LPO teens give back with meal

SANDPOINT — The United Methodist Church offers a community meal every Thursday, helping to fight hunger in the area.

It is not every week, however, that they have Lake Pend Oreille High School students preparing and serving the meal as they did last Thursday. For LPOHS staff, it is about encouraging the teens to connect with the community.

“It was good to get the kids out there,” said Randy Wilhelm, career-technical education teacher at LPOHS, adding that the students who helped out had a lot of fun. “Many hands make little work. There were some kids who were there from the beginning to the end who just worked really hard.”

There were even some former LPOHS students who showed up to volunteer, he said.

Wilhelm and culinary arts teacher Rand Rosecrans partnered up for the event, with most of the food prep done by Rosecrans’ students. They made potato soup, chili and cookies for the approximately 130 people who came to eat at the church that evening.

The meal did not happen, however, without practice in the preparation of soup and different techniques, Rosecrans said.

“We built this into the curriculum,” Rosecrans said. “We have been practicing it for almost a month for the many different aspects — It is not just a matter of cooking soup, There is so much more to it that I can teach them in preparing a meal like this, and that’s why I think it’s just great, because there are so many other things teaching-wise that we can work in there.”

Wilhelm said the goal at LPOHS is to get more service learning opportunities worked into the curriculum, so each advisory class has different project they are doing.

“Our advisory chose to do the community meal, and we also adopted a two-mile stretch of Highway 2 that the school is going to keep clean on the Adopt a Highway program,” Wilhelm said, adding that they are also planning a food drive before the end of the school year.

Overall, the meal was a successful one, and Rosecrans, who hopes to do the community meals on a regular basis in the future, said any time they can get the kids out and experience the “generous spirit” of the community is a good thing.

“It gets them thinking about others, and anytime you can do that it’s successful,” Rosecrans said.

LPOHS senior Jared Kluesner said he was the last one out after the meal was over and agreed that everything went “great.”

“We were able to transport the food, we were able to get it heated up to a proper temperature, we had a big turnout … everyone was on task for the most part,” he said. “We had people waiting tables. If there was an issue, we could solve it. We had cooperation — there really wasn’t any part of the meal that was lacking.”

Kluesner said volunteering was important to him because, when struggling with personal medical issues recently, the community banded together to help him as well.

“It was just rewarding to finally give back for all the generosity that I have received in the last two years from the community,” he said.

Mary Malone can be reached by email at mmalone@bonnercountydailybee.com and follow her on Twitter @MaryDailyBee.