<table> </table> As teenagers lugging backpacks straggle into the Broadmoor Bistro&#8217;s pastry classroom, a chorus of &#8220;Hey, Bob&#8221; builds to a crescendo.</p><p>Bleary-eyed and yawning, the culinary students unzip their hoodies and slip into stiff white chef coats embroidered with the school&#8217;s logo and their name in script.</p><p>As the chatter, flirting and rowdiness ratchet up, a burly, 51-year-old man with salt-and-pepper spiked hair and rectangular designer glasses rolls his eyes to dramatic effect. The students may have rolled out of bed just in time to make an 8 a.m. class, but Robert Brassard &#8212; known simply as &#8220;Bob&#8221; to his students &#8212; is already working on &#8220;chef time.&#8221;</p><p>Nearly always the first teacher to arrive and the last to leave the Shawnee Mission School District&#8217;s Broadmoor Technical Center in Overland Park, Brassard is already two hours into his school day and ready to roll. Or knead, to be precise.</p><p>Today&#8217;s lesson: baguettes, boules and soft rolls.</p><p>&#8220;What&#8217;s the most important thing about baking?&#8221; Brassard asks his first-year students in a distinctive East Coast accent left over from a childhood spent in a rural Connecticut farming community.</p><p>His students offer up silent stares.</p><p>&#8220;Time! Can we ever make up time that we lose?&#8221;</p><p>&#8220;No,&#8221; several of the students mumble in unison.</p><p>&#8220;Every minute we waste we can&#8217;t get back because that bread has to proof, and you can&#8217;t speed it up,&#8221; he lectures.</p><p>Brassard hates to waste time, and his own rise as an educator has been nothing short of meteoric. Barely a decade ago, he was struggling to balance the demands of life as a single dad with work as a corporate executive chef at John Knox Village when he dared to imagine his dream job &#8212; to whip the next generation of chefs into shape.</p><p>Trained in the &#8217;70s at Johnson &amp; Wales University in Providence, R.I., Brassard headed back to the classroom at Johnson County Community College to get a degree in food and beverage management.</p><p>While at JCCC, Brassard ran the Kansas City Community Kitchen Culinary Cornerstones, a training program for economically disadvantaged adults who were referred through a patchwork of social service agencies. The program was a success. Brassard won a national award. But he couldn&#8217;t shake the feeling he had arrived too late to really make a difference.</p><p>Then out of the blue Brassard got a call from a Shawnee Mission administrator. He&#8217;d been recommended for the job as head of the district&#8217;s culinary arts program.</p><p>&#8220;All chefs are teachers,&#8221; he says with a shrug. &#8220;Eighty percent of their time is giving instruction or critiquing. Every time you put out a new menu you have to retrain your staff.&#8221;</p><p><strong><span class="subhead">Opportunity knocks</span></strong></p><p>Brassard&#8217;s culinary class is no glorified home ec class with sharp knives. A slick promotional brochure produced by the district sums up his no-nonsense, results-oriented teaching approach.</p><p>Since Brassard&#8217;s arrival in August 2001, the district&#8217;s program has been recognized as one of the top high school culinary programs in the country. By 2008, he had been named outstanding culinary educator of the year by the Foodservice Educators Network International.</p><p>Broadmoor culinary grads have earned academic scholarships totaling more than $1 million to accredited culinary institutions, including the Culinary Institute of America, Johnson &amp; Wales University and the Art Institutes.