Courtesy Photo This photo shows a Pied Piper School student working at a local business. The school gives students the opportunity to work at local businesses and gain employable skills.

ALPENA — Pied Piper School students have an opportunity to go into the real world and learn what it’s like to work at a business.

The school and local businesses work together to let students work at local shops, such as Taco Bell, Nowicki’s Sausage Shoppe, and others.

Pied Piper paraprofessional Lorell Whitscell has experience as a transition specialist and acts as a job coach for the transition students, Principal Stacy Wentz said.

“She has a lot of relationships throughout the community because she’s so experienced and has done this for so long,” Wentz said. “She’ll go out and approach businesses about the opportunity to help our students develop skills.”

The school’s transition students are 16-and-a-half to 26 years old, but Wentz said a majority of the students are 18 and older when they start the school’s transition program.

Some students start their work experiences when they’re closer to their exit from the school, while others start working earlier.

“It just all depends on what their programming looks like as to when they start experiencing those work experiences out in the community,” Wentz said.

The students enjoy going out into the community and interacting with other people, Wentz said.

“They’re ready to work and they want to work,” she said.

Businesses benefit, Wentz said, because the students do actual work and business people are able to help students gain different skills.

“Our students benefit from having that exposure and building their resume through those experiences, so that, when they leave here, they have some work experience and the employability skills to be successful,” Wentz said.

Wentz said working gives students confidence so they know that they can do a job and get the fulfillment that everyone gets from a job.

“It also gives them references,” Wentz said.

This year, Pied Piper has invited businesses to practice interviews with the students. The students are able to learn interview skills and how they can grow those skills.

“Businesses rated them on several categories about how well they did on the interview and we’ll do it again later in the year to see how their skills improved or what areas we need to focus on to build those interview skills, because that’s a really important part of getting a job,” Wentz said.

Julie Goldberg can be reached at 989-358-5688 or jgoldberg@thealpenanews.com. Follow her on Twitter @jkgoldberg12.