Benny Westcott
After 18 years serving as the Sweet Home School District’s nutrition services director, Milli Horton has retired from that role, which she started in the summer of 2004. Her last official day was June 24.
She began her career at the district after the previous director, Pam Leslie, told her about the job and convinced her to apply. Horton was working at Wiley Creek Community Assisted Living at the time as its dietary manager, running the kitchen.
At the district, Horton worked out of a central kitchen at Sweet Home High School with about 9-10 team members, preparing food for all the schools in the district.
“I found out that I really loved working with people,” she said. “I like working with parents. I love seeing kids get fed. It was just fun being a really useful part of the community. I made sure that the kids got fed really good food, and took care of ordering and making sure that everybody got a lunch and a breakfast every day.”
She said that during the pandemic over the last two years, her kitchen has handed out thousands of meals, both lunch and breakfast.
“It was really interesting when COVID-19 happened, because even though that was fairly recent, we found that food was really, really important to people,” she said. “Just tons of food went out of here, for people that might not have had it otherwise.”
“We know now that food really matters for learning and being able to concentrate,” Horton said. “And there’s a lot of people that are in need and can’t provide that for their kids.”
Back at the beginning of her tenure, working for the district was a lot to adjust to.
“It was a huge learning curve because I had no idea of what happened in a school setting,” Horton said. “I had never done anything like this. There’s so many policies and regulations that you have to make sure that you’re abiding by, and it can be very challenging. And it’s something that’s always changing, and it changed probably more in the last 15 years than it has ever changed before. It’s way less focused on the food part and more on policies and regulations, which is kind of a shame.”
“You would think you would spend most of your time developing new recipes and getting to do some of that hands-on stuff, but a lot of your time is taken up with paperwork and documentation and stuff like that,” she noted. “It just takes an enormous amount of time. There are times when I’d stay two or three hours after everybody left, because it needed to get done, and it couldn’t get done in the day while everybody’s here.”
The job didn’t come without struggles for Horton.
“I got pretty discouraged a few times and had to be talked into hanging on and going forward,” she said. “Because at times it can be hard working with people and trying to please everybody. I had a really good supervisor (District Business Manager Kevin Strong). He was kind of my rock, and talked me down off of the bridge a couple times.”
She decided to stick with it.
“For one thing I needed the job. That’s always an important part of it,” she said. “But I didn’t want to quit. I wanted to finish out strong. And I knew there probably wasn’t anything I’d enjoy more really, and I kind of had to change my mindset. I had to look at all of the pros of this job and make a decision. Do I like this job? Do I want to stay? Yes I do.”
She noted that her work shifted throughout her time with the district. “It changed a lot, because it became more complicated,” she recalled. “There were a lot more regulations implemented by the Obama administration, which were good for nutrition and making sure that the kids got more whole grains and fruits and vegetables and things like that. It introduced kids to things that they might not have had otherwise.”
Even with all of the necessary desk work that came with the role, Horton emphasized the importance of people skills above all.
“It was more working with people and trying to make things happen than anything else,” she said. “Yeah, there was a lot of paperwork involved nowadays and a lot of computer time, but often the day is spent just putting out fires sometimes. You have to learn how to work with people and facilitate a really good environment for a team to work. I couldn’t do anything if I didn’t have a good team. That was probably one of the most important things – building a good team.”
She also transitioned into stepping back to a more managerial role.
“I love to cook, and in my previous jobs I did a lot of hands-on cooking,” she noted. “But in this one, I had to learn to stand back and give people the tools they needed to do the job, and kind of see what they were skilled at and try to use that to our advantage. I feel like the last few years we have really tightened up our team, and I feel like it’s probably the best it’s ever been.”
Horton, who was born in Lebanon and graduated from Sweet Home High School in 1973, got her start in cooking at the Tyler Bros. Logging Co. in southeast Alaska when she was 18. She spent 12 years there from 1974 to 1986, as the camp moved from one location to another.
“That was kind of my introduction to the world of cooking to please people and just watching people enjoy food,” she said.
Horton’s dad and his brothers moved up to Alaska in 1967, when Horton was 11, after seeing an advertisement in a local newspaper that noted that loggers were needed up in Alaska.
“They were very adventurous, and they decided they’d go check it out,” Horton said. “That was the beginning of total life change for a lot of families in Sweet Home, because a lot of the people that worked for them also went up there.”
Horton visited Alaska many times as a kid, even at one point attending school in a one room school house at the camp for a couple years. She said her mom didn’t much care for camp life, however, so the family moved back to Oregon after a few years. But Horton returned as an adult. Her brother, Wes Tyler, still lives in Hoonah, Alaska, owning and operating Icy Straits Lumber Co.
After high school Horton attended Lane Community College for part of a year and Lutheran Bible Institute of Seattle (which became Trinity Lutheran College in 1999 before dissolving in 2016), also for part of a year. She didn’t graduate from either because “I didn’t really know what I was wanting to do at that point,” she said.
After over a decade in Alaska, Horton and her first husband decided to move to Oregon, settling on Sweet Home.
“We were going to start a family, and we wanted to be closer to my parents,” Horton said. “We just thought that it would be a better place to raise kids. Although in retrospect, it was probably a pretty wonderful place to be in those logging camps.”
After arriving in Sweet Home, Horton started working for her parents as a secretary for DNS logging, staying in that role for 10 years.
She started running the kitchen at Wiley Creek in 1999, staying there for four and a half years. During that time she completed a two-year online dietary manager certification course from the University of North Dakota, graduating in 2002.
In her time working for the Sweet Home School District, Horton helped design a kitchen for the Junior High, which now has its own cooks and has been cooking in-house, starting this past school year. “It’s a really beautiful little kitchen, and that is something I’m really proud of – the fact that now we can actually cook there, and we can make great food and good smells,” she said. “I think the kids really enjoy that. I think it adds to the ambience of the school setting, just to have those good smells in the hallway.”
Despite enjoying her work at the district, Horton, 66, knew it was time to hang it up. “I just realized that there’s a time and a place for retiring, and it’s here,” she said. “I really want to spend more time with my grandkids.” She has two that live next door, the children of her son Matt Bostrom, and two that live in Woodburn, the kids of her other son, Ian Bostrom.
Along with spending more time with family, Horton said she is looking forward to working in her garden and potentially traveling to Hawaii, Alaska and the Mediterranean with her husband, Larry Horton, a former Sweet Home School District superintendent.
The district’s next nutrition services director is Amber Walker, who has worked in the district kitchen for nine years.
“She’s probably one of the very best cooks we’ve ever had,” Horton said of Walker. “I think she’s going to do a great job. She has lots of great new ideas and lots of energy, and I’m looking forward to seeing what she does.”
Looking back on her own time with the district, Horton said “I feel like I did the very best that I could, and I don’t have any regrets. I put everything into it that I could, and I feel like we built a very strong team, and in the process we fed a lot of kids a lot of meals. I feel like that’s probably our greatest achievement. And I wouldn’t say that I really achieved anything on my own. I couldn’t have done it without everybody else.”