Schoolhouse Coffee in Cleveland

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By Jenny Neill

After decades of “white flight,” the public school system in Cleveland, Ohio was in trouble. Cleveland was one of many urban settings in the United States where Caucasians moved away as African Americans moved in. Racial and cultural divisions remain a challenge in many American cities, with some experts pointing to current evidence that the phenomenon never ended.

Desegregation lawsuits and judgments against the Cleveland Board of Education starting in the 1970s continued through the next two decades and deepened the education crisis there. By the 1990s, a federal district court judge ordered the state to take over the school district. A few more years of legal maneuvering and court rulings shifted control of the schools to the mayor of Cleveland.

While that turn of events may have ended more than two decades of civil rights law suits, it did little to improve success rates of students. About half the students who enrolled in high school in the mid to late 1990s did not graduate.

Common core standards, merit-based pay for teachers, and funneling public funds into charter schools emerged as potential solutions to the broader public education crisis playing out across the United States.

The recent political history of public education in Cleveland is important context for how it is that high school students opened a coffeehouse inside their school.

Three Schools in One

The choice to demolish the school building that once stood on the site that is now home to John Marshall Campus was a difficult one. In the end, the Landmarks Commission agreed to allow it to be torn down to save the taxpayers money in creating a new and more modern space for high school students.

Sara Kidner, principal of the School of Civic and Business Leadership at John Marshall said, “We’re getting a brand new building—we also wanted to bring a new plan.”

As part of creating a portfolio of schools for parents and students to choose from, the district created three small schools to be housed within the new campus: A School of Civic and Business Leadership, the School of Engineering, and a School of Information Technology.

“There’s been extensive research within the district about high-performance school models and also about providing options and opportunities," Kidner said. "These are new and innovative schools to give students more of a choice as to what their education looks like.”

Monisa Mason, community and business coordinator at John Marshall High School of Civic and Business Leadership, acts as a liaison between students, teachers, business people, and community members.

Mason said, “The purpose of the School of Civic and Business Leadership is to prepare students to be business and community leaders, teaching them the importance of giving back to their community, being engaged in their community, and really having the business skills to open their own business.”

A major part of that new plan for John Marshall is to have students open and run businesses. The momentum for opening a coffee shop came from discussions among the Alliance board and staffers at the school. Startup funds came from grants made by two foundations with deep ties to Cleveland: the Cleveland Foundation and the Gund Foundation.

A Coffee Business Partner

The startup funds are going to two business: a coffee shop open now and a credit union to open in 2017. Finding a coffee business to partner with was easy, according to Kidner. She said, “Rising Star came to mind because they have a community impact thought process. So, I reached out and they were enthusiastic.”

Rising Star Coffee Roasters is a specialty coffee roaster with four locations in Cleveland. The main roastery is about a 15-minute drive to the west of John Marshall Campus. The company’s original roasting location, which continues to serve as a coffee house, is also a short driving distance away in the opposite direction.

Robert Stockham, general manager of Rising Star, and John Johnson, Rising Star’s director of coffee, both validated how Kidner characterized the relationship. Both also spoke of how working with youth in their community aligned with other progressive principles for which the company is known. Examples include paying a living wage and providing benefits such as health insurance to employees.

Reflecting on one of the aspects of the partnership he valued, Johnson noted, “It’s an incredibly diverse group of kids.”

The coffee shop functions as a community service extracurricular activity. The students who work there are not earning wages. Instead, all funds raised by selling coffee at the shop are funneled back into an account used to buy school-branded merchandise or pay for field trips for the student population.

All involved in the project see plenty of opportunities for it to be a valuable learning experience with direct tie-ins to the students’ curriculum.

“We’ve been talking about all the educational connection opportunities we can make," said Kidner. "We talked about Skype [sessions] with the farmers where the coffee is grown, the chemistry of the coffee and understanding acidity. They were as excited about the educational aspects as they were about the business aspects.”

Yet, a business it is—one with extra hurdles to overcome.

The Start-up

One way the professionals at Rising Star Coffee Roasters helped move the project forward was in selecting equipment for Lawyer’s Café. The students will have a small space in an existing concessions area to sell coffee during limited hours. The small footprint and limited hours constrained choices for an espresso machine, a brewer, and the other needed supplies.

Erin Molner, director of retail operations for Rising Star, trained students on the finance and operations team to understand how to analyze and then track the costs of starting up the business. Johnson advised Mason and the students about the more technical gear needed.

Lawyer’s Café is equipped with a K30 Vario single espresso grinder and a Guatemala Lab Grinder both from Mahlkönig, a twin station CBS-2132XTS Touchscreen Series coffee brewer from Fetco, and a Mega II two-group espresso machine from ASTRA. The students are using three liter airpots with the programmable brewer. (Johnson did the initial programming. However, there are discussions about involving science classes in that process in the future.)

Counter space was far from the only challenge faced by school administrators with getting Lawyer’s Café started. Another was figuring out how to involve students.

Mason asked for volunteers among the teachers to be part of the interview panel. Terrance Cleggett, a ninth grade history teacher, also coaches the football and track teams at John Marshall High School.

Cleggett first heard about the coffee shop when interviewing for his job. Explaining what motivated him to participate as one of the interviewers, Cleggett said : “…this is the first time they’re ever having a job interview so having a familiar face during the interview process might relax them.”

Adalis Sanchez, a ninth grader, is one of the students who had never done a job interview before. She said, “I was really nervous but I just went with the flow. At first I thought I wasn’t going to get hired because you can’t show you’re nervous.”

Janiyah Dowdell , also a ninth grade student, explaining part of the interview process, said: “We went through a couple scenarios, like we were working with a customer, like ‘What would you do if they didn’t like a drink?’”

Both teens were selected for the team. Sanchez, who wants to own her own business some day, is a leader on the marketing team and Dowdell, who wants to be a lawyer, leads the customer service team.

 “I thought it was a great opportunity to learn skills and to work with the machines and to work with customers,” said Dowdell.

The training the students underwent included a sweet treat. At a visit to Rising Star’s roasting facility, they tried eating Skittles while holding their noses and then again while breathing through their noses to understand better the difference between taste and aroma. Subsequent sessions introduced the youths to coffee, a beverage which many had never tried.

“Training kids on making espresso has been really fun and a challenge,” said Johnson. He explained that he kept instruction simple, taking a very step-by-step approach to teaching them how to manually pull shots.

Sanchez, who favors frappacinos, said, “I didn’t like regular coffee. For me, the flavor has to be sweet.”

She was not alone. The student-run research and development team surveyed the John Marshall student population to help decide what drinks to include and how to price them. Many indicated they preferred sweeter drinks to straight espresso or brewed coffee. However, designing the beverage menu would not be straightforward because the café is required to use sugar-free syrups.

Introducing Lawyer’s Café

When the coffee shop opens, the menu will feature two signature drinks, each for $2: French Vanilla Coffee and Nutty Caramel Iced Latte. The shop is not open yet as the students and teachers continue training. In mid-April the café will open from 7:30-8:45am and from 2:30-4pm on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. (The limited hours and sugar restricts are dictated by legal and scholastic constraints that come with being housed in a public high school.)

Kidner hopes to use the coffeehouse as a community hub. She said, “We’re talking about doing alumni nights, evenings for parents, and different groups in the community. We see having events in the coffee shop as a way to bring people together in conversation.”

Johnson, who grew up in a Western suburb of Cleveland, reflected on how easy it is to consider oneself as being from a city but not really experiencing the cultures of local communities within it. For him, the project is already serving the purpose Kidner described.

He said, of working with the students, “It’s really cool to have coffee bridge this divide. Now I see more the entirety of my city.”