The documentary tells the story through Landon Smith, Ava Jacobs and Taylor Marcum, and how the food cart, donated by the Kiwanis organization, helps them learn how to make change, chat with customers, make coffee, bake foods and other things that are much easier for people without visual issues.
Teacher Jennifer McQueen, an intervention specialist, had the idea to borrow the program that already was being used at Hamilton High School as a way to provide what she calls “basic employability skills.”
Taylor Marcum said it was helpful teaching students “money skills,” and also helped the students make friends in the school.
Their teacher, McQueen, said, “I think really working as a team would be the biggest thing” the students learned. “We took children who didn’t really know each other and they had to learn how to work cooperatively. I didn’t tell them whose role was going to be what on any given day, so they had to make decisions about how to work collaboratively.”
Third- and fourth-graders also work with the food carts.
The two filmmakers — Teri Horsley, the film’s producer/writer/narrator; and Steve Colwell of TV Hamilton, the director/videographer/editor — recently won awards on both coasts for their October 2017 short film called “Smacked” about opioid addiction in Butler County. It won best short documentary at the New York Film Awards in April.
“Smacked,” which looked at the opioid problem from a heroin addict’s point of view, was filmed at the London Correctional Institution and featured a young inmate from Butler County. It won best documentary at the Top Shorts festival in Los Angeles, and was chosen to be viewed at the Los Angeles Film Awards in April.
The students “are the real stars, and the teachers,” Colwell said. “What we did was so insignificant, compared to what they do.”
“And I think that was our ultimate goal,” Horsley added, “just to show how a service club and the school district can work together for the good of all, for people who may not have a lot of options.”
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