When a Merrimack Valley High School student spilled coffee on her pants before school last week, she ventured down to a converted classroom at the back of the building. Instead of diving through the lost and found in a desperate attempt to secure a dry pair of pants, the student’s replacement came from the racks of the school’s student-run thrift shop.
It was a resource that wouldn’t have been available to her last year.
The thrift shop and an adjoining food pantry — together called Valley Shoppes — opened this fall. They are the brainchild of Joanne Allen, the high school’s second-year associate director of student services. Everything in both stores is free.
Allen hatched the plan for the shops because she saw them as both a good way to teach practical and professional skills and an avenue to increase connections between students in special education programs and others in the building.
“Sometimes students who have significant needs — their place in the school is one classroom,” Allen said. “But this gave them the opportunity to now be right there in the forefront. They’re proud of it, they own it, and you can tell just by the way they carry themselves.”
The stores are part of a broader revamp of the high school’s special education program, which has focused on giving students more opportunities to work on life skills in the community.
While the thrift shop and food pantry were conceived of by Allen, the shops required over a month of legwork from the students before they were ready to open.
“We built this from the ground up,” junior Aylin Cook said during a recent tour.
The process has come with challenges along the way, students said.
Cook and his classmates arrived to a pair of empty classrooms on the first day. The early weeks were “chaos,” he said, as they worked together to clean donated clothing, decorate the rooms with fairy lights and other seasonal accessories, and load their products onto hangers.
The hardest part was setting up the shelves that would hold cans of beans, cartons of milk, and boxes of cereal, according to Cook.
“We messed up so many times, but finally we got them together,” he said.
By the end of September, the store was ready to open. It was then that the students, like many new business owners, learned the fallacy of the adage, “If you build it, they will come.”
“We wanted customers right away,” Allen said, but that did not happen.
An all-out marketing campaign ensued. Junior Cortlyn Johnson designed flyers, and the students plastered them to walls. They made announcements and visited the cafeteria to take their pitch to potential customers directly.
Eventually, people began to trickle in.
The options in the thrift shop run the gamut from Charlie Brown-themed socks to water bottles, jackets, gloves and toothbrushes. Some products are used and have been washed, while others are new. Once a customer has selected their items — often with guidance from the students — they travel to the front desk, where their selections are recorded in a notebook.
The food pantry at the back of the store is run in partnership with the New Hampshire Food Bank, which provides the food. It is the second food pantry to open that is associated with the school district, joining one at the Washington Street School.
In addition to giving the student “employees” practical experience, the stores are also serving other members of the community, Allen said.
“When you come to school, you want it to be a safe place,” she said. “If you are food insecure or clothing insecure, I think having those provided for you can go a long way.”
The students staffing the store on a recent Thursday morning gushed about the experience so far.
“The shop is an amazing opportunity for students to get supplies and also food,” freshman Ringo Kelvey said. “It really benefits the school community, because we are getting experience learning how to manage a shop, and the other students and ourselves are getting rewarded with our hard work.”
For some students, the experience has served as an initial exposure to retail work. For others, like Cook, who already works at Market Basket, it has been a way to think about what might be a better career fit.
“It’s been a great thing to learn about, but it’s not exactly something I want to do for the rest of my life,” said Cook, who hopes to find a job that involves being outside.
In addition to the in-school stores, some students are also gaining professional experience at externships this year, including at Osborne’s Farm & Garden Center, Hannaford, and in a kindergarten classroom at Penacook Elementary School.
“We’ve tried to create meaningful jobs that students can have where they’re learning skills that can be transferred into real life,” Allen said.
Back at school, Allen led the remodeling of the high school’s former home economics classroom this summer, repurposing it so that students could practice life skills, such as cooking, making their beds, and setting the table.
“We’re trying to teach them to be as independent as they can be when they’re adults,” Allen said.
