For the last three years, students at Classic City Performance Learning Center have had the opportunity to learn business skills by marketing and selling Jittery Joe’s coffee to their classmates and teachers.

Now, with the help of some University students, they will soon be able to serve espresso to a much larger crowd.

In 2010, the alternative school will move to its new site at the H.T. Edwards complex on the Dearing Extension along Broad Street.

The Jittery Joe’s location, which is run and maintained by PLC students, will move with it. The coffee shop will occupy its own building separate from the school.

Six University students in Vikki Clawson’s ILAD 4100 class, titled Leadership, Personal Development and Organizations, are helping develop a marketing plan for the business as it moves to a more convenient location.

“We’re coming up with different ideas for strategies to attract outside customers,” said Heather Stokes, a junior from Atlanta who is working on the project.

“We’re giving them tips to raise awareness about the business.”

The Jittery Joe’s opened at the high school in 2006 under the permission from the company’s corporate office.

All money raised at that Jittery Joe’s location goes back to the Performance Learning Center.

The coffee shop’s location in the middle of the PLC building at 240 Mitchell Bridge Road limits its customers generally to students and school faculty. With the new location the PLC intends to expand its clientele to the public.

“What they’d like to do is have regular customers and foot-traffic to sustain the business, so they can raise money to give back to the school,” said Jerrod Lukacs, a senior from Lawrenceville.

The students have been meeting once a week since the start of the semester to build the marketing scheme.

PLC, which also goes by the name Classic City High School, opened in 2003 at its Mitchell Bridge Road location.

The students are typically those who have dropped out of a previous high school or are looking for a non-traditional learning setting.

“Our mission is to reengage the disengaged learner,” said Kelley Scredon, who teaches entrepreneurship at the PLC.

About half of the male students at the school are fathers and about 30 percent of the enrolled females are mothers, according to Stokes. The school runs a daycare center for students’ children.

Clawson’s class involves four other projects designed to help Classic City and its students. Some of these other assignments were to develop a community service project PLC students could engage in, and to help the school implement a job shadowing program.

Jittery Joe’s is a source of revenue for the school, but the most valuable yield of the coffee shop is something less tangible – work experience.

“It teaches students the work ethics to become a business leader,” Scredon said. “They also learn the tools to get jobs after they leave here.”

Stokes said she too has gained valuable experience, but said she thinks her service to the community is more rewarding.

“It makes me really excited to get out into the workforce, because it’s giving me a glimpse of what a corporate project really looks like,” Stokes said. “If I have the time and resources to get out there and do something like this for my community, I’ll feel compelled to.”