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Lunch Ladies

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It’s early September, and 173,158 Maine public school students are back in their classrooms with spiral notebooks, pens, pencils, and erasers. In some classrooms there may even be laptops covered with stickers flipped open, and their screens lit up. The heat has backed off and the windows are open. The teacher is cheerful. The surroundings covered in bright-colored art.  Down the hall and around the corner at Hometown High School is the remarkably unremarkable windowless kitchen. The floorplan of the space where the prepping, cooking, and cleaning takes place is inflexible. Industrial pots and pans brimming with sizable portions have been maneuvered about like game pieces on a board. Expenses have been spared where possible with not-quite-vintage equipment beginning to age out. This is where one can find the lunch ladies—the working person’s corps de ballet. Those individuals whose job title has become so entwined with the public school system’s identity.

The Lunch Ladies

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