Thank You, Lunch Ladies and All Who Work to Help Others

“A thank you can change a life.” This assertion was shared by Jarrett Krosoczka during his 2014 TED Talk “Why Lunch Ladies are Heroes.” Krosoczka is the author of the Lunch Lady graphic novel series, and his talk and novels focus on the school lunch ladies who play an essential, but often overlooked, role in the education system. This reminded us of education data—essential for everyday district and school operations (such as planning, evaluation, and improvement), but often overlooked relative to other aspects of the education enterprise.

As emphasized in Krosoczka’s talk, lunch ladies do a lot more than serve chicken nuggets. More than 30 million kids participate in school lunch programs every day—that’s more than 5 billion lunches made each school year. In one district in Kentucky, where 67 percent of the students relied on schools to serve them meals each day during the school year, the lunch ladies retrofitted a school bus so they could feed 500 kids a day over the summer, when the children might not otherwise receive regular meals. Thank you, lunch ladies, for making the effort, and thank you to members of the data community for collecting the data that drives education decisionmaking and action.

Krosoczka’s presentation made us think about the unsung heroes in our lives. In the context of QIP, sometimes some of our staff become very busy with a large, important assignment. When we finish a big project, it is natural that we should thank the folks who worked on it—for example, the management planners, content leads, reviewers, editors, and graphic designers. But we sometimes forget to thank the people who didn’t work on that particular project, but carried the weight of all the other projects—also extremely important—that needed to be completed at that time, allowing others to focus on the large assignment. We want to take this opportunity to say thank you to everyone on the QIP staff—no matter which projects you happen to be involved in.