In the heart of the Cafeteria, the staff are working hard in the steamy kitchen to prepare food for all the kids that need to eat. And every year, their workload increases- and lunch lines do too- on students’ favorite meal of the year- Thanksgiving lunch.
Lunch assistant leader Stormy Penney and her team cooked and served the LISD Thanksgiving school lunch on Tuesday, Nov. 11 to celebrate the holidays.
“[I enjoy seeing] how excited all the students and the staff get about the thanksgiving meal and seeing the smiles on all their faces,” cafeteria assistant team leader Stormy Penney said. “The day before, I was reminding everybody that it was our thanksgiving meal— they always say ‘Lets goooo’ and I love that. It’s very rewarding.”
Penney and the lunch team have prepared for the crowds of hungry students that come to the lunch lines; much more chaos than a typical day.
“It was crazy, we actually have a lot of students eat that don’t normally eat in the cafeteria that come and enjoy the thanksgiving meal— which we absolutely love,” Penney said. “It builds up, so we end up spreading it out through three lines, but there was still so many students. Kind’ve almost—not quite—overwhelming, with how many kids were just packed into the cafeteria area.”
In addition to the irregular students who come to the lunch, teachers and staff that typically don’t eat want to eat too. A big challenge the cafeteria team faces is storing all of the food that they’ve prepped and trying to make an educated guess on the appropriate amount of servings they’ll need. They try to plan out how many total meals they’ll need early on so that they can order a proper amount of food.
“We’ll [look up] the numbers from last year, and then we start ordering about a month in advance,” Penney said. “As we get the product we start planning on how to prep it and get it done about a week in advance so that we can be prepared to include everybody. We always worry about running out or running behind on time.”
This year, the cafeteria serving numbers on Tuesday ran 660 students. (excluding the band because they were at the state competition). Regardless, lines were thick with kids waiting to try the menu: Turkey, stuffing, green beans, mashed potatoes and gravy, a honey-glazed dinner roll, and a slice of sweet pumpkin cake.
”It reminds me of actual thanksgiving, it’s very cozy and warm, except for the line,” freshman Zoe Gutierrez said.
To help absolve the problem the staff have to manage the long lines of people waiting to be served, they ran separate lines with extra help to manage the process as quickly as possible.
“We did have two volunteers come in, and that’s always nice, but we always make sure that we go over with our team the day before— you know, serving sizes and mak[ing] sure they all got the right amount of food,” Penney said. “Just stay calm. It’s gonna be a lot of kids, just stay calm.”
The lunch team preps everything a week in advance so that it’s just a “put in the oven and cook kind of thing” as Penney puts it. They cook it the day of so that it will be most enjoyable for the students.
“We typically start cooking it day of service, about 2 hours before service; that way we can come on time, nice, hot and fresh,” Penney said. “Then once the first lunch is over we will actually cook our second batch that way, not all at once, so that second batch can come out hot and fresh as well.”
The district-wide lunch is a way to spread holiday spirit and celebrate Thanksgiving traditions for students who may not get to have a big meal on the actual holiday.
“It was very yummy, there was a lot of stations and a lot of people there, so they prepared well,” freshman Lily Dobbs said. “I feel like I was very grateful for this new upgrade for a day.”