MISSION VIEJO : Mixing Up a Batch of Job Skills

Although the bakery at Esperanza School is no Mrs. Field’s Cookies, it is an industry of giant importance to the students who study there.

At Esperanza, a special-education school, students with Down’s syndrome and other developmental handicaps turn out chocolate chip cookies to learn job skills.

“Because of this, I’m getting to work at Taco Bell,” said Shannon Tierney, a 19-year-old student as she helped package a batch. “I’m going to get a good job. It’s nice to be able to work, and it’s lots of fun.”

The 22 students, who range from 15 to 22 years old, work two days a week making the cookies, which are sold at Mission Viejo High School and at Los Alisos Intermediate School, and are given to various service groups.

The students mix the batter, bake the cookies, package them in plastic bags, box them, clean up and then help deliver them.

“Upon graduation, we want our students to be able to move straight into a job,” Principal Ruby Edman said. “We want our students to be able to live as independent a lifestyle as possible. They want to have the gratification of working and being contributing members of society. They want the full-life experience.”

After working in the cookie-making program and taking other job-training courses, the students are assigned to one of 18 sites, including fast-food outlets, a clothing store and a hardware store, where they work without pay until graduation. Then, hopefully, they land paying jobs.

The students “assemble the products, make the salsa, sweep the floors,” said Joe Mbugua, manager of the Taco Bell where Tierney and others have received their outside training. “This has been very positive for them and us.”

Edman said that although today most people are open to the idea of training the developmentally disabled for jobs, that wasn’t always the case.

“When I came to Esperanza as principal 15 years ago, I remember people saying to me, ‘Don’t we spend a lot of money on training these people when we know they are never going to be able to pay society back?’ I was stunned by the bluntness,” she said.

But the program’s graduates are paying back society, not only through income tax taken from their wages, but in other ways as well, Edman said.

She told of one graduate with Down’s syndrome who learned that the school was trying to raise money for a van.

“He brought in $100 from what he was earning at Carl’s Jr.,” she said. “He said he wanted to help his friends.”