Beloved Windsor lunch lady retires after 28 years

When Lisa Hillman first arrived at Cali Calmécac Language Academy in 1992, she hadn’t even been looking for a job — and she didn’t speak Spanish, the primary language at the Windsor school.

“Back then, you just asked your friends if you wanted to work with them,” said the 69-year-old Sonoma County native, who received such an invitation from a friend at church to join her at the school. “I never had to really interview for my job.”

Much has changed in the 28 years that Hillman has remained a kitchen employee at Cali Calmécac, from her job title to the size of the dual immersion school and its place in the community of Windsor. But Hillman’s love for the interactions with the students she feeds has sustained itself through her career, which ends this month when she leaves the kitchen for the last time.

“The pandemic clinched it,” she said. “It’s no fun putting food in boxes.”

School staff said Hillman will be missed for everything from her wacky Halloween costumes to her ability to show care to students and families, even if she didn’t always know how to express herself in Spanish. The COVID-19 pandemic has made her departure from Cali Calmécac, as for other 2020 retirees, quieter than even the private lunch lady would have imagined.

“She was a trouper,” said Hilda Rizo, administrative assistant. “I’m glad that she’s been here a lot of years. She has a really good heart and she’s great with her staff.”

Hillman’s choice to work at Cali Calmécac coincided with her youngest daughter Alaina’s entrance into first grade at Brooks Elementary School. Lisa Hillman had never worked in a kitchen before, though in the beginning, her job looked somewhat similar to how it has during the pandemic: making food cooked somewhere else ready for students.

“I took over for the janitors, handing out food that got delivered from Piner High School,” she said. Another six years later, Cali Calmécac became part of the Windsor School District and a few years after that, the school built its own kitchen.

“We were handed the keys and given a menu and basic concept of how a kitchen was run, and we figured it out from there,” said Athena Holling, a member of the kitchen staff for the past 12 years. In her time working beside Hillman, the two became close friends, she said.

In her new role as the kitchen manager, Hillman ensured the menu created by the nutritionist was executed. The school didn’t have a cafeteria, so the kitchen staff had to feed multiple lunch periods of students (Cali Calmécac enrolls kindergarten through eighth grade) in a multipurpose room, Hillman said.

“It was almost like a Disneyland setting,” she said. “Because we had to move them in and move them out as fast as we could.”

It was during those years that Hillman learned the delicate art of planning which food options would be popular and how much to prepare during a given day.

“When you’re trying to make 600 lunches … you can’t always choose the right thing,” she said. “When you run out of that main article and that kid comes through the line and their face falls, it’s just a really hard thing to watch. But you can only throw away so much food.”

Of one cardinal rule, however, she is certain after nearly three decades.

“You didn’t dare run out of chicken nuggets,” she said.

Principal Sharon Ferrer said Hillman has often taken on a proactive role of advocating for her families in addition to feeding their students each weekday. If families were struggling to pay their meals bill, or Hillman thought they may be eligible to receive free or reduced-price lunch benefits, she’d head to Ferrer’s office.

“She’s always putting the kids’ needs first,” Ferrer said. “She wants to make sure they are taken care of. She’s come to me many, many times to ask for my help.”

Holling said she helped convince Hillman to don her first Halloween costume for work over a decade ago. After some cajoling, Hillman showed up to work dressed as the Tin Man — hardly an unambitious costume for someone reluctant to deck out in the first place. The kids loved it, Holling said.

“We watched her blossom from being this hardworking woman that seemed a little more quiet and reserved,” she said. “We pulled this part of Lisa out that she didn’t like the world to see.”

Cali Calmécac and other Windsor schools also changed during Hillman’s tenure as a lunch lady. Windsor residents voted to create the Windsor Unified School District in 1992, and over the next several years, the school district worked to bring its high school students back from Healdsburg High School to their home district.

Alaina Hillman was part of the fourth graduating class of Windsor High School, spending her first two years at the middle school campus while the high school campus was being completed. Her mother used to raise funds for the graduation party each year that Alaina and her cousins were attending the school.

Alaina, who now lives in Vermont, said that when her parents moved to Windsor from San Francisco, the town had little to recommend it to outsiders. Friends and family questioned the decision, she said.

Now, “it’s totally changed,” Alaina said. “And if you look at the bigger picture, how does a town grow like that if it doesn’t have people that are committed and they put roots down? (My mom is) an example of a really good person who got up and did it every day and hopefully made an impact in somebody’s life just by being there.”

Being there has looked markedly different in Lisa Hillman’s final two school years. Five months before the onset of the pandemic, Windsor was evacuated during the Kincade fire, though a valiant firefight spared the town’s homes. When the pandemic initially closed schools in March, Hillman was sent home, as she is considered high risk for a more dangerous case of COVID-19.

When she did come back to work, preparing meals for students to pick up, she was relegated to the kitchen. She tends to stay inside while the families come to pick up their meals each week. That means significantly fewer interactions with the kids, which she said have been her main source of energy all these years.

“That was the reason why I still went there,” Hillman said. “I’m going to miss that.”

Even as she considers her next steps, Hillman expects that some things won’t change. For several years, she has seen the children of former students everywhere from the breakfast and lunch line at Cali Calmécac to the grocery store, and in the small town of Windsor, those encounters are still likely to happen, and remind her of the role she once filled.

“All of us know all the kids’ names because we have to put their name in the computer,” Hillman said. “I’ll probably always be the lunch lady.”

You can reach Staff Writer Kaylee Tornay at 707-521-5250 or kaylee.tornay@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @ka_tornay.