Los Altos High program teaches students how to manage their lives by running a kitchen

By Kaye Ross, Town Crier Staff Writer

Los Altos High School’s culinary program instructor, Betty Ewing, right, gives pointers to student cooks in the school kitchen. .

Betty Ewing’s culinary class meets in the old woodshop at Los Altos High School. It is a fairly cavernous space with a large stove, rotisserie oven, several long cutting-height tables, double sinks, refrigerator, washer-dryer and plenty of walking-around room. There are some chairs and a computer but no desks.

Students start dribbling in soon after 10 a.m. A girl with soulful eyes wearing a miniskirt takes a chef’s coat off the hooks near the door and puts it on. A few quiet kids seem to materialize from nowhere and stand at the margins, surveying the field. Girls in twos arrive midsentence. A tall, handsome boy glides in, grooving to an inner beat. A clutch of large puppy-boys enters, all wearing royal-blue LAHS football jerseys, their arms and legs and heads windmilling into each other at the doorway. The volume ratchets up, Wild 94.9 turns on and the teenage kinesis takes over.

Ewing yells a call to order. One of the boys brays for attention. “It’s my show now,” Ewing says, shutting him down. “It’s not your show.”

A sparkplug of a woman, Ewing started the classes nine years ago - “as a favor,” she notes - when she was chef and owner of the Blue Sky Café in Mountain View. She has a good two-hour commute every morning, driving from Monterey and stopping along the way to pick up food for class. She also runs the school culinary club and a non-profit, the El Cajon Project, which matches students at risk of dropping out of high school with jobs in area eateries.

Ewing’s salary is paid by the Regional Occupational Program of the county board of education, and the culinary arts courses are funded by the county, the high school district and whatever the program can bring in from food sales. The culinary club pays for equipment. Ewing has three classes of Culinary I, with 78 students, and one of Culinary II, with 30 students.

Learning to get along

The courses are aimed at teens who won’t be going to college, and there are some challenging and at-risk students in class. Ewing says she never has any discipline problems.

“These kids have to sit in a chair 90 percent of the time,” she said. “This is the 10 percent of the time when they learn about getting along.”

And they do. Ewing ticks off the jobs for the day, and the students divide themselves into groups flouring and frying chicken wings, setting up and basting rotisserie chickens, making personal-size pizzas, baking cookies and julienning a bin of carrots for later use.

In addition to teaching them cooking, Ewing wants her students to learn how to run their own lives, how to find a source of motivation to do without being asked, to see a need and fill it. She’s a perfect role model.

“Hold them DOWN,” she says as a student passes by with a half-dozen 8-inch knives, all aimed forward as if for battle.

Many of the students say they might want to do cooking for a career. Even those who don’t, praise the class and teacher.

“It’s the best program at school,” said Erikka Desilva, a senior.

Intensely focused on flouring chicken, José Leyva, a senior, says he is thinking of cooking as a career. “I enjoy it,” he said.

Class is ‘alive’

Antoine Wattley, a senior, loves chopping and prep work. The class is fun, he says, and the teacher is great. “She makes jokes here and there,” he said. “It keeps the class alive.”

Ewing’s voice rises over the din. “Nooooo,” she says, rushing to the rotisserie oven to stop a boy from basting the whirling birds with Asian marinade. “You can’t put it on when it’s spinning.”

“The music makes it better,” said Kassandra Peña, a junior. “And when you’re having a bad day, you can do something like laundry by yourself.”

The program has been a big hit with the students, teachers and staff who buy the lunchtime goodies every day. The day before this one, students sold so many chickens that they promised four more than they had cooked. Once a week, the class e-mails a special luncheon menu to teachers and staff and collects $5 for each lunch sold. One day’s meal was spaghetti and meat balls.

The class is threatening to become a victim of its own success, however. Erikka says there are rumblings that it competes with the cafeteria and might be shut down. Last week, a bunch of students, unbidden, circulated petitions backing the program. Ewing has confidence that the support of Principal Wynne Satterwhite will keep the classes going.

Joey Hodgkinson, a ‘93 El Cajon success story who runs a catering business called Foda, says funding is a continual problem. “They’re struggling to keep alive,” he said.

One gets the impression, though, that Ewing could take $50, a couple chickens and a recipe for sauce and hold things together all by herself. A sign on the wall says, “Well behaved women rarely make history,” and it’s clear that its wisdom isn’t just for the young women in the class.

Ewing is working to gain recognition by the American Culinary Federation so credits for completion of her classes can be transferred to post-secondary culinary academies. “Ninety percent of these kids are going to work in the food business, I hate to tell them,” Ewing says.

The tall handsome student is dancing at the deep fryers. Another boy is carefully rolling cookie dough in perfect balls and lining them up on a cookie sheet. Apparently dissatisfied with the look of the floured chicken wings, a boy is dumping more flour on top. The pizzas are starting to come out of the oven. A mountain of julienned carrots is piling up on one of the long tables.

Ewing collars one girl to tell her that she’s lined up a job for her. “Just wear a top,” she says. “You know what I mean.”