Bringing the culinary department to a new level, Chef Sarah Ramos has moved from the standard of just teaching students how to cook to a fully student-run grab-and-go service at Waterford High School.
Chef Ramos started teaching at Waterford High School last year and worked to create a similar trade experience that she was able to teach at her former school, Norwich Technical High School. At Norwich Tech, Ramos’s students had a full-scale restaurant experience in school–something she is aspiring to do at Waterford High School.
Currently, Waterford High has four culinary classes: Culinary Essentials, Bake Shoppe, Prostart 1, and Prostart 2.
Culinary Essentials and Bake Shoppe allow students to get the basics of cooking and baking, while ProStart 1 prepares students for making four-course meals and a deeper education in the culinary world. All of these classes are prerequisites for ProStart 2.
In ProStart 2, students have time to create a menu appetizing to the customers and execute it accordingly, essentially having full reign over what happens in the “restaurant.”
The “restaurant” will be based in the ProStart 2 class, where Ramos will be taking orders sent out via email, and the students will cook the food accordingly. Students will then bring the food to their customers and receive the payment.
Ramos wants to create an opportunity for those who cannot get into tech schools to have a similar tech experience here at Waterford High. To accomplish this, she plans on making a new class and having the existing classes do more than before.
Before, Culinary Essentials was the prerequisite for all other culinary classes, but going forward, “both [Culinary Essentials and Bake Shoppe] will be a prerequisite for getting into [Prostart 1 and 2],” Ramos says. If students do not know how to bake, then it will be more challenging for them to make a four-course meal.
Also changing will be the ProStart 1 and 2 classes. Going forward, Prostart will no longer be called Prostart 1 or 2 (however, the name is still being workshopped), and Prostart 1 will be an intermediate course that is more of an intro into management of a restaurant, while Prostart 2 is going to fully manage and run the “restaurant.” This new system will allow students to get a tech school experience within the time constraints of a regular high school. They will also become only semester courses compared to the full-year courses they are now.
Ramos is also trying to get students ServSafe credentials, which is the organization that sets sanitation regulations for restaurants. In every restaurant, at least one ServSafe-certified person is required to be working each shift, so these credentials will allow for students who receive these credentials to stand out and, if they are trying to get a job in the industry, they will be more valuable compared to the ordinary worker.
Ramos says that “if there is one fewer [certificate] you have to pay for when you leave this high school world, then you are already set up for success.” These credentials are transferable worldwide, so it is a worthwhile thing for students to have coming out of high school.
During the summer, Ramos also wrote up a curriculum for a whole new class to even further advance the culinary department: a culinary internship course. Although not yet approved, this course will give students the opportunity to go out into the workforce and get a job in the food industry or become a student teacher in one of the lower-level courses. This class can become a game-changer for students because not only will they be working in a real-world setting, but they will be receiving credit for it, too.
Altogether, the culinary classes that Waterford High once knew will be changing into a hybrid mix of Ramos’s industry experience and her tech school experience, bringing new life to the traditional scene of the home ec department.
