Pie sale nets $4,000 for Jackson Heights Honor Flight

At Jackson Heights High School, food service director Carrie Harris and cook Liz Rostetter can be found making school breakfasts and lunches for hungry Cobras from day to day.

But Harris and Rostetter have also added the task of making pies and cinnamon rolls as fund-raising items for Jackson Heights’ Honor Flight program, and a recent pie sale, dubbed “Pies For A Purpose,” raised $4,000 for the program.

“Liz and I find that it’s our therapy,” said Harris of the recent pie fund-raiser, in which 200 apple and pumpkin pies were put together from scratch in a five-day period to help raise funds to send local veterans and JHHS students acting as their guardians to Washington, D.C.

It wasn’t the first time that the two lunch ladies put together sweet treats for Jackson Heights’ Honor Flight program, as Harris noted the JHHS lunch crew assembled pies and cinnamon rolls last year to raise funds for the program’s ninth trip to the nation’s capital this past June.

“We sold more pies this time,” said Harris of the recent effort to fund the school’s upcoming 10th Honor Flight, set for June of 2024.

In addition to lunch crew members Deb Potter, Dawn Brown and Angie Chalmers, Harris and Rostetter also got some help with JHHS students, including Dawson Cochren, Haddlea Kilpatrick, Michaela Hutfles, Emirson Fritz and Constance McAlpine, in marketing and selling the pies.

“We had a few of the students come in if they had a free hour, and they folded and labeled the pie boxes for us,” Harris said.

Harris also noted that with the recent pie sale, there were only two flavors involved because JHHS Principal Derek Smith “only asked us about a week and a half before Thanksgiving if we could do that” and especially because the pies were made from scratch.

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