Less than a month ago, Matt Drolz was on Heinz Field as an offensive tackle for Springdale High School in the WPIAL football championships.

On Thursday, he was playing a different sort of position: kitchen manager for the school's annual holiday tea.

"I need a list of what we need," he shouts into a walkie talkie.

"Are those barbecue beef cups?" he barks at a passing classmate. "Get those on a plate now."

A holiday tea may sound quaint, but Springdale's version is an utterly precise operation on a massive scale.

We're talking 350 people and 12,000 cookies, from chocolate-chip sandwiches to linzer torte bars, every single one of them decorated. There are salmon mousse cups, crab quiche, blue-cheese balls and more than a dozen other appetizers, not to mention nine types of truffles and other candies.

Preparations for the tea -- which has been a tradition at the school for at least five decades -- began six weeks ago, with the baking and freezing of cookie dough.

"It's something that is really unique," said Gabriel Ziccarelli, superintendant of the Allegheny Valley School District, where the 600-student Springdale is the only junior high and senior high school. "Some of these kids, this is very, very important to them."

Dr. Ziccarelli is sitting down the hall and around the corner from the kitchen classroom, in the lavishly decorated tea room (converted from a conference room) that is as serene as the kitchen was hectic.

Teachers, school board members and employees sip punch out of glass cups and inhale spinach balls and creme de menthe truffles.

"We all look forward to this all year," said Kathy Dunmyre, head of Springdale's math department.

The tea is the work of teacher Karen Furyk, who started working at Springdale in 1973. Students of all varieties flock to her Foods 1 and 2 classes -- as many boys as girls -- and three boys in recent years have gone on to pursue careers as chefs.

Matt, the kitchen manager and a 17-year-old senior, learned to make fresh pasta in his Foods 2 class and now makes it at home. Nathan Zurisko, his Foods 2 classmate and the football team's quarterback, made "delicious" strawberry-banana crepes in class and regularly makes candy cane cookies at home.

The tradition of the holiday tea was well-established when Ms. Furyk started teaching, and from looking at old yearbooks, she estimates that it has existed at Springdale for at least 50 years.

The Foods 2 class plans the menu for each year's tea, based on careful analysis of written reports from the previous year on which items were popular and which ones were not. This year, for example, one student had the idea of turning last year's spicy chicken and cheese dip into a hot chicken crescent pastry hors d'oeuvre.

Students also put together a recipe book that goes home with each guest, send out formal invitations, and decorate the tea room, including the room's two Christmas trees and formal tea table with silver platters.

On the day of the tea, students are cooking the hot food, decorating cookies, keeping the appetizer and cookie displays stocked, greeting guests, and serving and refilling drinks. And while the students served their teachers and school staff members on Thursday, several teachers and staff volunteered to serve tea to the students yesterday.

For many of the students, the Christmas tea is the highlight of their foods class, if not of their school year.

"For some of the kids, this is their Christmas," said Ms. Furyk. "This is the most formal meal they're going to get. As much as it is a blue-collar neighborhood, the kids just thrive on this."

And while proper silver place settings and cookie-decorating techniques might not appear on exams state proficiency tests, Ms. Furyk is a firm believer in the educational value of presentation and etiquette.

"Attention to detail to anything we do is important," she said.

Social skills can figure heavily in job interviews, she said, and the feeling of creating something that they can be proud of is something that will serve them in their careers.

As Dr. Ziccarelli points out, there are hard skills in the food classes as well. The students write papers on several aspects of the tea, and use math to convert their measurements and recipes to the large scale required for the event.

Back in the kitchen, Matt is trying to keep the food flowing out to the tea room and to keep the 100-plus students in the kitchen relatively calm and quiet. This kitchen-manager gig is harder than he thought it was going to be: "No one likes to listen to a student," he said.

Small hiccups aside though, his final holiday tea is turning out to be everything that Matt hoped it would be.

"It kind of kicks off the holiday season," he said. "It gets you into the holiday spirit."