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Liberty Hill culinary students prepare food and friendships

After four years in the culinary program, students say that they have lifelong friends that they otherwise wouldn't have had.

LIBERTY HILL, Texas — High school is a chance for many of us to make lifelong bonds, and some students in Liberty Hill found those bonds inside the schools' culinary program.

It was a prep day inside Liberty Hill High School, and Chef Travis Hawthorne is making sure these students have everything ready for their next catering gig.

"Make sure we use that season salt," he explained.

"Breakfast, lunch, dinner and hors d'oeuvres for 140 people I want to say,"
 explained Senior Alex Urben. "So it will be a long, long, long day tomorrow." 

Urben is one of the students who's been in the school culinary program for the past four years.

"All of us in order to make it to practicum have to be in the program for four years," explained Abigail Perera.

The class isn't exactly what these students expected when coming to high school.

"High school, no way, I thought it would be a lot of normal course work, boring stuff like I've always been told," said Urben. "It's a big part of my day, it's sort of an escape of sitting down, take notes, study, next class. It's a nice break in that flow."

But it's where they want to be.

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"I think all of us can say that we love the class," added Perera. "Because it's like first period and we have this class in like six and seventh and already half our class will be in here."

"Some people have sports, some have clubs – we have culinary," said Urben. "We have our family in here that we've grown close to after working in the kitchen for thousands of hours over the past four years."

Some of the students don't plan on moving forward in a career in the culinary. Urben and Perera both, for example.

"Honestly, computer hardware and electrical engineering, so this is an amazing passion I have but it's more of a hobby and something I can do in my free time," said Urben. 

"I've applied to fashion school," explained Perera.

But these relationships are actually what they've been preparing this whole class.

"We've all made friendships that will last and we will want to reach out to each other when the years go on," said Perera.

The class not only does catering jobs like they were preparing for when we did our story, but also they compete in competitions between other school culinary programs.

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