The kindergartners came out of the lunch line with trays wobbling.
As the littlest ones struggled to balance their meals on broad plastic boards for the first time, every adult in the cafeteria jumped in to guide them.
“Who’s your teacher?” “Are these your friends?” “Where’s your class?”
The children, dazed by the din, responded with silent nods and blank stares. They hadn’t quite figured out the lunchroom yet.
“They’ve never been on the playground. They’ve never been to lunch,” a teacher said, bouncing between tables to tend to students. “It’s havoc.”
After a morning of introductions and instructions, this was lunchtime on the first day of school at Annandale Terrace Elementary in Fairfax County. Maybe second only to recess, lunch is the best part of the day, these kids say — a chance to reconnect with friends, exchange riddles and tell everyone how you learned to swim underwater this summer.
The first-day menu: mini corn dogs, grilled cheese, or a peanut butter and jelly Uncrustable. There were snacks such as yogurt, warm pretzels and cheese sticks, and under the plastic sneeze-guard of the salad bar were orange slices, eggs and grapes.
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After the second-graders, who dined at 10:30 a.m., came the kindergartners. Their sneakers dangled under the round tables, their legs not yet long enough to touch the floor.
One girl, beholding her breaded hot dog, was incredulous to learn that it contained corn. No kernels were evident. A boy next to her was certain his orange slices were actually lemons. (They weren’t.)
He drained a glug of chocolate milk, paused and let fly a robust belch, which he followed with an impish smile.
Chocolate milk remains a totem of elementary school. In the drink cooler, the legion of white-milk mini-cartons sat largely untouched. Nearly every hand that reached into the fridge came out with a brown box of the good stuff.
(This reporter did not sample the corn dogs or grilled cheese. But The Washington Post found that prepackaged peanut butter and jelly sandwiches taste as good as ever, and that the grapes on offer were remarkably fresh.)
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The first-graders who arrived next had left all the uncertainty of kindergarten behind. They waved eagerly to friends they hadn’t seen since last school year and bounced up to embrace. The exhortations from teachers to kindly remain at their assigned tables were not strictly observed.
A boy tripped while running across the cafeteria. That’s why you always use walking feet, a teacher reminded him.
The rules of the cafeteria are posted on the wall. They are not overly austere, and they are good lessons for life: Be respectful, responsible and safe. Use kind words and a whisper voice. Keep your space clean, follow directions, and do your own job. Stay in your seat, raise your hand for help.
And if you follow all the rules of the lunchroom, and your friends do too, you might be rewarded with a movie in the cafeteria on Fridays, which are already exciting because Friday is usually pizza day. That’s the best part of lunch, the kids say. If it gets too loud, one fifth-grader warned, “the teachers start yelling, and then everyone is yelling.” That’s the worst part of lunch.
Annandale Terrace is a Title I school, and every student — about 660 of them — receives free lunch. Rama Gundapaneni, the school’s food service manager, started prepping meals at 6:30 a.m., hours before any students arrived on campus Monday.
The school cafeteria is a staple in American culture — a cauldron in which nearly every child’s social universe is forged, at least partly. Movies and TV shows depict the cliques and drama. It’s the background for food fights and confrontations. An object of occasional ridicule for foods produced on an industrial scale.
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But the cafeteria is also a haven — a place to connect with friends. And at schools like Annandale Terrace, where about 80 percent of students are economically disadvantaged, the cafeteria is in some cases the only place where students receive reliable and healthy meals.
“We know that we need to feed them so they can do some good learning,” Principal Ingrid Badia said.
The focus Monday was on getting a routine in place. A food service staffer came over to a table of third-graders to give a girl a hug. The third-grader had left her little notes last year thanking the staffer for being so nice.
Fifth-graders were the most discerning. They thought some of the food was “mid,” and they were getting tired of seeing the same meals over and over. It is their last year of eating the food before they head off to middle school next year, where presumably greater feasts await. They giggled at the thought of that transition.
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Two fifth-graders donned matching “best friends” necklaces that one girl brought back from her summer vacation in Florida. They went to Disney World, and it was hot.
“Not just hot hot, but like hot!”
Some students brought their own meals in sparkly and branded lunchboxes. A fifth-grader packed hers, because she knew she wouldn’t like the cafeteria offerings. She rarely did. A fourth-grader brought his because his mom sent him with pizza.
A second-grader brought lunch because she just moved back to Virginia from out of the country, and she didn’t know how the lunch line would work. She sat alone on the first day but felt confident she’d make more friends. It would just take some time.
And now that she knew what to do, tomorrow could be different: She might try the lunch line.
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