‘Talking bananas’ inspire students

Early each morning, while students who attend Kingston Elementary in Virginia Beach, Virginia, are still asleep, school cafeteria manager Stacey Truman sits at her desk and picks up a banana.

Actually, 60 bananas. Sometimes, bunches more. For the next 45 minutes, Truman patiently writes messages of hope on each banana with a black marker:

“Not all those who wander are lost,” she’ll write on one.

“If you can dream it, you can achieve it,” she’ll print on another.

On she goes (“You get what you give” and “Never give up”), until she has filled several trays with what students call “talking bananas” — a lunch choice offering both positivity and potassium.

Truman, 35, who has worked in Kingston’s cafeteria for nine years, honed her banana-writing skills on messages that she tucked into lunchboxes for her two daughters, Mackenzie, 10, and Kayleigh, 7. Last month, she decided that the kids at Kingston might find the idea appealing as well.

“I want them to succeed in life and have an awesome day at school,” she said. “Whenever I can put a smile on all of those little faces, I’ve done my job.”

Although only about 10 percent of Kingston’s 540 students put bananas on their trays each day, many more have found Truman’s daily words of wisdom delightful, said the school’s principal, Sharon Shewbridge.

“She’s helped the kids to make healthier choices,” Shewbridge said. “But it’s more than that. Stacey genuinely cares and wants them to know they are loved. What I especially appreciate is that she does this without being directed or asked.”

Truman, who lives in Moyock, North Carolina, near the Virginia line, leaves Stacey Truman, a school cafeteria manager in Virginia, produced this first batch of “talking bananas” last month. her house every weekday at 4:45 a.m. and drives almost an hour to Kingston Elementary. Her husband, Zachery Truman, a computer tech, helps get their girls ready in the mornings, “because I’m not there when they wake up,” she said. For almost two years when her girls were younger, Stacey Truman also worked nights as a waitress because her family needed additional income to pay their bills.

“My girls sacrificed because I only saw them on the weekend, other than when I’d sneak in while they were sleeping to kiss them on the forehead,” she said. “When I was getting their lunches ready the night before, I started writing little notes on their bananas to let them know I was thinking of them and wished I could be there.”

A longtime collector of motivational sayings, Truman confessed that she gets a little help now from Google so that she’ll always have a large supply of fresh material.

“To see the kids’ faces light up when they choose their bananas is my reward,” said Truman. “And now, kids who bring lunches from home are coming in with talking bananas from their parents. I really love that.”

She is thinking of expanding her produce scribblings.

“Why not emoji oranges?”