Kennedy cook-manager prepares for last meal

by Dave DeMars

news@thenewsleaders.com

Maxine Pogatshnik is a cook-manager at Kennedy Community School in St. Joseph. But not for long. She will retire Tuesday, Jan. 31, but not without racking up some impressive numbers.

Thirty of those years have been at Kennedy Community School and nine at Westwood Elementary School in St. Cloud. Number of days worked in 39 years? 6,708 days. Meals prepared this year at Kennedy since the start of school in September? 52,650, or about 585 meals per day. Approximate number of meals prepared in her 39 years of work in the district? 3,924,180 in all. Number of days spent dreading coming to work? Zero.

“I like my job and I have a wonderful staff,” Pogatshnik said. “We get so much time off, it’s more like a part-time job, and I enjoy the children.”

But after 39 years of seeing to it that children in District 742 get a wholesome lunch and maybe a good breakfast to start them off, she figures she has earned some time off. It’s time for someone else to take the reins of cook-manager and make sure those meals are ready when the lunch bell rings.

She has seen a lot of change during the 39 years – mostly for the better. More fruits and vegetables are served these days, not so much starch. Protein amounts have pretty much stayed the same. And there is lots of emphasis on sanitation and keeping things free of any kind of contamination.

“We use to make a lot of hotdishes,” she said. “And wash our own chicken and fry it. Now it comes already prepared. It’s less time-consuming and it’s a lot safer.”

She says of all the various dishes served to students, they seem to like tacos the best. Another favorite is the garden-herb wraps.

“They are time-consuming to make,” she said, “but they are delicious.”

There’s not much baking done any more, Pogatshnik said, but this day the kids will get a special treat: home-baked banana bread made from scratch.

“Whenever we have bananas left over, I like to surprise the students with fresh banana bread,” she said. “And every once in awhile, we sneak a couple of loaves into the lounge for the staff.”

As a cook-manager, she oversees a staff of seven. She is responsible for planning and carrying out the preparation of the meals, which means getting the raw product in the door, storage, preparing the meal, serving the meal and clean-up each and every day. Her day begins at 6 a.m. and runs until 2 p.m. each day that school is in session.

With 39 years of service in school kitchens, one might think Pogatshnik would have a few suggestions as to how to improve the program. She paused and thought, and then said there really isn’t anything. They still get corn, green beans and other government commodities to use in lunch preparation, but not as much as in the past. The emphasis is on fresh fruits and vegetables.

“It’s a good product that we get,” she said. “It’s a good program.”

Things aren’t going to change much for Pogatshnik once she retires, except she will spend more time at home, she said. She has been married for 52 years, and her husband has been retired for 16 years.

“I’ve had a housekeeper all these years, and now I’m going to have to wash the kitchen floor,” she said.

There aren’t any trips in the immediate future, but with her two children and six grandchildren scattered about the planet, she expects there will be some trips. She has already been to Germany and Austria.

For the present, she said she has a lot of books she wants to read and a collection of pictures she wants to go through and put in albums. Maybe she’ll do some volunteer work, but she has no plans to come back to the kitchen, not even as a substitute. Retirement is kind of bittersweet, she said.

Will she miss coming to work each day?

“Yeah, I’ll miss the staff and the students,” she said.