Foster serving up smiles at Blackburn

Cafeteria Manager Andi Foster has demonstrated superior organizational skills and a keen eye for detail over an 11-year period working at Blackburn Elementary School. Each day, Foster and her five-person team face the daunting task of feeding roughly one thousand hungry students, the most in the local system. Foster’s managerial duties include creating and managing production records of the amount of food prepared and served, placing and receiving food orders and delegating daily kitchen duties among her employees.
Foster, who has several family members that also work for the school system, began her own journey at Blackburn as a part-time substitute.
“I would actually work here for three-and-a-half hours, then I’d drive over to Long Branch and work there three-and-a-half or four hours… So I did that for probably half a year, maybe a little longer than half a year, before an opening came up here,” Foster explained.
Now Foster begins her shift at 5:30 each morning and typically leaves at 1:30 in the afternoon, a schedule that has proved to be ideal.
“It is awesome,” she said. “That was one of my pull-ins to this [career]. I never grew up thinking I’d be a lunch lady. My mother was a lunch lady. She worked at the high school. But my kids, the older they got, they were big into sports. And in order to make those games, it’s perfect. Especially middle school games that start at 4:15 or 4:30. If I was still working in Roswell, I never would have been able to make those events. So it’s a good trade-off. But my kids laugh at me, because when 9:00 comes, momma’s in bed.”

DAILY BREAD

Foster has a crew of five, and their hours and duties all vary slightly.
“Every kitchen’s different,” Foster said of the way responsibilities are delegated. “My thing here is my girls rotate. So I want them all to know how to do every position that is in this kitchen. If someone’s out, it’s not a problem to jump in. I don’t want to hear, you know, ‘How do I do that?’ All my girls are cross-trained in everything.”
Each day in the cafeteria kicks off with the serving of the breakfast meal.
Then lunch is served continuously each day from 11:45 to 12:35, and each grade has a set time to appear. Foster expressed her appreciation to Blackburn’s custodial staff for allowing her team to focus on cleaning up the kitchen.
“Our custodians take care of cleaning up our lunchroom,” she said. “We give them lunch, and they clean the lunchroom. So that is a definite win… generally everything is clean, top-to-bottom, for [cafeteria staff] to walk out at 1:15.”
Foster hopes that people recognize exactly how much physical labor is involved in cafeteria work.
“They work hard,” Foster said of the women on her team. “People don’t realize how hard… it’s not a cushy job, by any means. But I don’t think there’s any of us that would trade it for anything.”

LEADING THE TEAM

Foster noted that while her position as Cafeteria Manager did not require specialized schooling, frequent training sessions are still required to keep herself and her team up to date on health and safety regulations.
“We do have to take food classes, to get ServSafe certified, so we know we’re not going to poison the children… making sure that everything is clean, up to health code, and the food is where it needs to be, temp-wise, that is a scary thing. Because it would not take much to make everybody sick if you didn’t follow sanitary guidelines,” Foster explained.
Foster has a number of important responsibilities in her role as Cafeteria Manager, but personnel decisions are not among them.
“I really don’t do hiring and firing. That’s central office, so that’s above me,” Foster said. “I keep up with the girls. They’re the backbone of my kitchen.”
Foster’s supervisor Julie Knight-Brown designs the weekly student menu at Blackburn, but it is up to Foster and her team to make sure that the schedule is effectively implemented, which is no small task considering that students get to choose from three different food selections each day.
“Friday does not change,” she said. “That is hamburger/hot dog/french fry day. And we have more kids eat on Friday than probably any other day. But they always have a minimum of three choices. Like yesterday, they had a choice of beef and cheese nachos, or a burrito, or two tamales. And then I have a sandwich every day. I either have a PB&J, a grilled cheese, or a ham and cheese. Every kid likes that. There is something for everyone. We have a vegetable every day, some days we have two. Sometimes on Tuesdays we’ll do mashed potatoes, green beans and gravy. That’s another favorite. And then juice and milk.”
Of course managing this many food selections requires careful accounting procedures in order to maintain inventory.
“We have to do production records,” Foster said as she described a sample daily report. “Matter-of-fact, I just finished that up before you got here. I literally do a production record which actually tells [Knight-Brown] how many kids I fed and how much food I used. We used 80 pounds of hamburger yesterday, and that gave me X amount of servings. This is how much they ate, and this is how much we had left over.”
Foster said that ordering the necessary ingredients for the school’s meals is another duty she shares with Knight-Brown.
Managing supply shipments from different vendors is a critical component of Foster’s job, as at least one delivery comes in nearly every day of the week. Foster voluntarily comes in on Saturdays to receive the weekend delivery, just to make sure that the work week goes smoothly for the cafeteria team.
“We do not have to be here. I choose to come in on Saturday. I come in and put my stock up for my girls. I do that, but I live just down the road,” Foster said.
In fact, Foster said making sure that all of the supply deliveries arrive on time is probably the most stressful part of the job, since missing even one delivery could throw a wrench in the week’s serving schedule.
“I came in Saturday about 1:45, and my truck hadn’t been here. I came in later Saturday afternoon and my truck wasn’t here. I came in Sunday and my truck wasn’t here. Now I’m panicking, now I’m sending an e-mail to my boss saying ‘Where’s my truck?’ It did not come until Monday,” Foster said while describing the stressful experience.
As for the most rewarding aspect of her job, Foster said that serving young students brings a unique joy to her work life.
“I say that because these kids tell you everything,” she said. “They tell you things you don’t want to know. But they’re just so sweet, so innocent at this age. They just want hugs. So I’m going to say interacting with them is my favorite part.”
In her free time, Foster still enjoys attending and supporting local sports, but for different reasons than when her own children were students.
“I work a lot of the gates at the sporting events,” she said. “I have two daughters who work for the school system, and they coach, so I get to watch them coach. And I’ve been here 11 years, so [the students] were my babies and now they’re up at the middle school or they’re up at the high school. So I do go support them, watching them play their sports. And they think that’s kind of cool.”