Azusa Unified School District
In the Azusa Unified School District, middle school participation is a testament to the nutrition team’s commitment to improving the student experience and ensuring that they have the nutritious food they need to learn and grow. “We observed that very few of our middle school students would go into the cafeteria in the morning to eat breakfast. They prefer to be with their friends,” says Stella Ndahura, the district’s Nutrition Services Director. The nutrition team decided to experiment with putting a grab-and-go cart at the middle school’s entrance gate and pre-bag milk, whole grain breakfast bars, muffins, and fruit for students to take when arriving at school in the morning. “By just moving the location of the food to be convenient for the kids, we increased participation in breakfast by 50%.” They also asked students what they liked and found that they didn’t want eggs unless in burrito form, preferring whole grain muffins and bars and yogurt parfaits in the hotter months. In winter months, students crowd around the carts that serve hot cocoa made from heated USDA-compliant chocolate milk.
Ndahura and her team are mission-driven: they believe the school meal program is nourishing learners today and building healthier habits for improved health over the long run. They do this by exposing students to new food experiences alongside concepts they might know from local fast-casual restaurants. In high school, students can expect to have organic locally sourced rotisserie chicken freshly sliced by a kitchen team member regularly – once a week on Friday. There are stations where students can customize burrito bowls that are familiar, but healthier than what is available at restaurant chains in the district. “They couldn’t believe they could get something like that at school,” reports Ndahura.
The Azusa program has benefited from an infusion of funds made possible through Healthy School Meals for All legislation in California (for more on HSMA in CA see the recent research from CBP), Kitchen Infrastructure and Training funds (KIT) (including designated funds for local foods for schools, supply chain assistance, equipment for scratch cooking, and freshly prepared foods). “We cannot make the vision of scratch cooking come to life if we don’t have the right facilities, equipment, and staff training - it’s a very different skill set. Now we can be creative and learn how to do scratch cooking.”
