Mt. Edgecumbe High School students pick up turkeys in the kitchen at Centennial Hall during the school's annual Thanksgiving dinner on Wednesday. (Photo: Ed Ronco)

Sitka | It was Thanksgiving on Wednesday for students at Mt. Edgecumbe High School. On the day before Thanksgiving, the state-run boarding school in Sitka puts together a huge dinner for all of its students, every year.

On Wednesday morning, a yellow school bus pulls up to the front of Sitka’s Harrigan Centennial Hall, and students from Mt. Edgecumbe High School stream out of it. They’re moving quickly, mostly because it’s cold, but perhaps also because good things are about to happen inside this building.

“There’s 80 pies over there. We’ve got about 700 rolls,” says John Wathen, food service director at Edgecumbe. He’s been up since 5 a.m. with his staff, roasting turkeys. 40, count them, 40 turkeys. And that’s not all.

He lists off “… a couple hundred pounds of stuffing, a couple hundred pounds of mashed potatoes, 150 pounds of corn …” and then revises those estimates upward just a few minutes later, when he reaches into one of the warmers to pick up a giant (and heavy) tub of stuffing.

Wathen has been in this job for 23 years, and believe it or not, making all that food goes pretty smoothly. By now, they have this down to a science. And when it’s time to eat, and the tables are called up, it’s quite orderly.

The turkeys come out of tin foil and go onto platters, the mashed potatoes and stuffing are put into bowls that the students hold as they come through the line, and they all make it back to their seats, food intact.

At one of the tables, Mt. Edgecumbe High School Superintendent Randy Hawk is carving a turkey to varying degrees of success, and passing it out to the students in his “extended family.”

The “extended family” is how Edgecumbe refers to groups the students are in – a handful of kids from all over the state, matched up with a staff member or a community member’s family. They dine with their extended family every other Thursday, and then there’s this, with hundreds of people all together in one room, sharing a meal.

“Well, part of it is, the kids are away from home, so we try to make it a home environment because these are some things they miss, being here at Edgecumbe,” Hawk says. “So we try to fill those voids by giving them family-type activities that make them feel like they aren’t so far away from home.”

And to some degree, it works, says sophomore Felisha Orsborn. She says this year’s gathering is a little smaller than last year’s, which was her first Edgecumbe Thanksgiving.

It’s a good menu, with turkey and cranberry sauce, and potatoes, “and some really good rolls,” Orsborn says, but really, it’s about people.

“It feels good, when you can’t go home-home, that they have this for us,” she says.

“Home-home,” as opposed to Edgecumbe-home, is in Anchorage.

There’s also entertainment – from the school’s rock band, Native dance groups, and sophomore Doug McClenahan, who is tuning his ukulele in the lobby, in advance of playing “Hey Soul Sister” by train on stage.

The performances take place toward the end of the meal, but throughout, even while everyone is sitting down and eating, one woman is very hard to keep up with. Her name is Paula Clayton, she’s a counselor at the school, and she coordinates this dinner.

It’s a team effort, she says, full of students and staff who work together to pull it off.

“It’s good to see the hard work you put into it pay off and have the kids smiling and enjoying each other, and the staff too,” she says.

She hasn’t had a chance to sit down and eat any of the food.

“That’s tomorrow,” she says.