Education Week - February 19, 2020 - 23

from knife safety and uniform cutting techniques, to
coordinating prep duties, to standardizing recipes.
It took more than two years to update and retrain
everyone, but today, the staff not only cooks student
meals from scratch but also caters teacher and school
board meetings and participates in local cooking
festivals and competitions.
The money saved from consolidating menus and
reducing kitchen waste added up quickly. The district
has saved about $3 million of its more than $41 million
food services budget in the past five years.
Urban reinvests the savings and profit from higher
food sales to replace as much of the district's canned
and processed food as possible. Today, all of the fruit
and nearly all of the vegetables they serve are fresh,
with most of the produce coming from local farmers.
Greenville has switched out frozen processed chicken
nuggets for tenders made from whole pieces of chicken.
Every school has a fresh soup and salad bar daily and
fresh seafood, like wild-caught Alaskan salmon or local
catfish, at least once a week in elementary and twice a
week in secondary grades. And in several of the district's
high-poverty schools, Urban has installed tower gardens
where students learn to grow herbs and greens, which
are used in the cafeteria for salads and sides.
"When I got here, we were buying a pre-cooked
hamburger that had probably over 20 ingredients in it,
which is scary to me," said Urban, who now gets beef
from a local rancher.
Hamburgers now have four ingredients.
"It's certified Angus beef; it's garlic; it's salt; and it's
onion," he said. "That's it."

Urban has kept the food budget for the largest
school district in South Carolina solvent even
as other districts' food services struggle to make
ends meet. An analysis by the local Greenville News
in August found that Greenville spent only $472 per
student on meals-$77 to $211 less than the next two
largest districts of Charleston and Horry counties.
While the other two districts ended the last fiscal year
with a deficit in their food budgets, Greenville had a
more than $360,000 surplus.
That cushion has helped Urban provide more support
for students in poverty.
"There's a large percentage of students that come to
school that, unless they're with us, they're not getting highquality nutrition," he said. "Some of these kids ... don't eat
on the weekends. Before I really got into this, I didn't really
understand the extent of that as well as I do now."
Greenville now provides free breakfast to all students,
and it has been able to take a softer approach to working
with families who owe cafeteria debt at a time when
districts nationwide are facing backlash for "lunch
shaming," or aggressively trying to collect meal debts.
Urban pledged that he'd never single out students
who owe the district money or refuse to feed them.
Three years ago, Greenville bought two food trucks,
painted with bright fruits and vegetables, and expanded
the summer meals program. The program now reaches
students in high-poverty apartment complexes and

other areas who aren't participating in summer school
or community programs where meals are provided.

During the school year, the trucks serve a
different purpose: letting students "taste test" new
menu items.
While the cafeterias keep some kid-standard fare, like
hamburgers and pizza, Urban regularly rotates and adds
new dishes from local seasonal foods. The cafeteria staff
uses the food truck to sample new offerings at different
schools to figure out whether, say, a barbecue dish needs
more spice or should be served only at the high schools.
Most of the time dishes survive with a few tweaks, but
students took a hard pass on sushi rolls.
Urban also partnered with Greenville's annual music
and food festival, Euphoria, a four-day event that draws
hundreds of visitors from across the country, to hold
an annual cooking competition, in which high school
students compete to provide a new item for the school
menu. Students team up with Michelin-starred chefs to
make their meals on stage during the festival.
"It's a funny thing to watch my high school students
instructing a three-Michelin-star chef on what to do and
how to cut the onions," said Drew Archer, a culinary
arts instructor at the Donaldson Career Center.
Nate Kingdom, a second-year culinary arts student
at the Donaldson Career Center, won this year's
competition with his banh mi chicken sandwich, a
Vietnamese sandwich which traditionally includes meat
and fresh and pickled vegetables. He worked with the
food services staff to adapt the spicy dish for the middle
and high school menus. It sold out on the first day it
appeared on the menu.
Kingdom laughed as he recalled that Urban made
sure the staff saved a portion of the sandwiches for his
own third lunch period, to ensure that he got to taste his
creation. He said he can't wait until the sandwich comes
back onto the lunch rotation.
Urban's approach to involving students in their lunch
menus appears to be working. His Twitter and Facebook
accounts are colorful displays of daily specials, from
buffalo blue cheese chicken salad to smoked-barbecueturkey BLT sandwiches. Students see an array of "build
your own" food bars, including Asian rice bowls, tacos,
and top-able mac-and-cheese. Teachers can even
request dishes to align with units students are studying,
such as a low-country seafood boil accompanying
a history lesson on South Carolina's island fishing
communities.
"I remember when [school lunch] was literally just
like, you had a hamburger, a chicken sandwich, and
mashed potatoes, maybe," Kingdom said. "And now
today I saw [Urban] posted that the middle schoolers
were having shrimp and grits for lunch, and I'm like,
that's crazy. He's having these delicious foods, but not
only is it delicious, it's also healthy foods."
Jeff McCoy, an associate superintendent, said he sees
more approving looks from the students, too. "In the
past, while the meals were healthy, I don't think they
were all always things kids wanted to eat," McCoy said.
"I see a lot less of the food being wasted now." n

LESSONS

From a
Leader
Look within
Training staff in food
safety and cooking skills
can save money by
preventing food waste
and allowing more inhouse preparation.

Engage students
Students are more likely
to accept a variety of
foods (beyond pizza
and burgers) if they are
engaged in creating and
taste-testing menus.

Go mobile
Food trucks can support
summer meals for foodinsecure students who
don't attend summer
programs.

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Education Week - February 19, 2020

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