Courtney Greco, 16, a senior at the Regional Career and Technical Center, wraps food for the Thanksgiving meals.

The Providence Journal / Bill Murphy

COVENTRY — Years ago, when a blizzard blanketed the town the day before Thanksgiving, John Rapoza had a big problem.

Inside the Coventry High School culinary arts program kitchen, where Rapoza teaches, it was just him and pounds of turkey and trimmings prepared by his students. The meals, all 200 of them stored in tidy plastic containers, were ready to go to the dozens of senior citizens and people with disabilities who had no one to cook for them, or share Thanksgiving dinner with.

“They canceled school that day,” Rapoza said. “We were all ready. I showed up early. We had no students to roll it out.”

It’s a problem that Rapoza hopes he won’t need to deal with for this year’s Turkey to Go Program, an outreach effort with the town’s Human Services Department. For 10 years, culinary art students from the high school’s Regional Career and Technical Center have basted and browned turkeys to create the traditional meal.

Yesterday, several students portioned out the food to create 200 meals. In all, 66 students from grades 10 through 12 spent the better part of last week tackling the mammoth cooking effort. The menu includes turkey, dressing, gravy, butternut squash, mashed potatoes, peas, cranberry sauce, homemade rolls, plus desserts, including pumpkin pie and strudel. The meals will be assembled on Monday and ready for delivery, which will be handled by social workers, by Wednesday.

The prep list called for 200 pounds of turkey, provided by the town’s Human Services Department. The rest of the food — some 60 pounds of mashed potatoes, 50 pounds of freshly peeled butternut squash, 9 gallons of stuffing and gravy, and 12 pounds of pumpkin for pie — comes from donations and from the local food bank.

For many of the students, cooking the lavish dinner for so many is a challenge they willingly embrace.

“The sprit of giving is good,” said James Curtin, 17, who worked with Joseph Moreau, 17. The students placed pieces of dough crumbles on top of cherry preserves to make a strudel dessert called cherry crisp. Moreau said his family does the traditional big meal.

“This is helping to bring a little bit of spirit to people who are less fortunate and who can’t get to their families,” he said.

Patricia Shurtleff, director of human services in Coventry, coordinates the delivery effort once the students are done. She first approached the school a decade ago. The students’ work frees up resources for the department to prepare Thanksgiving baskets for families in need.

“It’s just terrific. It’s more or less to say that someone is thinking about you today,” Shurtleff said. “We give them two full dinners; one for Thanksgiving Day and one for leftovers. They are in their own homes … apartments, they live on their own.”

Courtney Greco, 16, mixed fresh pumpkin in a bowl amid a sweet ginger aroma. She said she thinks of her school work as her way of giving back to the community. “They don’t really have people to make them Thanksgiving dinner or have someone to have it with.

“Someone else will have the joy of delivering it,” she added. “If I could have been there to see their faces, it would have been pretty cool.”

lsparks@projo.com