When my first children's book was published
in 2001,
I returned to my old elementary school
to talk to the students about being an author
and an illustrator,
and when I was setting up my slide projector
in the cafetorium,
I looked across the room,
and there she was:
my old lunch lady.
She was still there at the school
and she was busily preparing lunches for the day.
So I approached her to say hello,
and I said, "Hi, Jeanne! How are you?"
And she looked at me, and I could tell
that she recognized me,
but she couldn't quite place me, and she looked at me and she said,
"Steven Krosoczka?"
And I was amazed that she knew I was a Krosoczka,
but Steven is my uncle who is 20 years older than I am,
and she had been his lunch lady when he was a kid.
And she started telling me about her grandkids,
and that blew my mind.
My lunch lady had grandkids,
and therefore kids,
and therefore left school at the end of the day?
I thought she lived in the cafeteria
with the serving spoons.
I had never thought about any of that before.
Well, that chance encounter inspired my imagination,
and I created the Lunch Lady graphic novel series,
a series of comics about a lunch lady
who uses her fish stick nunchucks
to fight off evil cyborg substitutes,
a school bus monster, and mutant mathletes,
and the end of every book,
they get the bad guy with their hairnet,
and they proclaim, "Justice is served!"
(Laughter) (Applause)
And it's been amazing, because the series
was so welcomed into the reading lives of children,
and they send me the most amazing letters
and cards and artwork.
And I would notice as I would visit schools,
the lunch staff would be involved in the programming
in a very meaningful way.
And coast to coast,
all of the lunch ladies told me the same thing:
"Thank you for making a superhero in our likeness."
Because the lunch lady has not been treated
very kindly in popular culture over time.
But it meant the most to Jeanne.
When the books were first published,
I invited her to the book launch party,
and in front of everyone there,
everyone she had fed over the years,
I gave her a piece of artwork and some books.
And two years after this photo was taken,
she passed away,
and I attended her wake,
and nothing could have prepared me for what I saw there,
because next to her casket was this painting,
and her husband told me it meant so much to her
that I had acknowledged her hard work,
I had validated what she did.
And that inspired me to create a day
where we could recreate that feeling
in cafeterias across the country:
School Lunch Hero Day, a day where kids
can make creative projects for their lunch staff.
And I partnered with the School Nutrition Association,
and did you know that a little over 30 million kids
participate in school lunch programs every day.
That equals up to a little over five billion lunches
made every school year.
And the stories of heroism go well beyond
just a kid getting a few extra chicken nuggets
on their lunch tray.
There is Ms. Brenda in California,
who keeps a close eye on every student that comes through her line
and then reports back to the guidance counselor
if anything is amiss.
There are the lunch ladies in Kentucky
who realized that 67 percent of their students
relied on those meals every day,
and they were going without food over the summer,
so they retrofitted a school bus
to create a mobile feeding unit,
and they traveled around the neighborhoods
feedings 500 kids a day during the summer.
And kids made the most amazing projects.
I knew they would.
Kids made hamburger cards
that were made out of construction paper.
They took photos of their lunch lady's head
and plastered it onto my cartoon lunch lady
and fixed that to a milk carton
and presented them with flowers.
And they made their own comics,
starring the cartoon lunch lady
alongside their actual lunch ladies.
And they made thank you pizzas,
where every kid signed a different topping
of a construction paper pizza.
For me, I was so moved by the response
that came from the lunch ladies,
because one woman said to me, she said,
"Before this day, I felt like I was
at the end of the planet at this school.
I didn't think that anyone noticed us down here."
Another woman said to me,
"You know, what I get out of this
is that what I do is important."
And of course what she does is important.
What they all do is important.
They're feeding our children every single day,
and before a child can learn,
their belly needs to be full,
and these women and men
are working on the front lines to create
an educated society.
So I hope that
you don't wait for School Lunch Hero Day
to say thank you to your lunch staff,
and I hope that you remember
how powerful a thank you can be.
A thank you can change a life.
It changes the life of the person who receives it,
and it changes the life of the person
who expresses it.
Thank you.
(Applause)