By Craig Williams 

Every school day morning, around 430 children arrive at the Meridian campus with the expectation of learning a thing or two. Some arrive by bus, some by car. A few even walk. And lots arrive hungry.

Which brings us to Sherri Calvin, the woman who’s been behind feeding those kids for the last 27 years. For the past two years, with the retirement of Mrs. Bosecker, she’s been officially in charge of food service for the entire school. And that means more paperwork, a few more hours, and a lot more responsibility. When you stop to think about how many kids eat breakfast at school — about 175 — and then how many kids will be eating lunch at school — virtually all 430 of them — you begin to see the importance of making sure that all of this runs like clockwork. So it’s a good thing Sherri is on the job. She and four other kitchen staff members prepare several thousand meals each week, from breakfast pizza and walking tacos to chicken Alfredo and French toast sticks.

Sherri loves what she does and tells me it makes her feel good when she sees kids getting the nutrition she knows many of them don’t always get at home. After all, she’s a mom, too, and a grandmother on top of that! Her grandkids are non-stop, and Sherri tells me that if her friends had to describe her in just a word or two, it’d probably be ‘family-oriented.’ But when I ask her who does the cooking at home, she confesses that between ballgames and soccer matches, she hardly gets a chance to cook these days!

So, she ‘grandmas’ as much as she can, but remembers when her daughters were younger, she loved this work because it allowed her to be available when they were. And when they were in school, she was cooking for them, anyhow, just as she does today for so many children from the surrounding communities that feed into Meridian. And if you’re still a little hungry, she tells me, she never minds putting a little more on the plate.

Sounds like Sherri’s friends got it right, because an extra helping sounds pretty family-oriented to me! And, given that Meridian really is just one big family, I’d say those kids are pretty lucky to have Sherri in the kitchen.