Faces of Utah Valley: LaVon Vogl, the Orchard Elementary Lunch Lady Whose Harry Potter Breakfast Games Have Kids Begging to Get to School

Faces of Utah Valley is a new Provo.com series about the people who make this valley what it is. Our first nomination came from a PTA in Orem, and it was about the lunch lady.

At 7:30 every morning for the last two weeks, there's been a line out the cafeteria door at Orchard Elementary in Orem. School doesn't start until 8. The kids in that line aren't early because their parents dropped them off early. They're early because they want to be, and the reason is a woman in a black kitchen shirt with a stuffed owl on her shoulder.

Her name is LaVon Vogl. She works in Orchard's kitchen, she's a Harry Potter fan down to the bookshelf, and for 13 years she has run something she calls the Breakfast Games. This is her last year. She retires at the end of it.

"Since our school starts early, mornings can be tough," Orchard's PTA president-elect, Kenzie Raines, wrote when she nominated Vogl. "But Breakfast Games have our kids BEGGING to get to school."

How it started: a school that was supposed to close

The Breakfast Games didn't start at Orchard. They started 13 years ago at Geneva Elementary, also in Orem, where Vogl was working at the time.

"They said they were closing the school, and so I thought we should do something special for the end of an era," she told us.

Geneva didn't close that year. "They ended up keeping Geneva open for another five years," she said. "We just made it a tradition."

It's hard to miss the echo. The games began because a school might close. This fall, they ran at a school that's in the same position: Orchard is one of 13 schools in the new Timpanogos School District's closure and boundary study, and its families don't yet know whether it will be open next year. Our story on the closure studies has what's known so far.

How the games work

The rules are simple enough for a kindergartner and exciting enough for a sixth grader.

• Eat breakfast, flip your tray. Some trays have a colored sticker on the bottom. Each color stands for a prize.
• Not eating? You can still play. "For those who choose not to eat, a coin draw box is there for them to participate in," Vogl said. Kids pick a random coin, and if it matches the color of the day, they win.
• Teachers get in on it too. Vogl has prizes for them, according to the PTA.

The cafeteria gets the full treatment. A round table is covered with a giant Platform 9¾ sign. The Sorting Hat sits on a stand by the kitchen door. There's a Hogwarts trunk, a stuffed giant spider, house banners hanging over the serving line, and a Marauder's Map blanket under the prize table.

The prizes

The prize table is the kind of thing kids remember for years. Vogl described it to us from the smallest prize to the biggest:

• small piñata prizes
• Golden Snitch-shaped fidget spinners
• 3-D printed eggs with dragons inside
• and the grand prizes: a large 3-D printed basilisk snake, a Harry Potter scarf or hat, or a Hedwig hat, the white owl kind with yellow eyes

All of it comes out of her own pocket. "She is the best lunch lady and brings the games all on her own time and budget," Raines wrote.

The numbers

You can see what the games do just by looking at the line, but Vogl keeps count, too.

"We normally serve an average of 72 for breakfast," she said. "Our highest day during the games was 167. Our average has been 158."

That's more than twice as many kids eating breakfast before class. Ask any teacher what a kid with breakfast in them looks like at 10 a.m. compared to one without, and you'll get the point.

"They always want to be 'wanted'"

The games aren't the only thing she's done. Vogl has been putting up Harry Potter-style "WANTED" posters of students in Orchard's hallways.

"It's been fun putting wanted (Harry Potter wanted) posters throughout the hallways of the kids," she said. "They always want to be 'wanted.'"

It's a joke about a wizard's wanted poster. It's also a pretty good summary of what a great lunch lady does all year.

What's next

This is Vogl's third year at Orchard, and her last. When she retires at the end of the school year, she already knows where she'll be.

"When I retire at the end of this year I will spend time playing in my Harry Potter room with my 22 grandkids," she said.

Then she added the part that matters: "I will miss the students!"

How to thank her

The 2026 Breakfast Games end Friday, Oct. 30. If your kids go to Orchard, they already know. If they don't, you can still do something: share this story, and if you know LaVon, tell her what she meant to your family. The Orchard PTA posts its news and contact information at linktr.ee/orchardelementarypta.

And if there's a LaVon in your life, the crossing guard who knows every kid's name or the neighbor who runs the block's Halloween, tell us about them. That's what Faces of Utah Valley is for.

Related on Provo.com

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• The Timpanogos School District, explained
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• Living in Orem: a guide
• Halloween 2026 in Utah Valley: every dated event