Leechburg students selling handmade soap for scholarship fund

Leechburg Area School District’s “Creation Café” was in operation less than a year before the covid-19 pandemic altered everything.

Opened in 2019, the space was designed provide a unique learning opportunity for students enrolled in life skills/learning support classes in the district, serving a variety of hot foods and drinks to students and staff of grades six through 12.

But even after the school’s reopening, the pandemic meant selling homemade food items could be a health concern.

“Because of covid, they weren’t able to sell anything edible,” said Erin Hettrich, who teaches an adapted art class — a course designed for students with cognitive or physical disabilities. Hettrich has been teaching the same group for the past eight years. They range in age from seventh grade all the way to 20 years old.

“They were missing that experience of having that shop and doing more job skills.”

But the pandemic has allowed teachers and students to “transform the space,” Hettrich said. Students can still focus on selling goods, working on money skills and developing a work ethic — just with a new product.

The pandemic spurred a new business in Hettrich’s class: Her students are making and selling handmade soap and soap dishes. They’re marketed under the name ACOVEA, an acronym of the students’ first initials. The soaps will be sold at the schools’ Creation Café.

“My goal, always, every year, is to choose something they need the least amount of help for,” Hettrich said. After teaching the students how mold the soap dishes with clay and forming the soap, providing them with photo cards showing each step, she said students are able to go through the process with little intervention.

The students also package the soaps, take orders and sell them in the café. They’re involved at every phase of the process.

Hettrich said they were able to make around 30 packages in three days — last week, they sold more than 55 to teachers, staff and parents.

100% of the proceeds from sales are going to the district’s Domenic Guido Scholarship Fund, named for a Leechburg Area High School math teacher who died in 2020.

“This is just another example of our teachers going above and beyond to, 1, create new and lifelong skill based activities for our students, and 2, to honor a colleague,” said Tiffany Nix, superintendent of Leechburg Area School District. “Mrs. Hettrich is always on the cutting edge to give our students opportunities to work outside of the classroom. The arts are important at Leechburg, and we thank her and our students for thinking of creative ways to honor Mr. Guido.”

Hettrich said she hopes to continue the ACOVEA project in the coming years, perhaps expanding to more products. She is already considering designs for handmade earrings and coasters.

“A lot of times they don’t feel they can do as much individually,” she said. “My goal is to say, ‘Look at what you can do from start to finish.’”