[Darin Detwiler] Hey, welcome to another episode of Spoiler Alert. I'm Dr. Darin Detwiler.
[Callin Godson-Green] I'm Callin Godson-Green.
[Darin Detwiler] And we're here in Charlotte, North Carolina at the School Nutrition Association's annual conference. And we're here to talk about food.
[Callin Godson-Green] We are, how's that always?
[Darin Detwiler] And schools.
[Callin Godson-Green] As always.
[Darin Detwiler] Excellent. Well, not always about schools, but we're talking about schools this time.
[Callin Godson-Green] Exactly.
[Darin Detwiler] And with us, we have a guest. And who are you?
[Cacyce Davis] I am Cacyce Davis, Child Nutrition Director of Elmore County Schools in Alabama.
[Darin Detwiler] We were talking about Alabama and the first thing you started to bring up was BBQ and seafood.
[Cacyce Davis] Yes, they're popular in Alabama. We've got great food in Alabama. And we try to feature those items in our cafeterias.
[Darin Detwiler] I did hear that rumor that your school cafeterias have some incredible foods.
[Cacyce Davis] Yes, we've got a great staff. Our team, they love our community and they love serving our students and really work to just equip them for what they're trying to accomplish in the classrooms.
[Darin Detwiler] Give us a sense of how big, is this a big school district, a big staff?
[Cacyce Davis] I would say a medium-sized school district. We have 15 schools, just over 11,000 students, but we've got really good participation. We serve about 8,000 breakfast meals a day in the same lunch.
[Darin Detwiler] And before we started recording, you were talking about how many students, they come to school and the first thing they do is eat breakfast.
[Cacyce Davis] Correct. At all of our schools, we serve breakfast in the classroom. We have breakfast waiting for them outside of their classrooms before they get there. And our goal is to have them ready to start their day. We know that it is critical that the basic needs of children be met so that they can be successful in the classroom. And nutrition is the basic of all needs.
[Callin Godson-Green] And for those maybe that know less about the programs in general. So students opt in to the breakfast and lunch program, or is it available for everyone, or is it certain thresholds?
[Cacyce Davis] In Elmore County, we participate in the community eligibility provision. So meals are offered at no charge in Elmore County. And so that meal is available to all of our students at no charge every morning.
[Darin Detwiler] What would you say is the most popular breakfast food?
[Cacyce Davis] Biscuits. Silly question. Now, I will say in the last year, because we've been working, it's challenging what we can serve to the classroom. And, we've worked to, diversify our options. So we've been working on a grits bowl because biscuits and grits are very popular in Alabama. And so we have a cheese grits bowl that is in a bakeable bowl that we're able to deliver to the classroom and have ready for them. And so that's something that's gone over well. And actually, we had spoken about shrimp. We've got some great managers that have kind of worked to develop their own recipe options. And they actually served a shrimp and grits with an Alabama farm-raised shrimp product. And they're actually Alabama grits, so both local items, and serve the shrimp and grits for lunch. So the students love it.
[Darin Detwiler] You mentioned challenges. And before I dig a little deeper into that, you also mentioned that in addition to some of the varieties, You have an occasional food truck operation.
[Cacyce Davis] Yes, we have a BBQ food truck. It's called the Hot Spot. The goal was for it to focus, target primarily our high school students, but it really travels to all of our schools. We took a team to Georgia, actually traveled to another state and worked with a competition BBQ team to train us up. Our assistant director, Mo, has led the way on that in developing recipes. So we took how they prepare BBQ at their restaurants and made it work within our school programs. And we've come up with some really good quality recipes that we use. We've got a brisket taco nacho recipe. It's one of the favorites, a certified Angus beef burger and then ribs.
[Darin Detwiler] I'm getting hungry.
[Callin Godson-Green] Yeah, We'll go back to school.
[Cacyce Davis] Come visit us. We would love for you to come anytime.
[Darin Detwiler] I gotta tell you, I don't know why these Food Network shows aren't doing a whole series on what school districts are doing, like with food trucks and the competitions. That would be exciting to watch.
[Cacyce Davis] Well, and what we know, kids love good food. And we act like kids are hard to feed, but they're really not. They just like good quality food like everyone else. And so we try to give them the best we can possibly do within the means that we have, which are challenging because we have limited resources to prepare the meals that we do. We've got great agriculture product that's grown in Alabama, so we utilize that as much as we can. Our Department of Ag partners with us. They provide access to additional funds if we serve Alabama product. So we try to do that as much as we can.
[Callin Godson-Green] That's such an interesting incentive. I like that.
[Darin Detwiler] Well, and imagine the idea that this is an opportunity for students to taste what foods grown locally tastes like. It's not from New Jersey, no offense, New Jersey, no offense.
[Cacyce Davis] But we don't necessarily know where our food comes from.
[Darin Detwiler] And sometimes it's like, oh, it came from all that distance to be here. What's local? I don't know. You know, in terms of challenges, you talked about serving breakfast at the classroom door. You've talked about diversity of different foods and even food trucks. What are some of the ways when we talk about good food and quality food that we make sure that first and foremost, it's safe food?
[Cacyce Davis] Training with our staff. And almost everyone has a new generation in the workforce right now. And that's one big challenge we're facing. And it's just training up your staff and taking every opportunity, us at administration, to equip ourselves to provide them with the resources that they need to serve meals in their cafeterias. But also any opportunity that we have for our teams and our cafeterias, we take advantage of just to increase their skill set.
[Darin Detwiler] I think it's important not only with the training, but There's probably so much behind the scenes. Is there a recall that's impacting this part of food? Or is there a problem with the piece of equipment we take for granted? It's the freezer. How often do we worry about the freezer?
[Cacyce Davis] Every day. Every day.
[Darin Detwiler] Well, we have to know how to take temperatures. We have to look at these temperatures over time. We're using technology to track these things. Therefore, now your staff has to be trained on the technologies as well. And they're probably going, why do I need to learn this technology or this software or whatever? Is that part of the training that you deal with?
[Cacyce Davis] It is. I mean, we do food safety training, of course, every year. So much of that's about communication. I mean, if you're talking about a recall, because there are certain steps that you have to take. If you're talking about monitoring the temperatures of our equipment, we've got certain ones that keep an eye on it. Jody, our clerk, is one of the main ones that heads that up for us. But it's communicating to the proper person to address the issues that we have. Because for us, if we lose a freezer, it's going to be 5 to $7,000 of product that we lose. And so keeping the proper eye and having the resources and the technology available to do that. And in the past, we didn't have that. And so now we do. But it allows us to keep an eye on what's going on with our equipment, but also communicating the information when something needs to be done quickly.
[Darin Detwiler] Well, I would imagine that this is so behind the scenes. Students probably don't even realize that stuff's going on. But we have a population of students that they're on social media, they're aware of certain things. Do you ever have students or families ask about like Are we impacted by this recall or do we have any radioactive shrimp?
[Callin Godson-Green] They hear buzz words and they're like, oh, I got to find out about that.
[Cacyce Davis] Yeah, Well, and because we don't serve a lot of seafood, when we did introduce that product, it caused a bit of a frenzy in our school district. And we just work to educate because, say, take with the shrimp, it can be an airborne allergen, but also flour can be and we're not going to eliminate flour from our cafeterias. So it's just educating and making sure, that our staff, our families, our students are aware.
[Callin Godson-Green] Did you find that you had to do like a lot of advocating when you were going to bring the shrimp in, you know, like crowd control almost or how did it come in?
[Cacyce Davis] Well, the nurses were the most concerned because they were in their minds, we were going to have a magnitude of allergic reactions that they had not had. They were afraid they didn't have enough EpiPens and they just wanted to stay home, honestly. And so we did pull it from the elementary menu and then we found out our elementary kids got to the lunch line that day and they said, where's the shrimp? And so it's communicating and just being prepared. And over time, the more you expose people to things and that's just, We try to kind of make feeding kids so hard and kids are, some are more picky than others. But what we know about child nutrition is the more familiar they are with foods, the more likely they are to accept them. So you might try something one time, you might try it 20 times. And if you get them to accept it the 20th time, you've succeeded. And it's okay that they did in that first one to 19.
[Darin Detwiler] You kind of brought this up with the shrimp, but you also have a range of whether it's allergens or health medical concerns with students. And I would imagine you work with your school nurse program a great deal in terms of making sure that you're not making a decision that is going to potentially be dangerous to a student. But if you make this decision, now we can be more accommodating.
[Cacyce Davis] Yes. And again, that's communication and partnerships. We've got a great partnership with our nursing staff at the district level and the school level. We have software that allows us to maintain that data as students are coming through the line so they're identified. But typically the nurse at the school level is working along directly with students that have those types of dietary needs and making menu choices. We do also work to offer a great variety of meal options. Every day in all of our cafeterias we have at least two hot entrees and at least three. Many have more than that. So every student's going to have at least five choices to choose from as far as meal options.
[Darin Detwiler] Wow. School lunches have come such a long way since I was kidding. The tray with the little indentations for each meal. And there was like one option. You want this?
[Callin Godson-Green] Not even do you want this, there you go. You don't have a choice.
[Darin Detwiler] Actually, we did have a choice. It was, we got these little tickets. And one was for regular milk and one was for chocolate milk. And it was always like, what ticket do you get? You know, kind of a thing. because you had to pay more for the chocolate milk. That was the only choice you had. Everything else was this or no lunch kind of a thing. And I think that maybe I was just not old enough to pay attention to things, but I think that today we have much more concerns in terms of allergens and medical needs.
[Callin Godson-Green] Dietary preferences or like religious preferences and choice and things like that.
[Darin Detwiler] Yeah. So many challenges. And again, like you said, it all goes back to the fact that if you don't meet the most basic of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, how can you expect a student to be engaged and to be learning and to have a successful day if they are not able to eat?
[Cacyce Davis] And we've seen success with it in our school system. We've had increases in test scores, academic performance. We like to take some credit for it. They've done a lot at the state level and the district level to improve outcomes for Alabama students. but we do believe we've played an important role in that.
[Darin Detwiler] Well, I know you play an important role in that because again, I was a teacher for 16 years and I tell you the one thing that is common ground, common thread against all the students is, food, I'm hungry, when's lunch kind of a thing. And it's one of those important elements in learning. Thank you so much. And I think that I also want to make sure you know how much we appreciate you coming and talking with us today because I think you're welcome. I don't think that, you know, the kids should have to worry about it. I don't think the family should have to worry about it, but they should know how great of a job that people are doing behind the scenes.
[Cacyce Davis] Awesome. Thank you so much.
[Darin Detwiler] Thank you.
