Grandview teacher honored for cooking up student careers

AURORA | Standing in Audra Cooper’s cooking class at Grandview High School, it’s easy to forget all the arguments that say teenagers’ brains aren’t ready to learn until after lunch.

Before 9 a.m. on a recent Friday, students clad in professional chef uniforms feverishly put finishing touches on fried chicken, crepes, five-meat tacos and pasta with pesto. After the dishes were plated and ready, one student bounded across the room to try another student’s milkshake.

There wasn’t a drowsy eye around.

“Food seems to bring out a lot of passion in kids,” Cooper said, as a few stragglers cleaned their dishes and hurried off to their second-hour classes.

Cooper teaches in the school’s ProStart program, an initiative aimed at giving high school students real-world experience in the hospitality and restaurant business, with classes touching on
everything from cooking to writing a business plan.

Last month, Cooper was named the 2015 Colorado ProStart Teacher of the Year.

For Cooper, who has been a ProStart teacher for seven years, the past five at Grandview, the reward was a surprise, but a much-appreciated one.

“As teachers, we work our butts off, and a lot of it goes unseen,” she said. “So it was a really nice recognition that ‘we see that you work hard.’”

Mary Mino, president of Colorado Restaurant Association’s Education Foundation, which administers ProStart programs at several schools around the state, said Cooper has a knack for working closely with businesses and making sure her students get real-life restaurant and business experience.

“Her strength is her ability to create the right kinds of partnerships, and it’s reflected in her program,” she said.

The Grandview ProStart program has a partnership with Chili’s restaurant that Cooper helped launch when she taught at ThunderRidge High School in Douglas County.

That real-world experience is at the heart of ProStart, Mino said.

“It encourages you to work in industry in high school and ultimately, when you graduate, you have marketable skills to go out and get a job and be successful,” she said.

Spencer Petree, who graduated from Grandview last year and took ProStart classes his junior and senior years, said he got into the program because he thought a culinary career would be a good fit.

“At the time I definitely thought food and business was my passion,” he said.

But Petree said the program showed him it wasn’t a culinary career that interested him, but instead he wanted to manage a business.

“That’s what I really enjoyed,” he said.

Cooper said that’s something ProStart does well. It not only finds students who want a career in the restaurant business and gets them some of the necessary skills and experience for a career, but it gives other students hands on experience that might help them understand that the restaurant business isn’t for them.

But, Cooper said, the best part is seeing students who might struggle to find direction in other subjects really thrive once they’re in the kitchen or crafting a business plan.

“This is their area, this is what they know how to do well,” she said. “And it’s really cool for me as a teacher to see them bloom that way.”