Starr King Elementary
the best lunch in town!
Once upon a time, before Covid, elementary schools depended largely upon the help of parent volunteers. With the advent of a vaccine and return to on-site education, parents may once again enjoy the volunteer experience. This piece, written just before Covid sent us all home, was requested of me by a San Francisco Title-1 school to encourage incoming-parent volunteerism.
It may sound ridiculous, but helping out in our school cafeteria will turn out to be one of my life’s richest experiences. After six years now, my fifth-grader is graduating to middle school, and so, it’s time to move on. But it will be with some difficulty that I tear myself away from the great relationships I’ve developed with kids and staffers in the cafeteria on Mondays.
It all began six years ago in that first week of school when someone asked if I could help with the settling of our new kindergarteners at lunch, the opening of their plastic containers, and general clean-up of the cafeteria afterwards. I happily volunteered since my kindergartner had no pre-school experience and might find my presence comforting on that first, unfamiliar day of school. Sadly, I was wrong, and when lunchtime came I found him having a terrific time with his new friends—doing just fine without me, thank you very much!
Starr King is a large school with three lunch sessions and, though I was asked to help only with my son’s class in the first session, I remained that day for all three; not just because the custodian was overwhelmed, but because there seemed to be more children in need of help settling down than the limited staff could offer. I continued coming on Mondays.
Initially, I was rewarded for my efforts by many of the kids who quickly take a liking to you and wiggle their way into your heart. While it certainly felt good to attend these children, there were also some for whom my perceived presence as a relatively privileged person brought about a strongly negative reaction. I had never experienced anything like this. It became such a downer that I considered abandoning the endeavor altogether. But within two years of the most terrible of child scrutiny, some of these kids found me innocent on all counts. They began to engage me in a genuinely friendly manner and I was glad I had stayed on as things improved. Of the newly befriended, two or three of these children became surprisingly reliant on my weekly presence; so much so, that, whenever a holiday fell on a Monday, I made sure I was there on Tuesday!
It feels good, of course, to support a troubled child and especially one who is so happy to see you. I must also say how good it feels to be able to help a child in your own way. As a parent volunteer, it’s just you and them; you don’t need to know — you’re not permitted to know — a thing about the people and problems in their young lives. Once a troubled child lets you in, you can “adjust the dials,” as it were, to more positive settings as you see fit while, by comparison, interactions between staffers and children are more strictly controlled by school district.
Unlike grownups, children have a much simpler way understanding people. They seem to look directly inside you, operating right past adult obstacles like age and race to judge you up or down with surprising accuracy. Should you receive a favorable assessment, watch out!, for it could be you who is chosen by them to provide a weekly moment of delight. These, of course, are moments which they may soon forget or relinquish to a less conscious region, but they are real, eternal moments all the same in which you were allowed by them to install some useful thing of joy, however small, that will become a deep and permanent part of their psyche.
And here’s the thing . . . I was the lucky recipient of great parents, but if you happened to be an unhappy or troubled child who didn’t get the love and attention you deserved, well, we all know that you can’t go back and get it now, don’t we. But wait! You can, amazingly, experience, and hence, receive the very same feeling of love and attention which was denied you then by giving it to a child now who will appreciate you for it every Monday. Out of practice? No experience? That’s okay. I found that children are surprisingly patient with these things and not yet as skilled as we at holding a grudge should you get it wrong.
Sometimes, the significance of a thing can take you by surprise. This usually-rewarding-but-sometimes-disturbing experience with children has been one of my life’s most unexpected yet meaningful experiences and, if you can manage to get away at lunchtime, I wish the same delights for you.
As the parent or guardian of a school-aged child, it’s particularly easy to get involved, it’s so easily worthwhile, and you’ve got only these few short years to experience it, and then . . . it will be too late. There are other rewards, too. You hear great jokes (Q: Why do sharks like salty water? A: Because peppery water makes them sneeze.), you get great compliments (Currently, two of our youngsters think I smell good. I rarely hear this from grown-ups.) and, unlike grown-ups, they honestly misjudge you to be younger than you really are!
So if you, like me, are concerned about your age — or how you smell — why pay to “see someone” twice a month when you can be seen every week, for free, at Starr King!
It all starts at noon. See you there!
