BUHS students will serve up food from the Daily Bear
By Chris Mays, Brattleboro Reformer, published July 25, 2025
BRATTLEBORO — Students from Brattleboro Union High School are gearing up to run a store and catering service out of the commercial kitchen at the Winston Prouty Center for Child and Family Development.
The Daily Bear at CAVE Kitchen is named after the BUHS mascot, and CAVE stands for Culinary, Agricultural, Vocational Education. The hope is to be up and running by the beginning of September.
Students are getting the space ready. They’ve been cleaning, painting, recipe testing, setting up the store, getting licensed, creating menus, and talking to distributors and suppliers.
During a tour Wednesday, BUHS senior Halee Lockaby showed a garden outside on the Prouty Center campus. There were tomatoes, eggplants, radishes, mint, flowers, onions, pumpkins, squash and sweet peas.
“Nothing was here before,” Lockaby said. “Everything in this garden came from us.”
Lockaby said students from the Windham Regional Career Center built the shed for the program.
Some of the plants were initially grown at BUHS then replanted. Compost and organic fertilizer were used.
The hope is to sugar in the winter. Students also are “very interested” in opportunities to help fundraising for the community and providing food to the community, Lockaby said.
After the tour, chocolate zucchini bread and ice tea were served. They were made for recipe testing and received high marks from the tasters.
“Basically, our goal is to provide a therapeutic work environment for young people to learn soft and hard employment skills in a place that feels comfortable, and that’s something that has been a gap for us in our district,” said Bianca Fernandez, social worker in the Student Educational Assistance at BUHS.
Fernandez came up with the idea for the program, which received a grant from the University of Vermont and 4-H that she said aims to “explore food systems with diverse populations, specifically marginalized populations.”
The national grant is administered by universities throughout the country. With the funding, Fernandez said the school district has a three-year runway to become sustainable by bringing in enough income to keep the program running.
Other sites in the U.S. involve New American agencies delivering youth education about food systems through classes and workshops, Fernandez said, “but it’s not a business and it’s not a school.”
“I would say this is pretty unique,” she said.
Tate Erickson, director of special education at Windham Southeast Supervisory Union, described the effort being “about accessibility” and helping to achieve goals related to improving graduation rates and sense of belonging among students.
“We know we’re already reducing sending students out to private schools with a program such as this, with an option that can provide that meaningful opportunity,” he said.
Also, the hope is to bring some students back to BUHS and reconnect them to their home school.
Fernandez said a soft opening will be held for the store, which will offer beverages, breakfast and snacks, with baked goods from vendors, in a convenience store-like setting. An ordering system will be set up and hours will be established.
Initially, the focus will be on people working in the offices on the Prouty Center campus. Later, the plan is to offer food and drink to teachers at the high school as well.
Five to eight students are expected to be in each of the four blocks of the program each day. They’ll be participating via work-based or community-based learning placements.
School leaders want to increase engagement and offer alternative programming to meet the needs of students who “need that flexibility to get them to the table,” Tate said.
“Student need continues to go up as the population is decreasing,” he said. “It’s not just a fiscal drive behind this. It really is about getting student engagement.”