If you read many of my posts, you know about the sponsoring program. If you don’t, essentially it’s a program designed to provide work experience and opportunity for our students that can’t just go out and get a job at Mc Donalds for the summer. Each year the students are here, there is a different main event they complete with their sponsors. In seventh grade, the students just get to know their sponsors and plan fun class nights. In eight grade the work begins as they plan their eighth grade celebration which leads to ninth grade snack sales, then sophomore restaurant. In eleventh grade they plan the jr./sr. banquet and finally they run and operate “senior store” twice a term to pay for their senior trip.

Mid February, the 10th grade class I sponsor pulled off the event of the year: our Kung-fu-Panda themed Sophomore Restaurant! Let me tell you. It. Was. Hard,

Back in September, we accepted applications for managers of different committees! Various tenth graders were assigned to lead their peers in Logistics Planning, Main Food, Tables and Servers, Decorations, Entertainment, and To-Go-Food. Each committee paired with a supporting adult sponsor, we began to consult checklists and tick off tasks one by one. By the time January came along, planning was in full swing! We had two “class nights” (Friday night 7-9pm required evening activities) for planning committees to meet between January and the weekend of the big event.

To use the time for the class nights efficiently, we held lunch meetings with all of the managers and student class officers. This meant planning to plan for the planning meeting so we could plan at class night! FWEW! As decisions continued to be made and the event drew near, the pressure began to mount. While we had an incredible team of class officers supporting the student managers, each partnered with an adult sponsor, I hold a special role on our team. I am what is called a “Head Sponsor.” This means, for my 10th grade related events, I’m the big boss.

For months, I was circulating, communicating, touching base. I got to take care of big picture ideas, think through minutia details not on any lists, and be the fun killer when needed (no, we cannot have a dance floor… sorry that a layered ice-cream cake is too complex to pull off in bulk… please make sure you order napkins).

Being the sponsor in charge of it all, AND the adult touchpoint for the main food committee, I carried a lot of responsibility, and I’ll be honest, it was a heavy load. My three summers in summer-camp kitchens and three years waitressing, combined with seven years of classroom management couldn’t have prepared me for the magnitude of the event we pulled off. It felt like all I did on Friday and Saturday was put out fires and problem solve crisis. So here is my attempt to recognize the hard, but to see the beauty:

Hard

-I went Friday to check on our order, verify each of our food items had come in. We had everything on the list! Except cucumbers… and since we were serving an “Asian Cucumber Salad” as the side dish with every plate… this was a little bit of an issue…

-When checking our order, I verified things… not quantities. So when making the sweet and sour sauce, we ran out of rice vinegar! Apparently six bottles were given to us… we ordered six liters. When each bottle is half a liter, that doesn’t quite add up…

-A garden salad was in order for one of the starter courses- and 37 heads of droopy dirty lettuce wasn’t quite going to feed 230 people…

-Halfway into our Friday night food prep- we ran out of cornstarch! This was not a purchaser problem, we just didn’t order enough!

-Saturday we were a little less organized on jobs and spread out than we had been for Friday Night. Friday ran like a well oiled machine, Saturday the oil seemed to run out just like the lettuce, cornstarch and vinegar. I ran around beginning at 1:00pm doing tasks I hadn’t thought to put kids on the list for and getting out things for the next groups job to start. In the midst of this I was directing parents coming in, putting them to manage tasks I’d begun to prep, or to help with the jobs themselves where the students forgot to show up.

-The clock was ticking and the food prep wasn’t quite happening. I did not account for the cafe-take-out option prepping food at the same time as the main venue. I didn’t account for how many students would forget to come for their jobs. Both groups needed the stove, but only one of us could use it. Since their service started an hour before ours, they got priority.

-After the switch over happened, I started to fry, and the dumplings started falling apart. When testing the process, I hadn’t observed if the dumplings were frozen or thawed and didn’t realize they needed to be thawed.

-Nobody showed up for the job to finish the chicken. I started pulling pans from the fridge, spreading out the chicken, mixing it with the prepared sauce to get it in the oven NOW so it would be hot and ready to serve in less than an hour.

-Students showed up to work on the pepper-steak as I worked on the chicken. Soon I found myself dumping veggies in a giant pot with oil while reminding myself not to forget about the chicken, all while dumplings were frying up on the other half of the stove.

-I realized at some point it was 5:30 and nobody has begun the rice: a crucial part of any Chinese cuisine! I put some boys on the job who found me 15 minutes later declaring that they didn’t know how to operate the rice cookers…

-We were just about to start on the steak part of the pepper steak when I had hit my limit, feeling overwhelmed I was about to fall apart. I literally had to stop what I was doing, close my eyes, say a prayer and take a deep breath before giving the next set of instructions.

-Wrapping up the first, the second pan of prepped beef was nowhere to be found… I wasn’t sure how but I knew I needed to track it down.

-The beef was cooking unevenly so I tested a handle of the giant pot and grab them both to move the pot. Fun fact, one handle can be room temperature and the other a million degrees. I’m just getting back feeling in the last seared fingerprint.

-I began hunting down measuring cups to figure out how to portion food, deciding how to set up an assembly line for the service, while getting out dumpling sauces, salad dressing and rolling out our carts of prepped salads- my head spinning a million miles an hour

-Halfway into service, we ran out of dumplings. Apparently I didn’t see the second cooler and we only fried up half of them. Let round two of frying begin.

-We ran out of prepped boba teas! The split-second decision that “peach and strawberry vanilla shouldn’t be milk-tea flavors” by our resident expert boba teenagers increased exponentially the amount of tea that got used up and there wasn’t enough left for the last third of service. We began brewing a second batch.

-We ran out of desserts. Not sure how many didn’t get what they ordered, but we made the calculated number, and somehow didn’t have enough. Rumor has it some of the 10th graders thought they looked yummy, and took it to eat upstairs…

Thing after thing seemed to be going wrong. I was physically taxed and emotionally spent. I had nothing left to give, and yet, we had to press on. It’s taken a some days, but it’s been long enough now to reflect on the beauty…

Beauty

Dumplings and S: The dumplings were, as the kids would say, FIRE. So delicious. We bought them from a Chinese market in Nairobi and it was the most anticipated part of the meal. We planned for 3 per person as our Kung-Fu-Panda themed evening opened with this appetizer extraordinaire.

Kids showed up at 5:00pm as my stress levels were rising. We were beginning seating and serving at 6:20pm, just over an hour to fry 700 dumplings. S walked into the kitchen, “Where do you want me Miss G?” This kid was brand new to RVA in January. I haven’t had him in class yet, but my few interactions seem to point to classic teen boy behavior… a little bit too cool for school, working to find his place in the new crowd of peers.

But let me tell you. He was NOT too cool for the kitchen. This kid SHOWED UP. He come over to the fry pans. I opened a pan of dumplings and dump it into the hot oil to give instructions. I started stirring it around, blabbering as the caffeine from my second coffee rushed through my veins next to the adrenaline. I was stirring too aggressively, dumplings were falling apart and panic was rising in my chest. We ordered a few extra, but not enough for entire boxes of dumplings to fall apart, and yet stuffing-goo and dumpling-breading alike were sticking to the sides and bottom of the pan.

“Miss, you can’t fry the dumplings frozen. And the heat on the oil is too hot. If we don’t want them to stick, I think we need it on a little lower heat.”

One comment and S was officially in charge of the entire dumpling operation. I didn’t need to check on them once, quickly realizing my attention was fully needed elsewhere and S had it completely in control. He directed peers on how to get them thawed, on where to store them when fully cooked etc. With a few falling apart, we opted to serve two per person, a choice in the end that ensured all guests got them, albeit some after dessert instead of first once the second dumpling fiasco hit. S carried that kitchen, stepping in just when I needed him to. A new student, a little unsure, he found a place. With a flick of the wrist, his oil hit the open flame of the burner just right and he was Mr. Cool-Guy. Flames engulfed the pan as he casually sauteed the dumplings- right where he belonged.

Beef and H: Right before my mini-melt down including my needed deep breaths and eventual burning off of my fingerprints, H showed up to help in the kitchen. Having had an all day sporting event, H jumped in willingly with his whole heart. He stood over that beef for almost two hours, stirring it to cook, adding the veggies and finally the marinade to thicken for a yummy pepper steak. By the time he finished getting the pepper steak ready, he was spent. Dead on his feet, he eventually assigned himself the job of holding open the door to the kitchen so he could be ‘useful’ but not fall over passed out. He is just another example of a student who gave it his all. The other guys who came back the same time he did rocked it in the rice-room, getting us just what we needed, when it was needed most.

Dessert and J: My student J is no stranger to the kitchen. I’ve worked with her before and observed she knows her way around a cake pan, so in charge of dessert she went! Plating, sprinkling with powdered sugar, drizzling white chocolate and scooping ice-cream, J managed dessert with a smile. After scooping our gluten-free-dairy-free sorbet option and noticing the quick melting, the whole operation moved into the freezer where the girls sat for two hours, scooping and prepping 160 slices of cake and 75 bowls of sorbet. When the sorbet ran out, they improvised, serving to some guests left-over ice cream. Stepping in, working as a team, problem solving and managing on their own, I didn’t even know we ran out of desserts until three days later. Directing her peers, and helping them all get the desserts they needed, she even got to talk to the cute boy she’d had a crush on for three days.

Servers and L: L ran the front of the house. She had taken on the “Tables and Servers” job, which included the task of assigning server partnerships and which tables would be under their care. Using discretion, she made sure there were partnerships of two where each pairing had at least one “more competent” and one “perhaps-head-more-in-the-clouds” type student. She was intentional in crafting the partnerships for a positive dining experience for the guests.

What she didn’t realize she was doing was answering one of our class prayers for the year. This specific group of students has had a rough go of it, having been in pivotal growth years during COVID and missing some key normal developmental experiences. This has lead to some difficulties in navigating social situations and we find they tend to stay in their tight-knit-groups of people they know well. We’ve been praying for unity and growth, that barriers would be crossed in friendship groups, dorms, even across gender lines. Once a week, we sponsors have been meeting to pray. Our officers developed a class vision, ane even presented a class verse for the year, all around this theme.

Those server pairings crossed each and every one of those barriers. It was incredible, watching these students that often choose to sit all girls on one side of the room, boys on the other work in teams. Each pairing held their own, clearing dishes, refilling water, bringing the next course in a timely fashion, attentive, friendly and kind to the customers they waited on. They killed it, and they grew. They practiced unity. They practiced teamwork. They showed that they are willing to become the class of 2026, a force to be reckoned with.

Staff: There has been great discussion in the head sponsor team meetings about the purpose of Sophomore Restaurant. A couple staff members suggested it provides the opportunity for the students to take their girlfriends/boyfriends on a date. I rejected this- it’s way too much work for me to be putting this on so the teenagers can have a nice date in a community where we live fenced in on a 90-acre campus.

Others suggested it’s preparation for banquet, the event the 10th graders provide labor for next term that the 11th graders plan and put on. Plausible, beneficial, likely.

But what I internalized was a third suggestion: Restaurant is an opportunity for the students to serve the staff. The staff pour out so much for the students on a daily basis, sophomore restaurant is one event in the year where the roles are reversed, and the staff are able to be served by the students. This I love. This I could support. This, I see, we executed. We sat in three waves, 6:20pm was the first half of the staff, 6:40pm the second, 7:00pm, the 11th and 12th grade students who had bought the leftover tickets after staff had been given first purchasing opportunity.

We didn’t run out of our first wave of dumplings until all the staff had been served. We didn’t run out of dessert until all the staff had been served. We didn’t run out of boba until all the staff had been served. We didn’t run out of plates and have to start washing to re-use our dishes causing a slight delay in service of the main course until all the staff had been served. Though unfortunate for the students who got the short end of the stick, by seating the staff first, the staff received the first-fruits of our efforts. The staff were able to enjoy a night of fellowship with one another, their kids being babysat by the cooperating 9th grade class, the pressure to cook a meal off their plates for just a single night.

The Clincher: At the close of the evening, the speaker volume was cranked up as students began the tear-down of decorations. After the last of our guests wandered home, I called together our teens. I had planned to say a simple, “job well done” before praying and sending them to eat the leftover food we had sitting in the other room, but as I stood before the mic and the students settled before me, I had a sense from the Lord that THIS was a sacred moment. I learned from my last principal that hard work needs to be celebrated, recognized and honored. And so, we took some time to celebrate the work of those in the room. I wish I could’ve recognized every single human and all the hard work they put into making restaurant a success, but I couldn’t recognize them all. Instead, I recognized the ones I could think of in the moment, and am hopeful that what I did point out was helpful in encouraging our students. I celebrated their teamwork. I brought to the forefront of their minds our goal as a class to grow in unity and recognized how this event showed the growth they’ve been so longing to see. We cheered for S, we cheered for J, we cheered for L, we cheered for us. For the magnitude of the event we pulled off, for feeding tens more than they had last year. We reveled in the moment, then we prayed, THEN we ate. The cleaning commenced as belly’s were full and legs exhausted from being on their feet all night long. We chased the last of our hardworking students out of the cafeteria at 11:00pm when we the adults were done monitoring them and ready to go home (ok ok, the work was done too…). They finished mopping the last few spots of floor and turned off the lights. The bamboo walls had been returned to my yard, the Chinese hanging lanterns cut loose from their strings. The cherry blossom tree set aside for this years drama set, and the dishes stacked neatly for the cleaning crew we hired to finish the dishes come the morning. With a click we closed the cafo doors on what the class of 2026 used to be, walking forward into who this group of students is becoming, new experiences having taught what everyday life and school can’t, having learned by the power of change what only prayer can bring about.

Prayer Points:

-Would you continue to pray for the class of 2026? Please pray for growth in maturity, kindness in unity, and most of all that they would become a class that represents Christ to all those they meet!