Lunch Lady with a Passion: Part IV

From time to time, Cielo Kramer, who is the food service manager at Cash Elementary School, sends us some of her thoughts. Here is her latest:

65,000 Meals So Far

By Cielo Kramer

Forty-five more days (as of today April 8,20016) until the school year 2015-2016 ends. As my daughter said, it was like blink of an eye from the time she started her fourth grade! 

Productive busy days in the school seemed so fast, and it made me reflect on our accomplishments. 

For the past eight months, together with my staff, we hurdled busy serving hours, beat the schedules,  tightened our grips during challenging times, encouraged each other, learned tons from our work mentors,  met hundreds of new faces, laughed at our silly mistakes, corrected our wrong ways and had fun in our togetherness.  

I measure success in the work place not only through how much  and what we accomplished  but most of all through the quality of service we offered , how much we grow as a team and as individuals and the positive difference we made in the lives of others.

Going through my records, I estimated more than 65,000 meals were served from our serving lines for the past 135 school days.  From this school we average serving 300 to 320 children for lunch and 150 for breakfast every day. Imagine those who serve more than 700 a day like my friend Tabitha at Kernersville Elementary School.

I was tempted to count all the burgers, hot dogs, veggies, fruits, condiments, plates, fork kits, etc. we used for the past eight months.  

We might not visibly notice if we only depend on our daily production but if I sum it up, just for the apples, we served more than 14,000 pieces of it!! Steven, the one who prepares our fruits everyday, was ecstatic when I told him this count. “That’s a lot of apples!” he said.

I asked him, “Do you want me to count the oranges too?” He gave me a big laugh!!

Amazing feeling of accomplishment for our Team! The school year is not finished yet but we feel a tremendous satisfaction about the things we have done for the school system especially to our little Cash Cougars!!

I will end with this quote, “In love there is no toil, and even if there’s a toil, you love the toil.” (Augustine of Hippo)