Imagine organizing a family dinner for 40 people. Then imagine organizing that meal for 4,000 people — and serve breakfast to 2,000 of them, too, while you’re at it.
Emporia school district food service director Jill Vincent and her crew of 58 do just that five days a week throughout the school year and much of the summer. And they manage to do it on time, barring unexpected power outages or other minor catastrophes.
They also provide approximately 900 after-school snacks to the youngsters who stay after school for QUEST and other enrichment programs or care.
“Obviously it takes experienced staff members that are dedicated and knowledgeable in their job,” Vincent said. “You know it’s not really me who gets this stuff ready. It’s the cooks out on the floor, the truck drivers, my managers ...”
Vincent, with 29 years in the food-service business, is in her third year in the Emporia district. She previously ran the food service in the Iola school district. She received both the district and the regional “Director of the Year” awards in 2002-2003 while at Iola, and received the district director of the year award last month for the 2007-2008 school year. Both awards came from the School Nutrition Association-Kansas group.
The majority of the Emporia food-service team, which has been cross-trained, works out of the massive kitchen at Emporia High School. Emporia Middle School has a modified smaller kitchen set-up, and the remainder of the schools are preparation and serving operations, where hot food is delivered and workers chop salads, dish up canned fruit, or other tasks that don’t require full equipment to perform.
Two delivery trucks spend much of the day shuttling food and equipment back and forth among the schools, and there are always grocery shipments that need to be unloaded and put away in the limited storage area. Vincent said the district can keep about a week’s supply of food on hand.
Each school has a “lead person” who comes in early to set up the kitchen for the day.
“Then the other cooks and assistants start trickling in,” Vincent said. “And they know that they have a deadline. No matter how many people are gone out of our department, we still have a deadline.”
It’s something that rarely is missed. A power outage at EHS the first day of school caused some problems, but most of the food already had been prepared. Schools could be called and warned that food might be a little late. The frustrating problem came when the computer system that tracks students and their food could not be accessed.
Vincent said that secretaries and other workers wrote down the students’ names by hand, and when the electricity returned, all of that information had to be entered into the computer system.
“There can’t be any ‘stop’ to the day,” Vincent said. “We have to keep going. Everything has to be on time.”
That is one aspect of the job that hasn’t changed since school lunches came into being through the federal government during the 1950s. After World War II, she said, the government noticed that many of its military draftees and recruits were malnourished. The school lunch program was intended to help remedy that, she said.
Since then, more attention has been paid to schoolchildren and the food they eat in a school setting. Meeting nutrition requirements is a chore every day as planners calculate calories, sodium and fat content, carbohydrates, Vitamins A and C, iron, fiber and on and on. The day’s totals need to be adequate in each area to provide the nutritional balance the federal government demands.
That, in part, has helped eliminate most “from scratch” meals in larger school districts. Emporia offers several homemade dishes periodically. Spaghetti, macaroni and cheese, chili, cinnamon rolls and some bread items made from scratch work their way into the menu, but not until the calories and nutritional content have been determined. Workers feed that information into a computer program, ingredient by ingredient and can by can.
“You manually have to find the label from that item and put it into the system,” Vincent said. “You have to have the ingredients entered before you can create a recipe. ... It has become almost impossible to do things from scratch.”
Still, some tasty items remain on the menu.
Chili crispitos, already prepared, seem to be an overall favorite on the regular menu. It’s an enchilada-type dish, and the cheese sauce swathed on in the local kitchen adds to the flavor. Bosco sticks — bread sticks stuffed with mozzarella and dipped in marinara sauce — are popular, too.
Vincent is not surprised, though, that the special meals, with turkey or chicken-fried steak patties, mashed potatoes and gravy, are the most popular meals of all.
And for students who prefer or physically require other foods, there are always options on entrees, vegetables and fruits.
Vincent said fresh fruits and vegetables are available daily to students who don’t want them cooked or canned.
More than 80 youngsters in the district have food allergies to peanuts, milk, strawberries, kiwi fruit, fish, red food coloring and even ketchup; some of the youngsters have diabetes.
She talks with parents about how they want the food questions resolved.
“Can the child make their own decisions and pick out the food, or do we need to make special meals?” Vincent said.
Vincent also talks with principals and school nurses about nutrition, and gives presentations to classes and at in-service sessions to emphasize the importance of eating right. Her classes for maintenance workers emphasize safety. She uses unmarked containers to show the similarities in appearance of food and janitorial products.
“Is this mayonnaise or hand cleaner?” she asked the workers. “Is this chicken broth mix or is this granulated insect (poison)?”
Differentiating was difficult, even for the director of food service.
Those classes are all part of the new job description for the people who make sure children are fed.
“We’re not to be lunch ladies any more,” she said. “We’re lunch teachers, teaching about nutrition.”
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