A sweet smell from the Pinckney bakery circulates through the building and travels out the door into Lawrence schools each day.
“It’s dangerous to walk in here,” Julie Henry said, referencing the allure of fresh baked goods on any given day.
The district repurposed the former Pinckney Elementary School kitchen, where Bakery Manager John Bass and Bakery Assistant David Melody now whip up goodies daily.
They contribute to school meals at all schools, including the College and Career Center and Juvenile Detention Center Day School, with the exception of Lawrence Virtual School.
A batch of 400 brownies, a new menu item this year, had gone out Monday morning. Bass said in an interview earlier this week that since launching the bakery on Aug. 13, the district had served schools 1,296 scones, 1,050 banana muffins, 5,500 brownies, 600 dinner rolls, 3,090 dinner rolls, and 3,323 breadsticks.
New to the district, Bass had previously coached athletics and taught in other districts. Henry, director of nutrition and wellness for Lawrence Public Schools, said he and Melody have “gotten their feet under them even quicker than I would have guessed.”
“I’ve worked in a bakery for about 17 years, and I got into education for about 15, so I’m now doing ‘bakery education,’” Bass said, laughing.
The project is funded by a nearly $100,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Kansas Department of Agriculture: the Resilient Food Systems Infrastructure Program. Staffing is paid from the district’s savings realized from baking products in-house.
With the grant, the project prioritizes a partnership with local grain producers and farmers, so around half the ingredients used are local grains.
Student involvement is another key point of the project. Jenna Viscomi, administrator at Community Connections at Pinckney, said the plan is to offer C-Tran (Community Transition) students training with Bass and Melody beginning in spring 2026.
C-Tran, one of the district programs that moved into the building after the school board voted to close it and Broken Arrow Elementary, provides independent living and workplace skill building for young adults with disabilities ages 18 to 21.
“We’re shooting for second semester — allow these guys to get their feet on the ground and figure out all the bugs,” Viscomi said. “We’ll have opportunities for work experience within the bakery for several of the students. It’s gonna be great.”
Henry said the bakery will expand in the future but isn’t yet capable of replacing all the district’s grains. As opposed to frozen items previously purchased from its mainline distributor, however, the district now has more control over the nutritional quality of many of its baked goods. Opting for applesauce instead of oil, butter or eggs, for example, reduces fat and sugar content.
“If you’re making them and then serving them the next day or same day, you don’t need any of those fillers, preservatives, the things that aren’t great,” Henry said.
Each school receives one breakfast item and one lunch item from the bakery every week. The menu is staggered based on the building and grade level — and so that Melody, who’s also the truck driver, delivers six times a week instead of more than 20. One school may have dinner rolls at lunch on Tuesday and another school has them on Wednesday, for example.
The district already had mixers available and purchased two new ovens with updated features, including rotation and steaming, in addition to proof boxes and other equipment.
When the Trump administration in March ordered a freeze to the grant supporting the bakery, the KDA decided to immediately halt reimbursements. Uncertain if equipment would be reimbursed, the district put contingency plans in place.
But Pantaleon Florez III, experiential learning specialist and Farm 2 School coordinator, and Henry said the grant resumed a few weeks after the freeze. It’s currently in good standing.
If local news matters to you, please help us keep doing this work.
Don’t miss a beat … Click here to sign up for our email newsletters
Click here to learn more about our newsletters first
Maya Hodison (she/her), equity reporter, can be reached at mhodison@lawrencekstimes.com. Read more of her work for the Times here. Check out her staff bio here.
Latest Lawrence news:
Nathan Kramer / Lawrence Times
