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ProStart® is back
Bonney Lake High School earns spot at Nationals after winning the 2022 Invitational in Spokane
Story and photos by Lisa Leinberger The competition was hot at the Davenport Grand Hotel in Spokane as the hotel welcomed the 2022 ProStart Invitational.
For the first time since 2019, Washington ProStart teams battled for culinary dominance with a trip to Washington, D.C., on the line. Six teams joined the spirited competition: Bonney Lake High School, Bonney Lake Newport High School 1, Bellevue Newport High School 2, Bellevue Ferris High School, Spokane North Central High School, Spokane Lewis and Clark High School, Spokane
ProStart is a hands-on, real-world career-connected learning program where students are mentored by industry leaders. Students not only receive career and technical education credits, but their industry mentors also open doors for them when they are ready to enter the workforce.
The culinary skills competition is not for the faint of heart. Each team has 60 minutes to complete a meal consisting of an appetizer, main course and dessert. They must do it without electricity or running water. And not only do they have to rely on propane stoves, they use hand-cranked blenders and ice cream machines.
The students must also display their knife skills and demonstrate what they know about sanitation, kitchen safety and teamwork.
Ingenuity is also important as students must problem-solve to make sure all their meals are cooked within the allowed 60 minutes. The students from Bonney Lake High School stood out when they placed a metal tray over their propane burner to fit more than one pot on the flame at once.
In addition to the culinary skills curriculum, ProStart offers a management curriculum. Newport High sent the only management team to this year’s invitational, winning an automatic trip to the national competition in Washington, D.C.
Cynthia Monroe has been the culinary arts instructor at the NewTech Skills Center in Spokane for four years. This year was the first time she was a judge for the competition with the tough job of tasting desserts. competition, adding that she was also looking for consistency in the plating of the dish. She noted that baking is different from savory cooking.
“A recipe is a formula in baking,” she said, noting the science behind it.
Teaching culinary arts to students through the pandemic has been a tough job for teachers. Ashley Grow has been at Ferris High School for three years, and she described the last two of them as intense. Students took her course because they wanted to cook, but they had to meet over Zoom or Teams. She ended up sending a monthly kit to the students or the recipes to parents so the students could cook alongside her over their computers.
Grow’s team didn’t decide to compete until January. In a normal year, they would have committed and started practicing much sooner. Student Aahanah Fischer was the deciding factor. A senior this year, Fischer competed in ProStart when she was a freshman and really
Bonney Lake High School
Newport High Team 1 North Central
wanted to do it one more time.
“I told her we can do it, but you have to take leadership,” Grow said. Fischer came through. She designed the menu, and she taught the team the rules. It was extra challenging because the team didn’t have a mentor chef this year. Grow said she would have felt bad asking a chef to participate when the industry had to struggle so hard during the pandemic. But Fischer already runs her own catering business.
“She’s pretty passionate about it,” Grow said.
As the only team in the management competition, Newport High School had the opportunity during the invitational to learn what to improve upon before heading to the national competition.
“We want to see you come back with some big championships,” Phil Costello, owner-operator of Zip’s Drive-In in Spokane, told the students. Costello was joined at the ProStart Invitational by Brian Moreno, the owner-operator of McDonald’s in Othello. Bonney Lake High School took home first place and earned the opportunity to compete in Washington, D.C., in May. Newport High Team 1 came in second place, and North Central came in third.
Over Mother’s Day weekend, Bonney Lake High School took eighth place in the national competition. Newport High School’s management team came in 32nd place. ■
