Warm, cozy, creamy, and sweet.
The West Brew Crew has it all.
What is the West Brew Crew? It’s a student-run coffee shop that has special deliveries every Wednesday for our Normal West staff.
The idea to serve coffee here at West is thanks to West’s special education teacher, Heather Lueschen, a teacher in the life skills-based special service program.
The idea to serve coffee here at school originated at Normal Community High School: “Over at Normal Community High School, they have a sister program over there, and they were running a coffee shop. (…) In 2019, we applied for a grant and got it,” Lueschen explained.
The West Brew Crew is a coffee shop that offers coffee to all the staff at Normal West.
However, originally, the service was provided to students as well, but many restrictions occurred after COVID: “Unfortunately, when COVID hit and [coming back] from COVID, there were a lot of restrictions on what we could and could not sell to the students. [It’s now a] teacher [only] coffee delivery store. Our students make the coffee, and we deliver the coffee to the teachers,” Lueschen stated.
For a staff member to order coffee, they have to fill out a form that they receive via email on Wednesday morning. The drinks are delivered during 3rd hour that same day.
“When we first started, we only did iced coffee, and we only had three flavors. Now we do hot or iced coffee,” Lueschen said.
West Brew Crew offers seven flavors of coffee, hot chocolate, apple cider, and chai tea.
“Third hour on Wednesdays, we make and deliver it every Wednesday unless it’s a half day or there’s something else going on…that’s what impacts us not being able to make her deliver it,” Lueschen explained.
The money gained from this program tends to be poured back into the program to help their students in any way they need.
“We do community-based instructions, so if a student can’t bring in money to go out to purchase in the community, we help supplement,” Lueschen said.
Future plans are to also use the money to purchase items for their sensory room, curriculum, and a variety of other things.
“The biggest benefit is for our students because we’re mostly working with our sophomores, they don’t have a lot of those job skills that you need for jobs like talking to customers, counting money, following a task list, and things like that,” Lueschen stated.
If you’re a staff member who enjoys coffee from West Brew Crew, you can look forward to many expansions.
There are still some things that they wish to accomplish and get done; some of these things are to “expand into more varieties of coffee and non-coffee items, because there are a lot of non-coffee items, and get more people to buy coffee or, [in the future], non-coffee,” Leuschen noted.
Staff members should watch their emails every Wednesday morning to put in their order!
