Alps View's newest project, Dragon Café, adds to our multi-pronged approach to meeting the many challenging social, emotional, and physical needs of our students and we hope to secure enough grant funding to see it through. 

The idea for Dragon Café stemmed from our students' high desire to increase their cooking skills, and a strong yearning to eat healthier foods. For example, some of the students brought from home all of the ingredients and equipment needed to make bear burgers. Yes, bear burgers! They ground the bear meat in class and grilled the burgers on our BBQ. They fed sixteen students that day, most of whom had never had bear meat before, and made one of the best burgers I have ever had. Additionally, our students have started chopping and freezing the fruit from their lunches to later be combined with milk and yogurt, also from their school lunches, so they can experiment with making delicious smoothies for the class. Their creativity without the proper equipment astounds me and I can't wait to see what they will create given the right cooking equipment and ingredients.  

The mission of  Dragon Café is to create hands-on learning opportunities for our students, provide essential cooking skills utilizing fresh and healthy foods, increase our students' knowledge, skills, and interest when it comes to healthy living and cooking, and strengthen our community and parent/guardian engagement while we utilize them as guest chefs. We will do this by creating a Café that:

• is a functional cooking area and provides all the necessary cooking equipment for several methods of cooking

• utilizes members of our community and incorporates student parents/guardians as guest chefs

• incorporates lessons and fresh food, in and from the garden, and produces a positive outcome for the student frustrated with traditional desk/seat work

• strengthens teamwork amongst classmates and continues to build upon our family atmosphere

• offers our students hands-on interaction with healthy eating, self-sufficiency

• exposes students to the many joys of cooking and the potential for a career pathway

• exposes students to all manner of new foods and culinary exploration

• provides credit toward student elective requirements

The mission of Project Dragon Patch is to create hands-on learning opportunities for our students, provide fresh and healthy foods, increase our students' knowledge and skills when it comes to healthy living, and share what we learn and harvest. We hope to create a garden that is not just a garden but also an outdoor living classroom.

Additionally, we aim to give our Alternative Ed students a sense of pride in their school, a sense of pride in themselves, new confidence in their abilities, and a sense of achievement as they look at our garden and say "We did that!" 

We know our garden is a BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal) and we are going for it! Through fundraising and grant writing we hope to achieve the funding needed to complete our project.

Donation Information

Alps View High School is currently running a Garden Bed Sponsorship Drive. Click here for more information: