By Wayne Glembin
Fifteen years ago, a relationship was forged between Vail School District’s Transition from School to Work (TSW) program and St. Rita in the Desert Catholic Church. At that time, TSW was a fledgling transition program for high school students participating in special education at Cienega High School. The program sought to help students develop work skills while connecting them with various support agencies and potential employers for their transition from high school to their lives beyond high school. One of the first student work crews established was the landscape maintenance crew and their very first customer was St. Rita. A young parishioner from St. Rita was a member of this landscape maintenance crew and his father happened to be a Knight in St. Rita’s Knights of Columbus council.
Quickly, a friendship between the Knights of Columbus and TSW developed out of this original work arrangement. Every fall, the Knights hold their Tootsie Roll Drive to benefit people with intellectual disabilities. Students with intellectual disabilities are some of the very students served by the TSW program, so the friendship became a true partnership. For more than a decade, staff members and students from the TSW program, now a district-wide program operating at all five of Vail’s high schools, have participated with the Knights in their Tootsie Roll Drives. St. Rita’s Knights, in turn, gift Vail’s TSW program with a portion of the proceeds from these drives. While TSW is partially funded by the state and the school district, the contributions from the Knights augment that funding, which enables TSW to expand existing work experiences, such as with the Vail Depot Thrift Store, Resource Food Bank and making their own adobe bricks. Vail residents should know and appreciate that their donations to the Knights stay right here in the Vail community to help teach and develop the very students who will become our new adult citizens.
