Special Students Get the Scoop on World of Work

One year ago, James Burdick was a troubled teen who says he was prone to getting into fights and skipping school. Now, the tall, soft-spoken youth says he is turning his life around at “scooping school.”

Burdick, 18, is one of about a half-dozen students who serve up ice cream cones, sundaes and other treats at an innovative, new Baskin-Robbins mini-store on the campus of Tobinworld, a private special-education school in Glendale for autistic, emotionally disturbed and other developmentally disabled students.

The not-for-profit store, the first step in a program that helps students land jobs with the ice cream company, is being hailed by its backers as a boost for students who want to succeed, but find few opportunities.

“A whole lot of kids who might have ended up homeless on the street, or lived a life in a state hospital, will now have a chance to work in a real Baskin-Robbins store,” said Judy Weber, executive director of the nonprofit school, which has 240 students ages 5 through 22 who come from 14 Los Angeles-area school districts.

Weber founded Tobinworld 18 years ago, naming the school after her autistic son, Tobin, now 28 years old. She said her goal was to create a place where developmentally disabled students could prosper and learn skills to help them live as normal a life as possible.

“We want our students to be taxpayers instead of wards of the state,” she added. “And most of them can be--they just need a little help.”

The mini-store, which opened in December but was unveiled Wednesday in a ribbon-cutting ceremony attended by local officials, looks like most others in Baskin-Robbins’ national chain. It was built with about $15,000 worth of equipment and furnishings donated by the ice cream company, whose headquarters are also in Glendale.

The mini-store is staffed entirely by students from the school’s “diploma track” program and supervised by Ed Akamine, a classroom aide at the school who, by chance, had managed a Baskin-Robbins store in the early 1980s.

“We treat this experience just like a real job,” Akamine said.

“The students have to fill out an application and go through an interview process to be hired. We even make them wait before the interview so they’ll get butterflies in their stomachs. The whole shebang.”

On the job, the students learn not only how to scoop Rocky Road, but work the cash register and handle money, deal with customers and keep the workplace clean. Faculty members pay cash for ice cream, but students are allowed to buy treats only with tokens earned for positive behavior.

Workers who succeed at the campus store will be transferred to a Baskin-Robbins corporate store for more on-the-job training, this time under the company’s auspices. From there, they will be eligible for real jobs at franchise stores across the region, said Ed Lopez, a training supervisor for the company.

“The true measure of this program will be how many kids get out of the classroom and into real-world jobs with our help,” Lopez said. “For many of them, there’s nowhere to go for this kind of training, so we want to give them a shot.”

Tobinworld officials said the Baskin-Robbins store is the first step in a planned project called “Dream Street,” which they eventually hope will include a fast-food restaurant, a retail store and other small businesses in which students can learn job skills.

Burdick, who came to the school from Verdugo Hills High in Tujunga, said his goal now is to be among the first group of students promoted from the campus store to the corporate training program.

“I was the kind of kid who was getting into trouble all the time,” he said. “When I first started doing this, I was really nervous because I hadn’t really worked before, but I’ve learned a lot.”