Special education students open cafe inside Legacy High School

Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of dining at the Cowbell Café inside Mansfield Legacy High School. The restaurant is the product of an innovative teaching grant written by teachers, Michelle Lutes and Jayme Schroeder. They received the $2,700 grant from the Mansfield ISD Education Foundation. The grant provided funds to purchase equipment and supplies to run a restaurant/café inside the high school.

That in and of itself is a pretty interesting thing for a school. (Just ask the Culinary Arts team at Ben Barber Career Tech that run Savvy's Bistro which opened in 2006.)

However, what makes this dining experience so unique is that it is through the combined efforts of Legacy special needs students.

According to the grant, students benefit by "gaining food service experience and skills that will lead to future job placement, as well as, reinforce their every day living skills."

Michelle Lutes said they held Cowbell Café job interviews to determine functions from the hosts, servers, kitchen staff, napkin rollers and more all the way through the mini-restaurant roles, each student had a part.

The food was tasty (we had salad, lasagna, plus dessert) and the service was exceptional. The plan is to have seatings on a regular basis each month during the school year.

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The name, Cowbell Café, is a Texas-sized hat tip to the Kowbell Arena which was the world's first indoor rodeo arena. The Kowbell Arena, which is where the Legacy band hall, performing arts center and journalism room are now located, was demolished to make way for the high school.

Changes for intermediate schools bell schedule

Updated April 29, 2011 - If you are looking for information on the new bell schedule for intermediate schools and middle schools for the 2011-12 school year, please visit the update page.

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At the Tuesday, May 25 school board meeting, the administration presented information on a change to the intermediate school bell schedule for the 2010-11 school year.

Next year, the bell schedules for our intermediate schools will be pushed back 15 minutes to help alleviate transportation issues. The intermediate schools bell schedule will shift to an 8:15 am start time and a 3:30 pm afternoon dismissal.

Background
Dr. Morrison had the administrative support division look into ways to resolve as many of the late issues for buses as possible. Late issues have included buses that were 20, 30, and sometimes 40 minutes, late after last dismissal bell. These problems resulted from our second bell at the elementary and intermediate schools who currently share the same start/end times.

A traditional method that was considered to solve this problem included purchasing more buses and adding drivers. This idea proved to be cost-prohibitive. (For reference, the last buses we bought for general routes cost about $100,000. To get to every campus within a 15 minute window, we would need to add 24 new regular route buses, drivers for 11 special education buses, and the required 22 special education drivers and attendants .) This solution would have required an investment of several million dollars. With this information, it was time to go back to the drawing board for a more creative approach which concentrated on the routes.

Currently, we are carrying 4,700 passengers after the second bell. (Our other bells at the middle and high schools are just about half of that number.)

We utilize all 99 general route buses to get to that second bell. Since elementary and intermediate schools are on the same bell schedule, it's just impossible to be at two places at one time. We utilize the buses that we have as effectively as possible, so we like to pick up the elementary school kids that are in the same attendance zones as the intermediate schools. We pick up both the elementary and intermediate school students, then take them to their neighborhoods. So it made sense to continue that process and transport those kids one time rather then running an elementary school route and then turning around and running a separate intermediate school route.

Our solution
In researching this situation and through some careful consideration on our routes, we found that by moving the intermediate school bell schedule up by 15 minutes, we could alleviate the majority of this transportation issue. This 15 minute difference will give us the time it will take to meet the transportation needs at elementary and intermediate schools. Additionally, we determined that if families had students at both the elementary and intermediate levels this would be a benefit from a parent's driving perspective. There is also a benefit for families who have both intermediate and middle school age children because the new bell schedule closes the gap between those two levels by 15 minutes.

By moving intermediate schools to the 8:15 am - 3:30 pm bell schedule, we can best utilize our resources to get the students to their next stop.

Additional InformationWe've also had some specific questions and concerns from parents:

Q: Will the intermediate students not ride the bus with the elementary students anymore?

A: We are in the process of re-routing the majority of our routes now with the additional 15 minute window. In some limited cases because of capacity, some intermediate school buses will not have elementary students on board as well as some elementary school buses will not have intermediate students on board. This occurs under the current routing schedule. Our goal is to continue co-mingling the students in there attendance zones. Where buses are used to run both intermediate and elementary school students the bus will stop first at the elementary school.

Q: What happens with the transfer bus going from Donna Shepard Intermediate and Tarver Rendon Elementary?

A: We are working to eliminate the Tarver Rendon and Donna Shepard shuttle and instead provide direct service for Rendon students and Shepard students. This route is our toughest to cover because of the distance; therefore, we are working towards a direct service for these campuses rather than a shared solution. Additionally, the construction project planned for 1187 will cause additional time delays between the two sites.

Q: Are you changing the schedules at Tarver-Rendon and Perry Elementary?

A: There is no change to elementary school bell schedules. This option was discussed at the two campuses with the PTA, but it was later determined to not be necessary with the intermediate school bell schedule change.

Thanks for coming to our party

"What if we throw a party and nobody shows up?!"
That was the thought I had over the weekend before the Centennial Celebration at Newsom Stadium on Monday, May 10.

Thankfully a good number of people in the MISD community decided to show up, approximately 2,300 of you actually. The event was a great success from our perspective: we were able to provide a free event for the Mansfield ISD community that included family-friendly activities and games as well as food and live entertainment.

Best laid plans
Of course, no special event goes according to plans. We had a few issues to overcome including the weather. No rain, but the evening was very windy. Very windy. There was so much wind that we were only able to safely use three of the planned six inflatable attractions. The other issue was food lines, apparently free food is a major draw. Our team of cooks, and food prep did a tremendous job of feeding the masses in a timely manner, but we know the lines were long at times during the event.

Overall we were highly pleased with how the event turned out and hope attendees appreciate the effort, planning and work that went into it. We weren't really sure how many people might come out to the event so the numbers were a pleasant surprise.

Thank you to the sponsors, workers, volunteers and vendors for providing the support for the 100th Anniversary wrap-up party.

Lastly, be sure to check out the photo gallery from the Centennial Celebration. We've included some photos from attendees. (If you have photos from the event that you'd like to share, please send them to mansfieldisd[at]gmail.com.)

Now it's your turn
If you joined us at the event, please share your thoughts in the comments below. What did you think of our anniversary party? The comments are yours.

Superintendent Update - May 2010

In our continuing video series with District Superintendent Dr. Bob Morrison, we have some information to share on high school #5, the attendance zoning process, the District's centennial celebration, and end-of-year parent involvement...