Having a student business has SO MANY benefits. Depending on what your product or service is, you have the opportunity to practice independence, money math, cooking, responsibility, and so much more! In this series, various guest bloggers (teachers & special educators) will share their tried and true experience of starting and running a student business for special education students. Hopefully these posts will give you some great ideas or inspire you to start a classroom business of your own to teach students valuable vocational & life skills! Up next is a classroom volunteer charity program!
About The Guest Blogger:
Hi! I’m Nicole (Sped Transition Teacher) and I am teacher in a work-based transition program for students 18-21. We have a wide range of abilities in our program and the students are considered mild/mod-high functioning.
This past school year our program created a partnership with a local charity in our neighborhood that helps feed and give supplies to those in need. My students play central role in the success of this partnership and “business.” While it may not be a typical business that is because we are not selling goods for profits; my students run the behind the scenes organizing drives and gathering supplies for this charity.
How The Business Started:
Last school year was anything but typical. Our students usually go out to work in the community for 2.5 hours each day. Between the restrictions due to the pandemic and operating on a half day schedule, my co-worker and I had to get creative. We decided to bring the community and work to our students, since they could not go out to work anymore. The local charity was totally on board!
The start-up was straightforward, since we would be organizing drives and donating items received, we were able to just follow our fundraising and club protocols that the school already had in place. Our admin was very supportive from the get-go and would often stop in to observe our students working on their tasks. There was also a club version of this charity already established in our school, this made our path to helping them even easier.
Special Considerations & Safety Protocols:
Anytime our students are working, whether on or off-campus, it’s important consider the liabilities. Running this business/partnership during Covid proved to have its challenges. The students all worked at the same time but could not share any equipment and had to maintain social distance.
To overcome this, we had the students wear gloves whenever they handled donations and we created stations around the room for students to work. By splitting up into stations, we were able to socially distance the students and staff. We would have 1-2 students working on an assembly line making the donation bags and another group of students would be sorting inventory. The individual donation bags consisted of soaps, toothbrushes, snacks, water, socks as a way to help someone through the week. When students created 25 bags, they would have to place them in a bin for pick-up. A representative from the charity would come to pick up items from us that we made. We also had students that were virtual help to make flyers and notes for the donations/drives using Canva.
Our students also helped to make and donate sandwiches to the charity’s community lunch program. Since the students were working with food, this brought another level of safety procedures we had to follow. They all had their own equipment, washed their hands frequently, wore gloves and had to wear hair nets. We followed the same food safety protocols we would if we were out in the community.
Supplies:
Luckily, the only expense that we had for this partnership was the supplies for the sandwiches. Everything for the supply bags was donated by people in our community or school. Our teachers and paraprofessionals would take turns buying the bread for the PB + J sandwiches, even our SLP would contribute! No one minded doing so because we knew it was going to a great cause, but we could have also easily added this to our suggested donations list.
Student Tasks:
This partnership was a win-win. It allowed our students to continue to gain necessary skills imperative to future employment AND it gave back to the community. Our students were involved in every stage, beginning to end.
Students were responsible for:
- Creating flyers for the fundraising drives
- Creating cards for sandwiches on Canva
- Pricing supplies on Amazon
- Organizing and taking inventory of donations
- Creating donation bags
- Setting up and cleaning up stations
- Ensuring donations were ready for the pick-up date
- Bagging and labeling sandwiches
- Bringing the supply bags and sandwiches to the pick-up location.
IEP Goals:
Even though my students were not able to go out to the community to work like they typically do, we were still able to make progress on their IEP goals. Most of my students have general work goals and by having them participate in this “business” we were able to work on the following goals:
- Student will dress appropriately and be properly groomed for work
- When at a work site, student will communicate in an acceptable manner with supervisor and peers
- Will speak respectfully to a supervisor
- When on a job site, student will follow instructions of the supervisor, speak respectfully to the supervisor, and respond appropriately to a supervisor’s criticism.
- Will participate in a variety of work experiences with the assistance of a job coach
- Will build his/her way up to complete work experiences without the assistance of a job coach.
- When on a job site, student will seek assistance, as needed, when learning new tasks.
Staff & Student Time Commitment:
We worked on this partnership Monday through Friday for two class blocks, as long as school was in session, we were working! This mirrored our typical schedule, where students would normally go out to work in the community from 9:30-11:30. The tasks we focused on changed depending on the day of the week and if we had a drive for donations. Typically, our schedule was as follows:
- Monday: Organize and gather donations, put together individual bags of supplies.
- Tuesday: Make sandwiches to donate to the soup kitchen, create notes on Canva to place on sandwiches.
- Wednesday: Make sandwiches to donate to the soup kitchen, create notes on Canva to place on sandwiches.
- Thursday: Organize sandwiches for pick up, put together individual bags of supplies.
- Friday: Take inventory of supplies left, put together individual bags of supplies.
Marketing:
The charity we partnered with is very well-known in the community so they did most of the marketing for us with their social media posts. The club that was already established in our school helped to market the drives in the school.
Moving Forward:
This evolved from an idea and quickly grew over the span of a few short months. Our students created over a thousand sandwiches that were donated to local soup kitchens and hundreds of individual supply bags. We even got thank you notes and videos from those that benefited from the student’s hard work. With the new school year quickly approaching, we plan on delving into this partnership even further. My coworker and I have plans to have the students assist further with the marketing of this partnership (hanging flyers, sending emails, posting on social media), taking trips and volunteering at the charity’s events in the community. We also are going to be selling merchandise to help fund this non-profit organization during this school year.
Advice For Getting Started:
I suggest looking within your school and community. You could have students research the clubs in the building and charities that are run nearby. Every soup kitchen is need of donations right now and most schools have clubs like “Habitat for Humanity”, or other organizations built to help those in need. Ask to help anyway you can and set up a schedule of those tasks that not only benefits your students by working on key vocational skills but gives back to your school and community. If you have any questions about supports or how to get started on a partnership like this, please feel free to email me @ spedtransitionteacher@gmail.com
Best of luck this school year!
Nicole, The Sped Transition Teacher
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