NATCHEZ — Pleasant Acre Day School’s mission is to provide valuable skills to mentally and physically challenged adults.

“We stress life skills and life enrichment programs,” said the school’s director Mary Ann Foggo-Eidt.

Life skills include lessons on table manners for home and for eating out at restaurants and lessons on how to interact with the general public.

Foggo-Eidt said the school operates a cottage industry in which the students recycle Mardi Gras beads and sell them out of a shop at the school.

“Recycling of Mardi Gras beads covers a lot of the school’s lessons — math, lengths of beads, counting, sorting,” Foggo-Eidt said. “It is a small cottage industry that lets them interact when people come to buy the beads. Life skills are big part of what we do.”

In addition to those life skills lessons, life enrichment programs are a big part of the school’s mission, Foggo-Eidt said.

“We take them on field trips to the coast in Biloxi, and they get to eat out,” Foggo-Eidt said. “Before Jefferson College closed, we went there for Easter egg hunts.”

Foggo-Eidt said Santa Claus is coming to the school today and the students plan to go to the Moose Club to see Santa on Wednesday.

“They have a pretty rounded schedule out here,” Foggo-Eidt said. “Our mission is that we want them to live the type of life where they can reach, gain and maintain their potential.”

Foggo-Eidt said the Miss-Lou has been generous in support of the Pleasant Acre Day School for its entire 60 years and seven years ago an anonymous group donated a van to the school to take the students on field trips.

“This year, we had a dilemma with our bus that takes us to Biloxi,” Foggo-Eidt said. “The air conditioner died when going to Biloxi in May. We are doing a solicitation to get a new cooling system for our bus.”

Eidt said the school is solely dependent on donations from the community, as the school does not receive any federal, state, municipal or county funding.

“We operate on a shoestring budget, but we have so many angels floating around that take care of our building,” Foggo-Eidt said. “We are truly blessed, and we are grateful for the support and prayers of the community.”

Donations can be made out to Pleasant Acre Day School and sent to P.O. Box 1362, Natchez, MS 39121.

Call 601-442-2264 for more information on Pleasant Acre Day School.