Empower your Managers
a student allergic to soy for example. At home they can safely enjoy ground beef tacos, burgers and spaghetti, but wait, at school these are not available, but why? This was one of the first changes I made early in my career; we switched from pre-cooked beef crumbles that contained soy to a product without. We also minimized how many products we served that contained peanuts or were processed in a facility with peanuts. The goal was for it to be easy for the students allergic to peanuts to identify what to avoid; two items: peanut sandwiches and peanut butter cups. We took this approach with our entire lineup of foods and made changes wherever it made sense to simplify those ingredient lists! For all you Spider Man fans, “with great power comes great responsibility.” I always felt that being a menu planner and deciding what 60,000 students were going to eat every school day came with great responsibility and let that guide my menu choices. Systemize and Simplify your Approach In the beginning I was doing a lot of things that were inefficient. I would have lists and documents and menus that had to be re-created each time the cycle menu changed. Use technology to your advantage. Take the time to get allergens entered into your nutrition management software so you
on Special Diets! Positive Spin Putting a
Depending on the size of your district,you are going to need to delegate certain aspects of this process. I worked in a large district and had just one person responsible for special diets. It was unrealistic that one person could give an individualized approach to each and every special diet request. So that meant we had to empower our kitchen managers and give them the blueprint to meet our expectations. They received the information they needed for each student and the expectation that this student should receive a meal that was as similar to what everyone else was getting as possible or an alternative that was acceptable to the student. So guess what, this requires a conversation with the student and depending on their age, the parent, to determine their likes/ dislikes to come up with a menu that works for everyone. The managers have relationships with these students, so it makes sense to empower them to work one on one with the students. If you are lucky enough to plan school menus and special diets, I hope this inspires you to treat each student with a special diet needs as if they are your own child so they can love school meals MORE than everyone else .
Consultant, Kazmarski LLC | Co-Founder/President, Locally Grown Inc. Jenna Kaczmarski, MSPH, RD, SNS
Confession time…. Sometimes special diets made me crazy! Flashback to 2005. I had just been hired as the first registered dietitian in a large school district and obviously one of my responsibilities was special diets. We had no nutrient management software, no database to track which foods contained which allergens or carb counts and no formal way of accepting special diet requests (think handwritten vague notes from a doctor on a prescription pad!). So naturally, I got to work! As someone who built a process for managing special diets literally from the ground up, over the course of about ten years, I found a few things along the way that made it all work. And by the way, when we created a formal process and form to submit requests, we went from about 15 requests each year to 800! So yeah, the only way to keep my sanity was to imagine what it must be like for little Johnny who was allergic to soy, corn, wheat and peanuts to experience school lunch and do my best to make him feel taken care of and valued enough to provide him a meal he could still get excited about. Which brings me to my first point. Let empathy guide your actions
certainly didn’t ask for them and as someone who is fortunate to not personally know what it is like, I can only imagine and proceed with great empathy. That means that it is going to require extra effort, but that extra effort means the world to the student (and their parents) who can enjoy their meals at school with the peace of mind that they are safe. When approaching special diets, if you are asking the question “what is the least accommodation I am required to make,” what would happen if instead you ask “what can I do to help this student experience school meals like everyone else does.”
11
Evaluate your products
can take advantage of reports. If your software does not allow for this, you can use Microsoft Access to create a database, and it will get the job done. Just make sure you set aside time each summer to update your product records to ensure reports accurately reflect allergens and carb counts. For your students with life threatening allergies, their life depends on the accuracy of those lists!
Jenna Kaczmarski, MSPH, RD, SNS Consultant, Kazmarski
There are a lot of considerations to take into account when selecting which products end up on your menu. I encourage you to make clean label products a top priority; your allergy students and their parents will thank you. When you look at the list of foods you serve and then examine what allergens they contain it can be eye opening. Imagine being
LLC | Co-Founder/ President, Locally Grown Inc.
Jenna Kaczmarski is a mom, consultant and co-founder of Locally Grown Inc. with 16 years of experience in school nutrition operations and a former School Nutrition Director. As a consultant, Jenna works behind the scenes to make you look good and make sure you achieve your goals through strategic planning, meeting/ workshop facilitation, administrative review prep, leadership training and project implementation management. She co- founded the non-profit, Locally Grown Inc to engage in the work of building resilient and equitable local food systems and sustainable Farm to School Programs.
“When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” Dr. Wayne Dyer
You know the saying “walk a mile in their shoes,” well I would say “eat a school lunch in their shoes.” Which, by the way, is a great way to approach inclusive menu design in general, but maybe that is for another day. Students with special dietary needs
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