School meals are a modern-day miracle. When you look at the scale of school nutrition operations, the funding allocated, the guidelines and regulations that must be followed, staffing and supply chain challenges, not to mention too little time to serve, it’s nothing short of amazing that tens of millions of children are fed and cared for school nutrition professionals daily.
• What seems ordinary to you is amazing to others.
• What you see every day is a massive eye-opener for most of the population.
• An average day for you would blow most peoples’ minds.
How often are you taking the time to tell your story? How much do you share the amazing work that you and your team do? And make no mistake, it’s not about focusing on how great you are (though you are). It’s about focusing on how great the need is for millions of children and families.
Need some examples? Here you go. How many people outside of your team know:
How many meals you serve each day/week/month/year?
Any of the farms or food producers you work with?
How many entree options you offer each week?
You offer fresh fruits and vegetables with every meal?
Your menus are planned to adhere to specific nutritional guidelines?
These are the things that can get locked up in our heads and never communicated to our students, our families, and other school staff. What you take for granted as the standard operating procedure would boggle people's minds.
THE MORE YOU KNOW…
A few years ago a client we worked with met with a middle school class to present a deeper look into the economics of school nutrition. As the menu planner outlined reimbursement rates, the cost of food, the cost of staff, and other key topline items, students were stunned. We worked with the teacher to do an exercise where students had to plan menus along the same budget guidelines.
We also shared about the regulations and why it’s important for schools to offer healthy, nutritious meals. We showed comparisons of nutrition information between school meals and familiar restaurants. We asked the question of why they thought fast food companies spent so much trying to get their attention and what the physical impact of that could be.
By the end of the 50-minute class, the students had become champions for school meals. Late that week the teacher told me that he overheard some students trash-talking the school’s food when one of the students in the class essentially said, “You have no idea what you’re talking about. Do you know what Ms. Amy and her team do for us every day?”
We’ve seen similar turnarounds from parents when they are invited to learn about the amazing work done by school nutrition professionals. It’s not a quick fix. It doesn’t happen with one meeting, post, or newsletter. But it places you in the conversation and gets the reservoir of knowledge in your head out into the open, and that’s a fantastic first step to taking control of your story.
