Meara Isenberg

For Amy Saiter, President of the Lariettes Service Organization and a member for six years, spaghetti is more than just a meal. It means being able to see her daughter, senior line member Emma Saiter, dance and perform pom routines with the other Lariettes for the rest of the year- at football games, pep rallies and the national dance championships in March.

“You feel so proud watching them,” Saiter said. “They work really hard and it’s so nice seeing that result after all the work. It’s just fun seeing your kid do something they love to do.”

Every year, to make watching them dance a possibility, the Lariettes Service Organization, the Lariettes booster club, hold the Spaghetti Dinner at Coppell High School to raise money for the entire year’s events.

“It’s an event that requires everyone’s participation and we all work together from April through the whole summer,” LSO member Joey Smith, said. “But it’s great because at the end we have enough funds for the whole year.”

The 23rd Spaghetti Dinner raised more than $26,000 in total, which broke the record for the amount of funds raised in past years. It also marked a significant achievement for the Lariette girls themselves, who were responsible for selling all the dinner tickets, 11 members short of last year.

“We’ve been coming to the Spaghetti Dinner since we were really little,” senior Lariette Kara Williams said. “So it’s really cool getting to see these little kids in miniature Lariette costumes now looking up to us and saying ‘I want to be a Lariette someday too’. We’ve put a lot of effort and hard work into the event but this just makes it worth it.”

The money raised was not the only success of this year’s Spaghetti Dinner; the event also managed to bring together more than a thousand members of Coppell as a community for an evening of raffle tickets, bake sale goodies, an auction and, of course, spaghetti. Sixty of these members include Coppell’s own police department, who were specially presented with free tickets to the event by the Lariettes.

“We got together and we thought, ‘Hey, why don’t we do something for our police officers, for our community?’ Saiter said. “It’s been challenging, the issues in the news. It’s often a thankless job, to be a police officer- it goes unappreciated. So we stepped back and decided to take this opportunity to thank them for what they do.”

Several members of the police department, including Chief of Police Mac Tristan, along with members of the fire department- who arrived at CHS in a fire truck- came to the dinner.

After recent tragedies in Dallas and across the country, the police officers and the various citizens of Coppell found the dinner an opportunity to break barriers and reach out to one another. The officers were even seen mingling with the Lariettes and taking Snapchat photos with them.

“It’s just wonderful because [the Spaghetti Dinner] allows our students to not only get to know us individually but get to know the police officers as a whole,”  Diane Patterson, a police officer in Coppell for 16 years and a Student Resource Officer at CHS for six years, said. “This is another way for the police officers and the community to interact that’s a social setting. We can just eat spaghetti with them, just talk about anything in general- I mean we’re all Cowboys fans, Rangers fans. You get to know the humans inside of us.”