Freshly Brewed

Nestled between rooms 416 and 418, you might almost miss the East coffee shop during a busy passing period, despite the aromas that waft through the fourth-floor hallways every morning. Over the years, according to special education teacher Julie Paradise, students have started to lose interest in the coffee shop, especially since the recent removal of sugary products. But the shop will soon be getting a complete makeover that will make the small room halfway down the math hallway harder to ignore.

The special education teachers who are in charge of the East coffee shop are currently trying to get a grant from the East Fund to completely overhaul their look and increase student interest. Juniors Carley Allen and Kara Koenig are helping redesign the shop as an assignment for their interior design class.

“We have a project that we’re supposed to do with real life,” Allen said. “And then the ladies [in charge of the coffee shop] were like, ‘Would you guys be interested in redesigning the coffee shop?’”

Allen and Koenig thought it was a good idea to redesign something in the school, and they agreed to work with the coffee shop to help give it a fresh face.

When the coffee shop started in 2006 as a collaboration between the marketing and special ed departments, it was an important school event and more departments got involved besides marketing and special ed. The marketing students won an award competing with the coffee shop at DECA the year it opened. There was a school-wide taste test to decide on what would be the Lancer Blend, as well as a contest to determine the logo, which will be happening again as part of the redesign.

In order to actually open the shop in what used to be office space, the teachers in charge got a grant, which is what they are trying to do today. It was a large school event and it was important to all the students. This is a contrast to today, when while many students appreciate the coffee shop as a convenient source of caffeine, the interest is certainly not up to par of what the coffee shop used to be.

“Now, nobody really knows [the] story [of the coffee shop], so what we want to do is make it relevant now with kids today,” Paradise said. “People leave and passions change, you know, and this year we decided that we need to bring back the coffee shop.”

Teachers in the special ed department, including Paradise, are working with the interior design students as well as woodshop and art students, who will make the design concrete. All the students involved have been traveling to other coffee shops and taking pictures in order to get ideas for what to do with the coffee shop here.

Nothing is definite yet until the shop gets a grant; for now it’s all ideas and there are no dates. The participating students and teachers have been meeting during seminar, and Allen and Koenig are working on creating a virtual model to work from.

“Right now, we’re mapping it out on the older computers, and we have to do a 3D model of the [coffee shop],” Koenig said. “And we’re trying to get new food and stuff in there too so people will want to buy more.”

Paradise hopes for an increased interest in the near future, and believes this makeover of the coffee shop will help greatly with that.

“We’re going to try to go and turn it around,” Paradise said. “The guys are getting ideas about what we could do to our place to make it unique now.”