Every Friday morning the purple pod takes on a coffee shop vibe as student baristas craft specialty drinks for Powell High School.
Busy Bean is a coffee shop run by students in the PHS life skills classroom. They make a wide variety of drinks and deliver them to teachers. Busy Bean allows the students to get work experience without leaving the high school.
Each one of the students has a job best suited to their abilities, from running the espresso machine to making smoothies and even decorating the cup sleeves.
“I look at what makes each student most comfortable,” life skills teacher Mrs. Shelby Moore said. “The ones that are most comfortable in the kitchen get the most complex recipes, [to] the ones with less ability to be comfortable in the kitchen help run the Keurig instead of making something with multiple ingredients.”
The Busy Bean crew delivers the drinks from purple pod to green pod, allowing teachers to easily get their drinks without having to pause a lesson.
“In Busy Bean, I make coffee for the teachers,” freshman Alexander Bradshaw said. “I put the names on the cups, and I make the hot chocolate; then we serve them drinks.”
Delivering the coffees allows life skills students to be involved in the general education classrooms.
“[The teachers] continue ordering every week and are just so supportive and kind to my students,” Mrs Moore said. “I love watching my students light up when they do the deliveries.”
Just like at any other coffee place, there is a learning curve for making the drinks and working under stress.
“One of the most successful things has just been seeing the growth of the students from the beginning of the year until now,” Mrs. Moore said. “At the beginning of the year, we were making four or five drinks, but recently there was a point that we made 25 drinks in three class periods.”
For any coffee shop to run smoothly, you need recipes. The recipes at Busy Bean look a little bit different than your regular latte instructions.
“I outline the recipes so that they’re both visual and in a simplified wording,” Mrs Moore said. “I put a picture next to it, then I use wording like get the milk out of the fridge and say it in very specific terms.”
Getting a coffee is a great treat to start your morning, whether it be a spiced chai or just a cup of black coffee.
“My favorite part of Busy Bean is when we get a free drink after,” senior Maggie Spiering said. “My favorite drink is the chai latte.”
As in every classroom, Busy Bean has learning goals ranging from customer service to kitchen etiquette.
“There are several things that I focus on,” Mrs. Moore said. “One of them is just simply work ethic, understanding that you have a list of tasks to do that need to be completed within a certain time.”
Occasionally, Busy Bean needs extra hands, so some general education students get to help with the coffee making.
“I would like to more consistently include more general education students,” Mrs. Moore said. “I think that it’s a great opportunity for them to get to know my students, I would love to have a rotation of gen ed students coming in to help out with my students.”
As Thursday rolls around, teachers put in their Busy Bean drink order for the following Friday morning. This support of the life skills classroom makes a huge impact on the students.
“I’ve been amazed and honored by the support that we’ve gotten from the teachers this year,” Mrs. Moore said. “They’re always very understanding of the complexities that we go through in my classroom.”
