Cassadaga Valley opens Cougar Cafe for students
Cassadaga Valley Central School opened up a Cougar Cafe for senior students earlier in September. Photo courtesy of Cassadaga Valley’s Facebook page
The Cougar Cafe is more than just a cafe, also offering a flexible learning hub designed around how students can learn best. Photo courtesy of Cassadaga Valley’s Facebook page
The Cougar Cafe is an entrepreneurial cafe, run by students as well. Photo courtesy of Cassadaga Valley’s Facebook page
Students also meet with a certified teacher at the cafe, following their learning proposals and to help them reach their goals. Photo courtesy of Cassadaga Valley’s Facebook page
Students can go to the cafe and get things such as drinks or snacks and then engage in learning opportunities meant to prepare them for college or careers. Photo courtesy of Cassadaga Valley’s Facebook page
Cassadaga Valley Central School opened up a Cougar Cafe for senior students earlier in September. Photo courtesy of Cassadaga Valley’s Facebook page
The Cougar Cafe is more than just a cafe, also offering a flexible learning hub designed around how students can learn best. Photo courtesy of Cassadaga Valley’s Facebook page
The Cougar Cafe is an entrepreneurial cafe, run by students as well. Photo courtesy of Cassadaga Valley’s Facebook page
Students also meet with a certified teacher at the cafe, following their learning proposals and to help them reach their goals. Photo courtesy of Cassadaga Valley’s Facebook page
Students can go to the cafe and get things such as drinks or snacks and then engage in learning opportunities meant to prepare them for college or careers. Photo courtesy of Cassadaga Valley’s Facebook page
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SINCLAIRVILLE -- During the month of September, Cassadaga Valley Central School opened their Cougar Cafe, a cafe experience for students, namely seniors at the moment, to allow them opportunities to focus on and prepare for potential future college majors and careers.
More than just a cafe, the Cougar Cafe is a flexible learning hub designed around how students learn best. The space allows students to step beyond the traditional classroom to work on independent research, collaborate with peers, participate in online or distance-learning courses, receive targeted academic support, and explore interests connected to their future goals with a teacher advisor to mentor and support their success.
"In today's world, especially with opportunities that students have sitting in front of them and our belief that students should be able to 'thrive by 25' in a career field, they will need more opportunities to test the waters to get to those careers than we could ever offer in a traditional classroom setting," Superintendent Tammy Mangus said. "We operate under the belief that unlike many traditional school systems that ask kids to figure out if they're happy in their college major on their own time and with their own money, or to test out jobs on their own time and own money, we want them to test it out in high school."
Mangus said the school needs to be able to offer students opportunities to test these options out in ways that are flexible, giving an example of hypothetically having one student interested in going into the medical field, the school would want to offer them related courses like anatomy and physiology. They could also offer internships, externships, college course work, shadowing opportunities, and that was the reasoning behind opening the Cougar Cafe.
"What the Cougar Cafe is, is an entrepreneurial cafe that our students run," Mangus said. "It's a place where our students, if they have an interest, propose a learning pathway. So, they might say, for example, 'I want to go into healthcare.' So, they might jump into a class, either that we can bring in through distance learning from a college campus, or they might jump into an online course from an online learning platform that is asynchronous or they might embark on an internship or externship with research attached to it. They might jump into an independent learning project."
A certified and appropriately certificated teacher will be in the cafe, scheduled with the specific student, to help usher them through their independent learning project. That teacher, through an agreement that Cassadaga Valley negotiated with the teachers' union, might oversee five to seven students working on five to seven different projects.
"It's a really creative way to make sure students get the learning that they want to embark upon, in a really cool space that the seniors are finding really fun to hang out at in the morning," Mangus said.
Since opening, Mangus said the students using it are loving it. With it only being the first year, the school decided to start by offering the cafe only to seniors, with the plan to have it open for both juniors and seniors next year. The cafe is set to be open at the end of the day next year as well so more students can participate.
"We offer a special senior version of our free breakfast program," Mangus said. "Students can also buy drinks, coffee, snacks, and for the first portion of the school year students had to work on their proposals for their learning pathway; what sort of learning did they want to embark upon. So last week the teaching and learning committee in our district was reviewing those proposals. They’re helping kids nail down what that learning process looks like, how scoring will be applied. Kids have been really excited about the flexibility and opportunity in learning, as have the teachers."
Students at Cassadaga Valley should be interested in this experience, as it gives them flexibility and independence, Mangus said, adding that that is what everyone wants to build in their students. Anywhere around the world, Mangus said, someone can walk into a coffee shop and find students sitting there with their laptops, engaging in some sort of work.
"Our kids already exist in that world," Mangus said. "We don't want school to be confined by only traditional learning pathways. That's why we're opening this up so students can participate in the experiences they are most interested in."