[Darin Detwiler] Hey, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Spoiler Alert. I'm Dr. Darin Detwiler.
[Callin Godson-Green] I'm Callin Godson-Green.
[Darin Detwiler] And we are in Charlotte for the School Nutrition Association's annual conference. And we're not alone. We're with a ton of people representing school districts from all over the country, including our very special guest.
[Erin Coleman] Erin Coleman. I am from Perry Township in Indianapolis, Indiana.
[Darin Detwiler] Welcome.
[Erin Coleman] Thank you. Thank you for having me.
[Darin Detwiler] Thank you for spending some time with us. And before we started, a very important geographical feature of your district is that it's kind of like 2 districts in one split by a highway.
[Erin Coleman] So we have essentially a highway that divides one section from the other section, but each side of the district has their own high school, middle school, elementary schools. So they are truly rival schools within the same district.
[Darin Detwiler] But one central look at your food nutrition program.
[Erin Coleman] Yes, We do our best to match what one high school has versus the other one just for consistency on our end, the back end for menu planning. It makes it a lot easier. But there are times where we'll get a phone call from a parent. You know, I've looked at their menu. How come my child doesn't have this offered at their school. So we try to match it.
[Darin Detwiler] The FOMO of the other side of the highway.
[Erin Coleman] It's a thing. It's real. That's crazy.
[Callin Godson-Green] So you mentioned earlier to us that you had two satellite kitchens. Are they one on each side? Is that the idea?
[Erin Coleman] So yes, essentially we satellite to an alternative school and also we have a secondary school that is specifically designed to help students who are struggling to get their credits that they need to graduate. So on one side of the district, meals come out of there to service those schools, and then a school on the other side services the additional school.
[Darin Detwiler] Well, side note, as someone who used to be a teacher at an alternative high school, I think it's incredible you're doing a lunch program for them because they didn't do where I taught a lunch program for the alternative high school. It's like, you know, food is Maslow's hierarchy of needs. It's one of the most foundational physiological needs that we have. And if you have students that are high risk, they are dealing with all these additional challenges, why would the most basic of human things not be applicable to them? So it's good on you guys for doing that for your alternative high schools.
[Erin Coleman] Thank you.
[Darin Detwiler] I think it's a very important thing. You know, you can look at the idea of parents being like, what are my kids going to get? But for some families, it's extremely important to have that inclusion of food in their academic day because without that, there may not be a lot for them.
[Erin Coleman] That is so true for our district. We are a CEP district, so we qualify for all of our students to receive a free breakfast and free lunch meal. We are a high poverty district too. So we know for many families that is a truthful statement. The food they receive at school may be the only meals that they are receiving for the day. So we try to capture as many different nutrition programs as we can implement, whether that be breakfast, lunch, we do supper, we do snacks to try to fill that need for our community.
[Darin Detwiler] And do you also, I'm hearing this a lot, Do you do, there's different names for it, but the program where if you have afterschool sports or activities, there's also like a meal after school.
[Erin Coleman] Yes. So that is through CACFP, the Child and Adult Care Food Program. So we qualify where we're able to offer supper through that program. And then we offer afterschool snacks at elementary schools through their afterschool programs, but that falls under the NSLP umbrella.
[Darin Detwiler] Very cool. And I would imagine very complicated in terms of managing all this, the numbers and the inventory and the recipes and all these different elements. What are some of the, I want to hear some of your best practices, but what are some of the challenges that you recognize are kind of, yeah, these are top of the tier. This is why you're here, perhaps, to talk about these challenges.
[Erin Coleman] I'd say the biggest one is with different programs comes a whole different set of guidelines and regulations. So I have a separate auditor that comes and audits just my separate program through CACFP. certain guidelines or things that you have to follow under that program that you do differently under breakfast and lunch. How you list your items, the portion sizes, do you have to include the ounces, if they're whole grain or not on the menus? The observations that you have to do differ, the frequency. So That is probably the most challenging thing is keeping track of the different regulations and making sure that we are following things accordingly.
[Darin Detwiler] Does it become a situation where this program is more strict than this? So just follow the most strict program and you're halfway to doing the other ones.
[Erin Coleman] There is some overlap. I would say out of the two, the CACFP program for us and particularly is more strict. So some of the ways that we write the menus and things that we include for substitutes, we just go ahead and do that on all of our menus to make sure that we are covered. So, and they have different cycles too of how often you are audited. CACFP might be every two to four years, whereas the other administrative review is now every five years. So we just always have to make sure every year we've got our checklist and we are meeting all the program requirements and have all the documents so we know we are doing what we have to do. If they knock on our door at any time, we'll be able to provide that information.
[Darin Detwiler] Of course, you know what this is. one of those scenarios where you do everything the right way and your consumers, the students, they'll have no idea what's going on behind the scenes at all.
[Callin Godson-Green] But aren't they lucky in a way? Because if they don't know, it means that nothing is going wrong necessarily. Like you find out those things when there's been an issue. You know, your parents calling, you have districts, you know, people coming to you, especially being like, what's going on here or going upwards or downwards, whereas like if everything is working as it should and you guys are on top of it and ahead of. the curve per se or ahead of changes that need to be made, then hopefully things are smooth.
[Darin Detwiler] On that note, though, I would imagine, though, that you have to have certain protocols and even best practices and a little bit of trying to predict student numbers, weather, who knows what else, distribution issues. Let's explore that a little bit. What are some of the things that our best practices is if we assume this or if we account for this kind of thing. What are some of those things you deal with in terms of if we're going to make this work, we have to do this. is a non-negotiable.
[Erin Coleman] I'd say COVID. If anything, COVID taught us. to always have a plan B for every situation. So that was my first year as a director. I was an assistant director for a year and then I moved into that role and I remember thinking, what do we do? And no one knew because no one had ever been in that situation. So we really had to learn to act quickly. And we developed a lot of plans and things that we still have in our back pocket now if something should pop up. We're always thinking, especially in our district, living in Indiana, the weather, you don't know what hemisphere you're a part of. Winter one day, summer another. So we have a lot of power outages. The heat recently has caused a lot of our walk-in coolers and freezers to go out. So we have to have plans if that happens. Where can we divert that food? Where can we pull food from? Does everyone have their emergency water? Does everyone have their cases of peanut butter and jelly that we need in case we need to follow those real quickly and serve students?
[Callin Godson-Green] Is that like the go-to? Like if you can't prepare food, is that's, yeah.
[Erin Coleman] It is, but the challenge with that is we have a lot of students with allergies. So we have to have other things available too. But in those situations, what we've done is found essentially a sister school, a secondary school that if we need to, we can satellite food to bring over to them. Because more times than not, it always happens when you're preparing lunch, the power goes out You've got 20 minutes until the kids come through. No power. What do you do?
[Callin Godson-Green] Murphy's Law. And especially if the power is gone in the whole school, the kids are like, all right, what else is there to do? It's like eat. And you're like, okay, even that.
[Erin Coleman] We still have to feed them.
[Darin Detwiler] Yeah. And he has to be uniform because heaven forbid the parents are like, but we heard the students on the other side of the highway, they got to eat peanut butter.
[Erin Coleman] And it still happens too. How come my child was only offered, you know, this today and explaining the situation? It was an emergency. You know, our goal in our district is our motto, feed the kids. There's, you know, there's going to be a challenge. You can Never predict it, but if you're prepared, if those students went home at the end of the day with a full belly, we did our job.
[Darin Detwiler] Yeah. Well, I'm glad you brought that up because even that idea, it's a great model, feed the kids. But some of the conversations we've had today, everything from avoid, alter process as much as possible, try to find locally sourced foods, minimizing multiple ingredient foods or the fact that younger generations are calling a full meal, it's more of a snack really kind of a thing. So our definitions of food and meals are changing just as much as the pandemic changed a lot of our definitions. What are some of the challenges that comes from When you say meal, I see this, but you served this, or I expected this, but this is the reality, because those are changing.
[Erin Coleman] It has been very challenging. And I think one of the things kind of driving that to social media, you see things that other schools offer or read an article and people think, well, why aren't we doing it that way? Why can't we implement that? For us, I think the most important thing is to be proactive. So we are looking for more ways to educate the public because like you said, there's a lot of things that go on behind the scenes that affect and influence the way we do things, but the general public, our community, they don't have any knowledge of that. So trying to be proactive in explaining this is the meal pattern that we have to follow. We receive commodity dollars. These are how our menus are created. Our Pop-Tarts are not the same Pop-Tarts you're going to get on the shelves at a grocery store. So I think the more that we can get ahead of that and allow ourselves to set that narrative and explain the situation and how we operate, the more beneficial it is.
[Darin Detwiler] When you take in consideration, do you see the data a while back that was essentially saying that school lunch programs is the largest fast food restaurant in America. And yet people wouldn't see it that way because they have these other expectations over here. And yet when you talk to some of the people who've come to this event, wasn't there one The person we talk to, they actually have a food truck sometimes they take it from places. Do you guys have that?
[Erin Coleman] No, but I know a district who does have one. I'm wondering if you talk to the person I know. I would love to get one, especially for our summer program because we do, we feed about 25 community sites. So if we could have a food truck going through That would be wonderful. Just more ways to engage and make it more exciting.
[Callin Godson-Green] Yeah, changes it all. Yeah. Like the amount of effort and prep and everything that goes into school lunches. People still have a perception of like a school, you know, they're like, that's a school lunch. Like how good could it be? But realistically, then you hear food truck and people are like, oh, a bit more interested. Like it's the same stuff that's actually happening in our kitchen. And when you see those kitchens, in work, like I've been fortunate enough in my job to go into some schools when they're getting ready. I'm like, this is run the exact same way as a restaurant. Like you have your head chef that's doing everything, planning everything, putting out things. It's not like the same way that it used to be. You know, it's all prepared in the morning, sitting there soggy for the day, and then you got your same meal every day. Like it is the whole, it all comes back, I suppose, to your motto of feed the kids because at the end of the day, they're not going to eat something like that. If they don't like it, kids are kids, they'll just be like, I'm not eating that today. I think the old way of thinking was more like, if they're hungry enough, they'll eat it. doesn't matter what we give them. But now you want the things to be nutritionally correct because as you said, it could be the only thing they eat. But at the end of the day, kids are picky. We all know, you know, like if a kid doesn't like something, they're not going to finish it just thinking, this is all I'm going to eat today. They just won't.
[Erin Coleman] And you hit such a good point because when I talk about our district, I mean, we serve almost 14,000 lunches a day in our district. And we truly are the largest restaurant in our area of Indianapolis. And I'm always trying to instill it with our staff that the students, those are our customers. If they're not satisfied, if we're not making appealing nutritious foods that they're going to eat, then I mean, it doesn't benefit us. We just feed trash cans. We don't receive that funding. with reimbursement. So they truly, the students are what is driving our programs.
[Darin Detwiler] Well, and there's clearly evidence that shows that, a student that has consumed healthy food performs better. They are more able to be engaged in the classroom and they're more likely to return to the classroom, be early on time. And, you know, it's, you know, you have to have the right tools to go to class. It's not just your notebook and your pencil. It's also your body has the ability to say, I'm not worried about hunger. I'm able to now engage in this kind of activity. And it's amazing how we have to remind people about that.
[Erin Coleman] When we go to Washington, DC every year for the Legislative Action Conference, our state of Indiana, kind of our theme is that school is the most important, or food is the most important school supply. You know, without it, you're not gonna learn. I mean, it's great to have, you know, free textbooks and to have transportation, but food, as you mentioned, I mean, that's a basic human need. So It is mind-boggling to think that it isn't prioritized as much as we feel it should be.
[Darin Detwiler] Well, especially when it's just treated as so transactional and in contracts and as opposed to, look, we just want to make sure that every child is fed and is welcomed. And we do that in our homes. you invite someone over and you assume, can I get you a drink? Can I get you some food? It should be, the cultural element is the idea that a place of learning is a place of existing. If you're going to be there for that long, you should not have to do that while you're hungry. I think it also goes into the category of also your staff and your faculty. We've heard from many districts that a large percentage of their teachers and their staff eat at the school lunch counter just like everyone else. I've been that kind of person when I was a public school teacher. Not every meal, but there are certain meals that it's like, sign me up. I'll be there for that day. Because, again, you only have so much time to eat, just like the students. And yet you got to be ready to go. Kind of a deal. What's next for you? said, food trucks would be awesome. What is something you would love to be able to bring into your food program in your district?
[Erin Coleman] Honestly, a chef. I would love to have a chef on our staff to help us create more innovative dishes. In a perfect ideal world, everything we would be making would be made from scratch. Staffing is our biggest challenge and limitation to make that happen. So If we had a chef, someone with that experience to find ways to do more speed scratch, how can I elevate a chicken patty sandwich? How can I make this a little bit more fancy? We're also a very, very diverse district. I believe it's almost 80 different dialects, different languages spoken in our district. So we're getting a lot of feedback, especially from the secondary students. Can we have this type of food? No pork for religious So if we had someone who had that experience and knowledge to come in and help us create things to be more inclusive, I think that would just be absolutely wonderful for our students and our program.
[Darin Detwiler] You'd think there would be like a great test kitchen for like a new restaurant that wants to open in town. Well, try out some recipes in our school district. You'll get a lot of feedback. Trust me. Trust me, the students will tell you their opinions.
[Erin Coleman] They're not shy. They will tell you what they think.
[Darin Detwiler] Excellent. Well, thank you for coming and spending some time with us. Thank you for having me. And thank you for what you do. You know, I don't want to sound like a Whitney Houston song, but you know, we are talking about our future. And if we don't take care of them now, who's going to be there to take care of us later?
[Erin Coleman] That is so true. So true. Thank you for having me.
[Darin Detwiler] Thank you.
