Pizza Days and Chicken Wings: A Kitchen Manager’s Recipe for Connecting with Kids

Anyone who regularly cooks knows that feeling when you realize you’ve gotten in over your head.

Maybe a pot of pasta is boiling over on the stove just as you’re supposed to be browning chicken in a pan and mixing around some vegetables roasting in the oven. Plus you still have to mince garlic, chop herbs and grate Parmesan. If only you had more hands!

Of course, this is just home cooking we’re talking about — preparing dinner for a family of two or four or five.

That’s the only kind of kitchen pressure Khallela Ahmad was familiar with when she accepted a job as a food service worker for Denver Public Schools. Pretty soon, she was baking for the masses, and then cooking multiple entrees per day for hundreds of students and staff in an industrial kitchen. It was intense, she recalls, but she learned quickly.

These days, Ahmad works as a kitchen manager for the same district, at a middle school campus that is regularly feeding up to 500 students some days. She doesn’t often find herself behind a stove anymore — though that does happen when staff are out and someone needs to fill in. She’s managing a staff, running point of sale, doing inventory and more — all while finding time to use the food she and her employees prepare as a means of connecting with students who may need a little extra encouragement and compassion.

For this installment of Role Call, an EdSurge series where we talk to a range of school staff members to better understand the work they do and how they shape the day for kids, we spoke with Khallela Ahmad.

The following interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

EdSurge: How did you get here? What brought you to your current role?

Khallela Ahmad: Before I became a kitchen manager, I was a regular food service worker, and I wanted to do more than that. I always had people telling me that I had the potential to be a manager or a supervisor, and I thought about that for a while. I made sure that my attendance was good, that I came to work on time, that I was learning all that I could learn from my manager at the time, and when my manager would be out, she would leave me in charge. So that also gave me a little bit more knowledge, and like I said, I wanted to learn more, so I was excited to do this. My dad worked in the kitchen of an Air Force base when he was alive, and that was part of my interest as well.

How did you get into school-based food service work initially?

About nine years ago, I was working at a job that was temporary, and I knew that that job was going to come to an end. I happened to see a flyer for Denver Public Schools food service, and I applied and got the job. I was interested in it because it seemed like something that would be fun, something different. I mean, I’ve worked in a restaurant in a hotel, but I didn’t work in the kitchen. I was a hostess. I wanted to try something different. I wanted to challenge myself and see what that would be like.

What was your work like when you started? Were you cooking and preparing foods right away?

No, so when I first started, I started at East High School in Denver, and I was baking a majority of the time. Then we had to rotate duties, so I did have to start cooking. I was extremely nervous because at that time, East High School was not only feeding the students at that school, but it was also feeding students at two other schools. And so I was nervous because I was concerned about my time management: How am I going to be able to prepare all this food, not just for one school, but two other schools as well, and make sure that it’s done and it’s right and I get it done in a timely manner, so that when the first food person came to pick it up, it would be ready for them to take it?

Fortunately for me, the manager there at the time did help me. He didn’t just throw me out there, so it made it a little easier. As you just go on doing it for so long, you just get used to it.

You said you started out baking. Why didn’t that make you nervous?

It did make me nervous because it’s not something that I did [before], but it didn’t make me as nervous as the cooking because when you’re cooking, you’re cooking more than one thing. You could be cooking three or four different entrees at once, and that means you have to cut up vegetables and whatever else goes into those meals. And at that school, it was just one person doing all the cooking. When you’re baking, you have a recipe in front of you. You may have to make some muffins, but it’s not as many things as if you have to cook lasagna or spaghetti and meat sauce. That’s a lot of stuff.

I remember one time we had to make cheese for the nachos, and we didn’t have cheese sauce, so you have to use the milk and slices of cheese and you have to constantly stand there and stir that and stir that — on top of the other stuff that you still have to do for your duties. It was overwhelming, because I was used to cooking for four people. Cooking for over 200 people? That’s a little overwhelming.

How many different food options are food service workers at Denver Public Schools putting out for kids and staff?

It could be eight to nine different entrees in one day.

Wow.

However, even though there may be that many entrees, all of those entrees are not all on the cook, depending on how the school is set up and what the manager delegates to their staff to do. For my school, whoever is doing the cold vegetables, they also will do the salad and they will do any wraps that we have. And those are considered entrees. All the hot foods are on the cook. So that’s the thing: All the entrees are not on the cook. Some of those entrees may be on the person who is doing the vegetables as well.

When people outside of school ask about your work, how do you describe what you do?

I tell them that I’m a kitchen manager for Denver Public Schools. I tell them that I delegate duties to my staff. I order food. I do inventory. I do evaluations.

Sometimes I may even have to do some of the work that the ladies do, because if one of my employees is out, that means that work still needs to be done. And sometimes that may fall on me, which is fine, because then it gets me back to thinking, ‘I remember when I used to do this.’ Today, I had an employee out, and I had to do some of her work — I’ve even had my cook out one time, and I had to do their work — and for a moment I had forgotten how tedious [doing] one thing could be and I was like, ‘Wow, I don’t miss it,’ but I love my job.

I also run the point of sale. So when the students come for lunch and they have to put their numbers in, I do that as well. And then I do my end-of-the-day paperwork, which is all the information from breakfast and lunch. I have to put them in the system and make sure that everything matches up. So today it says I had 498 students eat and six staff members eat. Depending on how many entrees we have for the day, I add that up, and I subtract the number that my computer is telling me that we have, and I see if these numbers match. Do I have as many entrees left over as I should? Sometimes we do, sometimes we don’t.

498 students is a lot.

It is, but it’s always like that on a Thursday, because it is our pizza day. We have more students eat lunch that day. And we have a lot of students eat also on Tuesdays because we have school-made pizza and we have boneless chicken wings.

On those two days, I have the bulk of my students eat. So students that may not normally eat lunch here will eat lunch here [on those days], especially on Thursdays.

What does a hard day look like in your role?

I don’t want to say hard, but time-consuming is inventory day. You have to count everything in the kitchen — the forks and spoons, napkins, plates, cups, the boats that we serve the food in, down even to the cheese sticks. So I have to count literally everything in the kitchen, even the chemicals. That could take me up to three hours to do.

That’s once a month?

Correct. It is the last working day of every month.

Are you doing that so you know how much to order?

We’re doing that so that they know what is in my kitchen at the end of the month. The system may say I’m supposed to have, maybe, five cases of chicken patties and 20 bags of carrots, and I may not have those five cases of chicken patties. I may only have three. And I may not have those 20 bags of carrots. I may actually have 30. So they want to see what’s in your kitchen because the system is telling me one thing and we want to see if that matches up with what you’re telling us is in the kitchen.

What does a really good day look like in your role?

I think every day is a good day. I don’t know, I guess when everything is just flowing well, everyone is working together and helping each other out. Maybe someone’s done with their duties for the day and they go help other people in the kitchen with what they’re doing so that they can get the job done quicker. I love that. I always say that we are a family that we didn’t ask to be a part of, and yesterday I was telling them that a team that works together stays together. When we are helping one another, it just makes it so much easier for the next day and the next day. My ladies are very good at what they do. They get stuff done for the next day, and if they have time to get stuff done for the day after that, they do. I don’t have to ask.

So maybe that right there: That’s a good day when they just do what needs to be done and I don’t have to say, ‘Hey, can you do this? Can you do that?’ They’re just doing it. They may come to me and say, ‘Ms. K, do you have the paperwork for Monday?’ Like today’s Thursday; they might ask me for Monday and Tuesday stuff because if they can get stuff done ahead of time, they would do that.

That makes things so much easier, not only for themselves, but for me as well.

What is an unexpected way that your role shapes the day for kids?

Communication. I talk to my students. I joke around with them. A lot of students, if I missed a day of work, they say, ‘Where was you at? I missed you.’ I never think that they miss me, but the first time that happened, it made me feel good. It made me feel like I’m really doing something. And they see me not just as, ‘Oh, she’s the lunch lady.’ I’m a mom of three, and when other people’s children tell me, ‘I missed you because you weren’t here for a couple of days,’ that makes me feel good. That puts a smile on my face.

I may ask a student, ‘How are you doing?’ and they’ll tell me, ‘Oh, I’m not doing so well.’ And I just try to encourage them, speak wisdom to them and let them know that whatever they’re going through is going to be OK. I also try to get them to try some different foods. They may see something that they’re not really sure about, and I tell them, ‘That’s a really good item. You should really try it.’ I eat a lot of the food that we serve. And they’ll try it and they’ll come back and tell me, ‘You know what, Ms. K? That was really good. Thank you for telling me that.’ And then they’ll eat it again when we have it again.

Your role gives you unique access to today’s youth. What’s one thing you’ve learned about young people through your work?

They just want to know that somebody cares about them and that someone sees them. Because some of these young people, we don’t ever know what their home life is like. So just to shine a little light, a little happiness, on their day could change that.

I had a student one year where every day she would come and talk to me and I would talk to her and she was going through some things at home. I never asked her what it was because that’s not my business, but I could see that just me talking to her made her feel better every day. She was like my daughter that I didn’t ask for. She was very sweet. And when she was leaving — because she was going to high school — she was like, ‘I’m going to miss you.’

Conversation makes people feel better. They might be going through something, and a smile or whatever could make them feel better for that moment. I was young and going through stuff once, so it’s like, ‘What would I have wanted? For someone to just talk to me.’ They don’t have to necessarily talk to me about what they’re going through, but just talk to me.