Carson High's Reynolds leaving a legacy of success, love

Memories.

They are what Penny Reynolds takes with her as she approaches her last day at Carson High School.

The 31-year veteran teacher is retiring from the Carson City School District at the end of this week, leaving behind a legacy of unprecedented success in the CHS Culinary Arts Department.

Reynolds took a brand-new, fledgling department and turned it into one of the nation's most respected high school culinary programs.

Several state culinary champions have developed in the department over the past 17 years and gone on to compete in the national championships; an impressive feat for a program that has existed for less than 20 years.

Even more impressive is that it was built from the ground up by an educator who never expected to be a culinary arts teacher.

Reynolds, a Carson City native and alumnus of Carson High School, went through the school system here, graduating a Senator in 1979 and attending Baylor University in Waco, Texas.

She returned to the state capital with a bachelor's degree, majoring in education and minoring in science.

Reynolds landed her first teaching job at Eagle Valley Middle School, where she taught biology and home and career skills for 11 years.

After more than a decade at EVMS, though, Reynolds decided to try something else within the Carson City School District.

"I was walking out of school one day and decided middle school's not for me," she recalled. "Our principal at the time was walking out at the same time, and he said to me, 'Penny, do you want a job?' I said, 'Yeah, sure, what do you got for me?' He said, 'What do you want to do?' That's what got me to the high school."

Reynolds took over as head of Carson High's all-new Culinary Arts Department in 1998, along with its conceptual competitive cooking program.

She soon discovered that teaching high school students was the right fit for her.

"High school is where my heart and passion really was," she said.

During the first year in charge of culinary arts, Reynolds spent little time teaching in the kitchen. Instead, she managed student activities and taught science while writing grants for her new department.

The fruits of that administrative labor, she said, was a brand-new commercial-grade kitchen more appropriate for a competitive program than the six individual home-economic kitchen stations that had been the original installations since the high school had opened.

"We received $150,000 from the National Restaurant Association for a new kitchen," she said. "That sounds like a lot, but doesn't do much when its equipment and such."

Nonetheless, a new commercial-grade stainless steel stove was installed, and a natural gas line was added to the upstairs kitchen area along with a new back wall.

The first culinary class started in 1999, Reynolds said, with 125 students spread out over five Culinary I class sessions.

Two years later, the kitchen was expanded to include baking and hot foods areas.

"We knocked the last wall out to have the kitchen and restaurant together," Reynolds said.

In 2002, a separate classroom was added to the program when Reynolds decided to use the empty space once occupied by ROTC.

CHS culinary students began competing in 1999, Reynolds said, through Skills USA (otherwise known as VICA) not just in culinary, but across 73 different competitions.

"It's all of the vocational positions across the United States," she said.

The cooking competitions through Skills USA are individual and focused on two categories, Reynolds said, hot foods and commercial baking.

As commercial bakers, students have six hours to bake bread, rolls, cookies, muffins, a pie and decorate a cake.

In the hot foods competition, students are given five hours to debone or defabricate a chicken, Reynolds said, demonstrating eight different knife cuts. They also must prepare an appetizer, an entree, and a dessert.

Both competitions include a written test that goes along with the skills demonstration, she said.

Finally, there is a leadership skills competition through Skills USA, Reynolds said, that emphasizes more of the vocational aspect of culinary arts. It features a job interview and demonstration, including five minutes to teach somebody "on the job" a specific culinary skill.

The gold medal winners in each category of skills competition then automatically qualify for the national finals event held each spring.

Reynolds said CHS culinary students have gone on to national competition eight times in the past twelve years.

But that's only half of the competitions that CHS culinary students participate in, Reynolds said.

The other portion is sanctioned by the National Restaurant Association (NRA), which developed Pro-Start competition based on the particular needs of the restaurant industry.

"When a student finishes the curriculum, they will have earned three national certifications and 400 hours of paid work experience," Reynolds said. "They also receive a $2,500 scholarship from the NRA to continue their education in the restaurant/hospitality field."

Pro-Start, she said, is a team competition centered around an environment where teamwork is essential for success.

Teams have one hour to create a pre-planned menu and prepare a three-course meal using only two eight-foot tables and two burners, Reynolds said.

"You have to bring all of your own equipment, all of your own food, and you have one hour start to finish to present dishes to the judges," she said.

Pro-Start also features a management competition teams are given a set of demographics to design a restaurant and a menu around that data before final presentation to the judging panel.

This school year, 38 students competed in six different competitions, Reynolds said, including Regional Skills, State Skills, Regional Pro-Start, and State Pro-Start.

Reynolds said being a part of such as successful program at CHS is among her signature accomplishments as a teacher.

"This is a really proud thing to be leaving behind," she said. "It's pretty neat to be elite, and that's how it's going to go down big time in CHS history here."

The CHS Culinary Arts program has posted 15 state championship titles over 17 years, Reynolds said, and first cracked the list of the top 100 high school culinary programs in the United States three years ago.

CHS has ranked within the nation's top fifty programs for the last two years, Reynolds said, a feat no other high school culinary program in Nevada has attained. These include specialized vocational high schools where culinary arts is all students do over the course of a school day.

"They have a time advantage, equipment advantage, and fundraising advantage," Reynolds said. "The dollar difference is huge between Las Vegas and here."

But pride of competition is not why Reynolds spent all those years building a championship-caliber program from the ground up.

It's for the students, she said.

"The reason why I compete with these kids and put my energy into it is because of the scholarship dollars these kids get," she said.

At least three of her students over the years have received full tuition scholarships to Johnson Wells University, she said. Several others have gone on to further their culinary education after high school as well.

Culinary students have done more than merely learn a new academic concept, Reynolds said. They've been learning a vocational trade that prepares them for careers as culinary or restaurant professionals.

"If you're dedicated enough to be here practicing the amount of hours they are, when it goes to doing a practical test at the university, you know your skills," she said. "And when you walk into a job, you can outshine the other candidates with this experience."

To say Reynolds will be missed by all who have worked with or for her over the past 31 years is an understatement.

A retirement party was held for her on May 22 at Bowers Mansion in Washoe Valley, to which at least 280 people had RSVP'd.

Reynolds teared up when asked what she will miss most about teaching in the Carson City School District, and particularly at CHS for the past 20 years.

"The kids," she said. "Definitely the kids."

It's the students, after all, who have given Reynolds her fondest memories of teaching in the state capital for more than three decades.

"My fondest memories are watching the growth in these kids, to see them coming in the first day, having absolutely no clue what they're doing, fumbling, using the wrong side of the knife to cut, and then leaving here really proud with a product they can do," she said. "The neatest thing is having the students come back, years later, that you really didn't know, but you really hit them. It's seeing that they are out there, and they are making a success out of their own lives."

Reynolds describes herself as an active person and her teaching style as hands-on, requiring movement from one task to another. In a vocational setting, these characteristics have been invaluable assets to the CHS culinary program.

"I don't sit behind a desk--I don't have a desk," Reynolds said laughing. "I move around, I run around, they never can see me because I'm so short."

Although book work comes with the territory of any classroom, Reynolds said she tries to keep it at a minimum, because she feels students learn more by doing.

"They don't learn from a book, they've got to touch, they've got to feel," she said. "So you make up crazy labs, you make up crazy things to make stuff work. You look for new ways to get the harder concepts across to them."

She said doing the work, and not merely absorbing new academic concepts, is essential for learning a new trade.

"I try to make everything we do hands on, absolutely everything," she said. "There's those days when you've got to do book work and the technical stuff to gain the general knowledge, but you follow up immediately with something hands on, whether it's me doing a demo, making a mistake during the demo, to show that we all make mistakes. To show them that mistakes are okay, you just got to know how to fix those mistakes."

Mistakes are part of learning, Reynolds said, especially in a vocational environment.

"It's okay to make a mistake," she said. "If they can tell me what went wrong, their grade's going to go up because they won't make the same mistake again. Or, if they do, they can fix it before turning the assignment in."

Practicality sums up the dynamics and the curriculum of Reynolds' program. Even the mathematics that her students do every day has a useful purpose.

"Math is one of the subjects many students struggle with, and we do math in here every single day," she said. "They leave here being able to do a cost analysis of a recipe. They can take a menu in a restaurant and tell where a mistake was made in the math on the menus, because they use it from day one and they're not afraid of the numbers."

The bottom line, Reynolds said, is to prepare students for the rigors of not only a career in the working world, but also for real life.

"It's the fact that they've got a life, and I've taught them skills, not just being in the kitchen, but life skills, and I hope that everything we do in here reaches the real life," she said. "They know how to interview, they know what a time-crunch is, they know that if you put the extra effort out, the extra efforts going to come back."

But despite the mechanics and pragmatism of her program, Reynolds also said she has taught as a human being first.

"There are so many people that put their walls up around them and don't let the kids know who you are," she said. "You can't teach that way. We're all human. You've got to be a person, to be honest and kind. You just got to do it."

Like any other teacher, Reynolds has faced her share of challenging students that tried her patience and her will to the brink. But she credits student turn-arounds and their "a-ha" moments for her resiliency.

"What has kept me going is those kids who thought they had no future, but you keep prodding at them, just to be able to pull that little bit out of them and to see that "aha" moment in them and they got it," she said. "They got the whole picture."

And Reynolds said she has no plans of stopping completely yet. She is retiring from CCSD, she said, but not from teaching.

"I am not done teaching," she said. "Teaching is still in my heart, and I think it will be forever and ever."

Instead, Reynolds said she is moving on to teach at a charter high school out of state. It was a decision she said was made in mid-May.

"I have accepted a position elsewhere," she said. "I will continue teaching, but not in the state of Nevada."

No replacement for her has been named yet, Reynolds said, and CHS won't know until interviews are completed.

"We do not know who's stepping in here yet," she said. "The school district has not interviewed yet for the position. It's still open."

Reynolds said CHS had hoped to find someone before the end of the school year in order to make a smoother transition, but that didn't happen.

Although she is moving away, Reynolds said Carson City is her hometown and always will be. She plans to return one day.

"Where we're going is not the end. It's the next chapter of what you've got to do," she said. "Leaving is not forever. We're leaving for what's the best for us for the next five or six years."

Reynolds said she owes much to the community she has been a part of for most of her life, and she will never forget the support and the generosity of the people who live here.

"Carson City has been amazing-- the people, the employers, the local civic organizations, just everyone who has been supportive of not just me and my program, but of CHS in general," she said. "The support is here, big time. Just a big thank you to Carson for letting my dream to grow in to where it's at."