Benny Westcott
New Sweet Home School District Nutrition Services Director Amber Walker has worked in the kitchen since 2013, but her family has an even longer association with local palates: her mother, Kathleen Rivas, who spent 35 years with the district as a baker and taught her daughter everything she knows.
“We have a big family, so we always get together, and food is always the main thing,” Walker said. “I knew the basics of how to put a meal together, so going into the school district just made sense. And I was able to work with my mom.”
Born in Pomona, Calif, the 42-year-old Walker was eight when her family moved to Sweet Home, where she graduated from Sweet Home High School in 1998.
She was then a stay-at-home mother until entering the workforce in 2005, working as a darkroom associate and then as an X-ray technician for Selmet Inc. in Albany.
She left after nine months when she became pregnant with her third son, Dawson Sevier, soon to be a sophomore at Sweet Home High School. (Her two other children are 23-year-old Tyler Becker and 20-year-old Adam Becker.) In 2010, she attended Linn-Benton Community College for two years, then began working with the district in 2013.
“My mom was still there, and she had been with the school for about 25 years at that point,” Walker recalled. “She knew that I wanted to get back into the workforce. They were hiring, and I went in for an interview.”
She started out in charge of a program that distributed fresh fruit and vegetable snacks during the day. She then moved up to assistant cook and, finally, head cook before taking the job of director, reporting May 1 for her first official day in the top role. Her predecessor, Milli Horton, helped train Walker for the first two months until her June 30 retirement.
“She’s been a role model for me to be able to learn from her and her ideas,” Walker said of Horton. “She’s a wonderful person.”
As she takes the helm for her first full school year, she would like to incorporate more scratch-cooking, i.e., preparation from the ground up without processed products.
“When my mom started cooking for the school district 37 years ago, they did everything from scratch,” she said. “They got huge blocks of cheese that they had to grate to be able to use. They got whole potatoes. We don’t boil whole potatoes anymore. I don’t even know if that’s something I can do because of my labor hours. But it’s something that I want to strive toward.”
She estimated that the district currently serves one- to two-thirds of its food, such as spaghetti dishes and macaroni and cheese, from scratch. Fresh beef and other meats come from Holy Cow Meats at 25057 Springer Road. Walker also mentioned that a former baker at the high school kitchen who now runs the junior high kitchen used to bake fresh muffins and cookies.
Walker already has quite a few more scratch items on the district’s September menu.
“As long as the products are available and I have the labor hours, then I don’t think it’s impossible,” she said of increasing scratch cooking. “It’s a little bit more physical and laborious. It’s a lot more steps than just putting a corndog on a tray and cooking it. We’re going to try it out and see how it works.”
She would like to incorporate more baked goods from scratch.
“But that’s a lot of labor hours, too,” she said, “so that’s something I have to think about. I have a budget.”
She emphasized that achieving this goal isn’t a sure thing given current market conditions.
“Hopefully we can,” she said. “But with supply chain issues that we have and things like that, I don’t know how this next year is going to go.”
The district has been receiving help from the government, as well as waivers through the pandemic.
“Those are ending this school year, but they might come back around,” she said. “I’m not sure. It depends on what Congress does and how they vote. We might just have to get what we get. That’s kind of what we faced through the pandemic, but it’s still trickling down, and it might even get worse before it gets better.”
In addition to scratch-cooking, Walker also wants to return to choices.
“Through the pandemic, we just cooked one thing, and that was it at the grade schools,” she recalled. “They didn’t have a choice, but we’ll probably bring choices back.”
She credited her team, which at full staff consists of nine members, for making the whole operation run. It’s not quite at full staff yet but is coming close. Interviews are currently underway for the assistant cook job, and the head/cook secretary role opened Sept. 2 due to a resignation.
“They’re so wonderful,” she said. “They’ve worked through the pandemic and continue to come in to work with a smile on their face. They find it rewarding being able to feed the kids in our community. If you aren’t in the food industry, you don’t really have an idea of how hard it actually is. But it’s really rewarding because at the end of the day, you know that there are some kids in our community for whom our breakfast and lunch that we serve to them are the only meals they eat.
“It’s a very physical job,” she added. “Sometimes it’s physically exhausting to put that much food together. But the end result and watching the kids eat and enjoy what you cook is the best part.”
Walker described her team-leadership style as collaborative.
“I want them to be involved, and their opinions and things like that,” she said. “Because at the end of the day, if your team is not good, then you can’t run a kitchen. There’s just no way.”
What she enjoys most about cooking is watching people eat and enjoy her food. She’s also motivated to provide healthy items for children.
“There’s such a high percentage of obesity in the United States,” she said, “and it would be nice to combat that with the food that we serve.”
Walker’s family includes her three sons and husband, Brad. In her free time, she enjoys camping, riding in side-by-sides, reading, family and, of course, cooking.
“When you get together and everyone sits down and has conversations over your food and you can see that they’re enjoying it,” she said, “it brings a smile to my face.”