‘She gives from the heart.’ For cafeteria manager, feeding kids is a year-round passion

What started out as a three hour per day job washing dishes and acting as a cashier in an elementary school lunchroom has turned into a calling for Missy Hanner. Now the cafeteria manager at Lee’s Summit North, Hanner recently received the statewide manager of the year award from the Missouri School Nutrition Association.

“I love working with kids. I’ve always worked with kids,” Hanner said.

She was shocked when she found out about the award.

“I was very honored, and it did make me feel good that the things I do are noticed,” she said.

Lori Danella, director of nutrition services for the Lee’s Summit schools, said she and several other managers nominated Hanner for the award.

“Missy is the type of manager that she gives from the heart. She truly does to the students, to the staff, to the community. She definitely goes up and beyond,” Danella said.

Part of the award was supposed to be a free trip to the School Nutrition Association conference in Nashville, but that was canceled this year. Hanner will receive her award at the state conference in Kansas City in October.

Hanner volunteered and worked in schools in Illinois before moving to Missouri and starting work with the district in 2008. Since then, she has risen through the ranks, taking on more responsibilities. After working as a cook, she opted to train for a manager position and became a manager at Summit Lakes Middle School for six years before moving to the high school two years ago.

She sees her role as “getting to know people around me, my team and the administration, trying to see what I can do to make things easier or better for them and to create a work environment that is pleasurable,” she said.

Although the high school serves many more people than an elementary or middle school and has more products to track, “everything else stays the same,” Hanner said.

With the current crisis, things have been different, but Hanner has taken it in stride. Normally, she’d wind down food production toward the end of the school year to waste as little as possible.

This year, not only did she not have the luxury of planning for that, but she and other district employees had to figure out how to provide breakfasts and lunches to go for the families depending on the free and reduced cost meal programs.

Ingredients they couldn’t use or distribute that weren’t shelf stable went directly to Lee’s Summit Social Services. While the school year was still in session, Hanner and other employees set up a system at long tables to make balanced bagged breakfasts and lunches to go out on six different school buses.

About 40 food service staff members around the district volunteered for duty with the emergency feeding plan, according to Danella. All of the 180 workers in food services have been getting paid, regardless of volunteering for this program.

Each day, Hanner served about 75 students at an apartment complex and hundreds at the Lee’s Summit North parking lot, handing the prepacked bags out at the bus and through car windows.

“That was just my bus. My bus alone (did) about 1,000 meals (each day) when you think of breakfast and lunch,” Hanner said.

As of June 3, Hanner’s bus had given out 44,828 breakfasts and lunches. Overall, the district gave out 233,858 meals in that time period.

Since the school year ended, they have changed their delivery schedule to hand out five days’ worth of meals every Monday for each student, along with a quart of milk. The schools are continuing to serve meals this way until the end of June, when summer school is set to start.

Normally, the district would not be handing out meals after the school year ended; this program is due to the current pandemic situation. If summer school goes as planned, those sites will serve food to summer school participants, and there will be a community feeding site at Meadow Lane Elementary where parents can pick up meals for students 18 or younger.