skills students and encourage collaboration with traditional learners. The project is estimated to cost the store about $2,000, including labor and materials.
The life skills program serves 13 students with intellectual disabilities in two groups: high-schoolers and postgraduate learners. It focuses on functional academics, which teach students how to succeed in real-life situations at home, school, work and in the community.
“Our goal is to help students become more independent in their everyday lives,” said life skills teacher Amy DeAvilla.
The teenagers learn about cooking, how to do laundry and the basics of keeping a job. Students visit work sites such as the Saugus United Parish Food Pantry, the YMCA and Wahlburgers in Lynnfield for an hour at a time throughout the week.
The new cafe will offer a lesson on running a business from start to finish without having to leave the building.
“This is theirs — they own it,” said DeAvilla. “They are going to be fully responsible for it. Obviously we have staff that are going to oversee it but this is student-run and we’ll have it be their project and let them be successful with it.”
Her students will work alongside traditional students to operate the cafe as if it is a real business. They will order snacks from the district food provider, Whitsons Culinary Group, and offer specialty items, such as Dippin’ Dots ice cream.
“It’s something here that they can focus on and are solely responsible for,” she said. “We can really work on every skill from math, social skills, reading comprehension, budgeting, how to order food, inventory, customer service, personal hygiene. We can pretty much incorporate everything into this little store.”
The space, which was originally used for returning food trays to cafeteria staff, has been used by the town for storage for several years. DeAvilla said she has been slowly trying to clean it out for more than three years. She wrote to the staff at the Home Depot to ask if they would consider donating a few cans of paint to help the project along.
Christina Lopresti, general manager at the Saugus Home Depot, said she visited the school to get a feel for how many gallons of paint would be needed.
“When I saw the room, I thought ‘we could do a lot more,’” she said. “It looked like a good project that we wanted to do. We try to pick a project every quarter in the communities that we serve.”
Many projects are completed for local military veterans but LoPresti said she also recognized the financial needs of the schools that don’t get a lot of funding.
Home Depot employees installed new hardwood floors, updated the paint, replaced broken ceiling tiles and added shelving, she said. Over the next few days, crews will add molding and fine-tune small details of the room.
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Bridget Turcotte can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @BridgetTurcotte.