Swampscott High students making soap for sale
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SWAMPSCOTT — Like everyone else, students in Swampscott High School’s Discovery Learning Center are spending a lot of time lately washing their hands to stay healthy.
Unlike everyone else, they have their very own homemade soap to help them do it. And soon they will start selling that soap to others in the district.
Teacher Emily Borden runs the DLC, a special education program that teaches students vocational and life skills through community-based instruction. Borden said when the COVID-19 pandemic started, she had to get creative with her curriculum. So she came up with projects that both her remote and in-person students could enjoy.
“We had to learn how to integrate community-based learning without going out into the community,” Borden said. “So instead, we turned our classroom into a small business.”
During non-pandemic times, DLC students run a school store and a coffee cart for students and staff in the building. With the pandemic, the group started making holiday cards that they sold to faculty and staff through an online platform. They had success with that, so they started thinking about what they could do next to build on what they had learned.
“We all talked as a group about the pandemic, and how there’s really a couple underlying themes during the pandemic, and one of them is self-care and self-awareness,” Borden said. “And one really cool thing about taking care of yourself is giving yourself and all-expenses-paid spa day!”
Borden and her students had made melt-and-pour soaps before to give as holiday gifts and had had fun, so it seemed the obvious choice. She crowdsourced funds on the education-oriented platform DonorsChoose, and was able to purchase supplies including molds, soap bases, dyes, fragrances and glitter.
On a recent day in the classroom, students chopped, melted, stirred, and poured soap, designing both scented and unscented bars. Each student had their own task, working together from socially-distanced tables to make each batch, while remote students researched different soap-making methods.
Kaio Stevens, a senior in the class from Nahant, cut a long, molded stick of soap into small ducks and sorted them into a bucket of other assorted shapes to be added to bars of soap. He said that his favorite soap shape was the ones that looked like dolphins. Nearby, Kelvin Angueira, a postgraduate student, chopped up clear pieces of soap, melted them in a microwave and poured them over other colored shapes.
Borden said that because they have a fairly small operation and don’t currently have a way to accept online payments, they’re only going to be selling the soaps within the district for now. However, she hopes that next year, or even over the summer, they might be able to start visiting craft markets and farm stands and selling their work there.
“Because of COVID, we’re learning something new, and we like it,” Borden said. “So we’re not going to stop when COVID stops.”
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Swampscott High School student Kelvin Angeira cuts smaller pieces of soap to add to larger bars as he works in the Discovery Learning Center. (Spenser Hasak)
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