On December 13, 2021, SAA’s longtime food service director Dan Loukota announced that he was stepping down at the Christmas Break. We figure that SAA Administration knew about this well prior to this message, and had several weeks to find either a replacement or some type of substitute arrangement to continue offering lunch service to the children of SAA.
Since that time, over 3 months ago, no replacement has been named, and lunch service has not returned since Mr. Loukota’s departure at the Christmas Break.
On December 30, 2021, SAA Principal Bowerman sent an email to the school community: “We will be sending out a survey next week to get your ideas and opinions as we begin the big job of trying to find someone new to provide hot lunches. Please take a few minutes to complete the survey when it goes out. We will start meeting with people and collecting proposals this quarter.”
Sent a mere 5 days before the resumption of classes, the message seemed a product of old-fashioned procrastination. While it is fine for SAA to “use a Lifeline” by asking the customers for nominations and suggestions, we have found no record that any such survey was ever sent to the school community. Above all, the message offered no solutions, even temporary or makeshift ones. This suggests a lack of necessary problem-solving abilities.
Since the survey was never sent out, Eyes On SAA has a few suggestions for the school to consider:
1. Outsourcing. Negotiating an arrangement with a local restaurant or food provider (Subway, Dominos, Papa John’s, etc.) to offer a once (or twice?) weekly hot lunch option. Such an option is offered at other private schools, many of which are smaller and have less resources than SAA.
2. Food Heating. There could be microwave ovens made available to allow our children to heat up the hot food prepared for them at home. Industrial microwaves are offered at other schools as well, with multiple ovens to reduce delays, and reasonable safeguards such as adult supervision to ensure cleanliness before/after each use and to prevent contamination by allergens. The lack of food heating consigns SAA’s children to eating cold lunches with much fewer selection options, usually less healthy, and often more expensive. So unless they get up extra-early each day to cook hot food and purchase thermal equipment to maintain its temperature for several hours, children will continue to eat lots of PB&J, chips, cold pasta, etc.
3. Lunch Back-up Option. From time-to-time children may forget their lunch at home or in the car, or maybe because of work schedules or late-night homework could not take the time to prepare a lunch. Is there really no better option than the parent missing work to drive back home to retrieve the forgotten lunch and take it back to school? Or just have the child go hungry or have to seek food charity from their peers? How hard is it to set up a forgotten lunch hotline option (from a local deli or other food provider) for those children? Couldn’t such a charge be easily applied to the student’s account, like the after-school care service?
Meanwhile we in the school community have heard nothing whatsoever in almost 3 months (all of January, February, and March to this point) from Mrs. Bowerman about the lunch program. The school community has heard nothing whatsoever from SAA’s Secret School Board on this problem (or any other issue) since its top-secret body of work is not shared. This is a failure of leadership and administrative problem-solving, and communication as well.
With no answers for this failure over the past 3 months, there apparently is no school lunch option on the horizon for the foreseeable future, perhaps even into the next school year. Since we live in a land of plenty and can afford to send our children to a private school, it is unlikely that children at SAA will go hungry for more than one missed school lunch now and again. Yet this much is clear: SAA has dropped the ball on this.
Our children deserve better.
-Lillian Hepburn-Richmond
(A Cohort of Concerned Parents)
Shining Light. Breaking Silence. Holding Accountable.
We’ve got Eyes On SAA.
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