Partnership gets students to work

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For six years, we’ve been hard at work impacting the lives of students at Arrupe Jesuit High School in Denver. Partnering with the school’s Corporate Work Study Program (CWSP), we have employed 14 different students in our Denver office since the 2005-2006 school year. In addition to staffing the mailroom, Arrupe students also volunteer time to staff our special events.

This fall we increased our impact on the Arrupe work study program by completing the purchase and delivery of a new 42-passenger compressed natural gas (CNG) vehicle for use in the school fleet, which transports over 80 students per day to their jobs. All Arrupe students, freshman through senior, work one day a week to gain on-the-job skills and help pay for school tuition.

The CNG bus enables the school to combine two different routes that transport students to 105 different work locations in downtown Denver, saving both fuel and driver costs. According to Tom Mallary, director of CWSP at Arrupe, “We’re thrilled about this environmentally-responsible transportation option; it should result in a 15 percent savings in fuel cost compared to a comparably sized gasoline powered vehicle.” With the existing Arrupe vehicles averaging 130,000 miles per year, the CNG bus will make a remarkable impact on the school's maintenance and operations costs.

Arrupe Jesuit High School is a co-educational, college preparatory school that serves economically disadvantaged students from Denver’s inner-city neighborhoods.

Watch the school’s YouTube video about our bus.