November 5, 2024 // Diocese

Saint Francis, Dwenger Students Team Up for ‘Lunch Buddies’

Kevin Kilbane

The setting was an education department classroom at the University of Saint Francis. The joyful atmosphere made it seem more like a get-together of friends.

Students from USF’s education program and Bishop Dwenger High School’s St. Mother Teresa Program worked on crafts and squeezed in a little dancing before attending Mass and enjoying a pizza lunch. At the same time, all
of the students grew in career
and life skills while working together during the Lunch Buddies event held on Tuesday, October 22, at the Pope John Paul II Center on the university’s Fort Wayne campus.

“For our students, they’re all seniors that are either majoring in special education or they have a concentration in special education,” said Associate Professor Juanita Oberley, the division director for the Division of Teacher Education at USF. “Part of this program is that they have an opportunity to plan lessons and really plan a day, like a series of events, for students with different types of disabilities. … It really provides an authentic learning experience for our students in the role of a teacher.”

The Dwenger students benefit from working on social and conversation skills with similar-age peers they don’t know and from visiting a college campus, Oberley told Today’s Catholic.

“It is something they look forward to because they know
they are going to have fun,” said Andrea Wolfe, lead teacher for the St. Mother Teresa Program, which serves Dwenger students with moderate disabilities. Her students also feel good about helping USF students become better teachers, Wolfe said. “And they are excited for pizza!”

USF began the Lunch Buddies program in 2019 with special-needs students from public schools, Oberley said. The university put the program on hold in 2020 for a couple of years because of COVID. They restarted it in the fall of 2022 and have partnered with Bishop Dwenger’s St. Mother Teresa Program the past two years, she said. She hopes that relationship becomes a long-term collaboration.

“One of the big things we stress when our students are studying special education, and education in general, is our Franciscan values and the teachings of the Catholic Church,” said Oberley, who taught special-needs students at Bishop Dwenger and St. Vincent de Paul Parish in Fort Wayne before moving to USF. “We value the unique dignity of each person, regardless of who they are, where they come from, how they learn, how they look. So it’s really taking that and applying that value in their teaching to be working with these exceptional students.”

Bishop Dwenger began its St. Mother Teresa Program with the 2020-21 school year.

“By the time students in the St. Mother Teresa Program exit high school, it is the goal to make sure we have molded someone who is prepared to be an independent and productive member of society who knows that God loves them,” said Wolfe, who became lead teacher in the fall of 2021. “Ideally, students will be prepared to enter the workforce, but it’s important to remember that each student is an individual with different skills and goals, so after-high school plans may look different for each student. Either way, they are prepared academically and spiritually for their plan.”

Parents have been happy their child with special needs can go to school with their siblings and in a Catholic environment, Wolfe noted. The program also has attracted a few non-Catholic students.

This year, Wolfe and teaching assistant Leigh Anne Bush have five students in the program. Three of them, Ava, Joe, and John, attended Lunch Buddies day at Saint Francis.

For USF education students, the biggest challenge was not knowing the Bishop Dwenger students’ full learning abilities until they arrived, said Whitney Tippmann, who worked for two years as a St. Mother Teresa Program aide before enrolling at USF. Tippmann thinks she wants to teach special-needs children at a Catholic school after graduating in the fall of 2025. She was close to an
uncle who had Down syndrome, she explained.

“I wanted to give other individuals like him a Catholic education,” she said. She also believes Catholic schools haven’t quite caught up with public schools in serving students with disabilities.

Olivia Robertson, who, like Tippmann, grew up at St. John the Baptist Parish in New Haven, also hopes to teach at a Catholic elementary school, though not necessarily in a special-needs classroom.

“I think it’s good we are able to share our Catholic faith (with students),” Robertson said. “You can’t really do that at public schools.”

Once the Dwenger students arrived, Robertson and fellow USF students Noah Rice and Adam Gerber began the day’s activities by asking Ava, Joe, and John to think of things for which they are thankful. They wrote things such as “Halloween,” “spooky music,” and “food” on pieces of colored construction paper cut in the shape of tree leaves. 

USF students later attached the comments to the outline of a tree to create a Thankful Tree the Dwenger students could take back to their school.

Next, Bishop Dwenger and USF students decorated mini pumpkins using tempera paint. Ava and John began painting right away, while Rice helped Joe begin.

The entire group also had fun creating Halloween-themed mad libs – stories with words removed that participants fill in based on whether the blank space requests a noun, verb, adjective, or adverb. Activity leader Courtney Scoles gave Ava, Joe, and John reminders about what types of words fit those parts of speech. Scoles and other USF students also offered word examples and encouragement. Ava suggested words quickly, while Scoles and other students had to invite participation from Joe and John. The wackiness of the finished mad libs had all of the students smiling and laughing.

Oberley then suggested a “brain break,” so they turned up the volume on a Halloween music playlist. Joe quickly got out front to lead Ava, John, Oberley, and USF students in dancing to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.”

Tippmann and Robertson then led the Bishop Dwenger students next door to the Oratory of St. Francis chapel for Mass. USF offers Mass at 11 a.m. in the chapel Sunday through Friday during the university’s 30-minute Sacred Time block. Afterward, the group returned to the classroom for pizza.

Oberley and her students now plan to discuss and reflect on what they learned during the Lunch Buddies day.

“We talk about the joy of the experience, because it is absolutely joyful, but then we also take it as a learning experience,” she explained. “We do almost a critical reflection on how the experiences went, and then what they would change moving forward now that they have that knowledge.”