Nourishing Students One Lunch Tray at a Time

Growing up in Washington Heights, Keisha James remembered the strict attitude of her middle school lunch ladies.

“I was like, ‘no, I don’t like that,’” James said. “In my mind, I had to make the change.”

Today, James is a cook and manager at JHS 217 in Jamaica, Queens, where she has given the lunch workers a friendlier name.

JHS 217’s noisy lunchroom feeds over 1,300 students a day. Middle schoolers dine on pizza, apples, salad bowls, and PB&Js.

Lunch operates under a self-serve system, in which students walk in with trays and take what they want from a series of shelves and fridges. The school made the switch to this collegiate system shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic, and it proved to be a hit.

Students call out to James as she does her rounds. She asks them about their weekends and jokingly berates those who have brought their own meals: “Why are you bringing lunch today? You don’t like what I [cook]?”

James got into food service at 16 years old, when she took a summer job at Park West High School in Hell’s Kitchen. She went to New York City College of Technology and earned a degree in Hospitality Management. A few years later, she took a job with JHS 217. She has stayed there for a quarter-century.

“She’s the best,” Jeannette Torres, an aide and former student at JHS 217, said. “The way she keeps her group together—she’s a model as a manager.”

James worked her way up from “lunch helper” to manager. Her current responsibilities include overseeing kitchen staff, payroll, and ordering food.

Kids have a surprising amount of sway in what they eat at JHS 217. The student government conducts surveys about what the different grades eat for lunch. James said she also takes offhand requests for fruits like blueberries or grapes.

“I order what the children like,” she said.

The kitchen staff have faced hardship over the years, but the facilities are better than they used to be.

“There was a time when there was no air conditioning back there, and these women were dying,” Torres said. “But they were still putting out phenomenal meals.”

James said she also encounters struggling children on the job.

“The worst part of it is hearing a child say, ‘This is my only meal,’ or ‘We live in a shelter, we don’t have anything,’ and that I can’t do more,” she said.

But through the hard work of herself and her staff, James has helped provide countless students with nutritious and tasty food each day.

James said one student recently messaged her on Facebook to say that school lunch was her only meal most days, and that she had become a teacher to help those like her.

“I felt touched,” James said.

James’s own 14-year old son recently graduated JHS 217 and moved onto high school. She no longer drives him each day—instead, he takes the bus.

James refers to him as her biggest inspiration in coming to work each day.