Not Just Your Average School Lunch Program

Fredericksburg is turning a negative - a high percentage of students who qualify for free- and reduced-price lunch - to a positive: creative, healthy foods for students.

by Thomas Conway
GUEST WRITER

The kids at James Monroe High School in Fredericksburg, Viginia, love to complain about the cafeteria food. 

“It’s soggy and gross,” says one. 

“It’s just nasty,” another chimes in. 

Photo by Element5 Digital on Unsplash

I hear it all the time in my classroom, and until recently I took the kids’ word that the food wasn’t that great. It’s a high school cafeteria, after all. That’s what’s expected.

When I take a look at the food menu, though, I find myself wondering what the issue is. The school lunch menu isn’t limited to the usual institutional fair. On the contrary, the menu includes bean and grain burgers, crab cakes, steak quesadillas, portobello mushroom sandwiches, veggie burgers, and a shrimp po’ boy. To be sure, the standard cafeteria fare is certainly there — hamburgers, chicken nuggets, mini corn dog nuggets, hot dogs, pizza — but the menu isn’t limited to that by any means. 

“These kids grow up eating fast food,” says Fredericksburg City Public Schools’ Nutrition Supervisor Brian Kiernan. “It’s what they’re used to, and they like it. Of course I have that stuff on the menu. That doesn’t mean I can’t make it better.”

“We know that people don’t like change,” he continues, punctuating his words with a pointed finger. “The kids don’t like change; they love chicken nuggets. The key is to improve the quality and improve the nutrition, and to do it in a sound way. You have to understand the business side of food and translate it to school nutrition.”

Kiernan’s approach is anything but typical. He began his association with public school nutrition in Stafford County, just north of Fredericksburg, in the early 2000s’.  He was hoping for an opportunity to coach baseball and bring some creativity and quality to the school cafeteria but had a rude awakening.

“It was nothing more than prison food,” he said. “The people running the cafeteria followed the requirements and did the bare minimum.” 

He knew he could do better but found himself coming up against one obstacle after another. Still, he realized he had found a calling. “I come from a restaurant background,” he said. “I worked at all sorts of restaurants in Manhattan, and then ran restaurants here in Fredericksburg for years. I wanted room to grow, to push the envelope. I was overqualified for working at a starting cafeteria worker’s salary, but I wanted the opportunity to make a difference.” 

This led him to take a job in his adopted hometown of Fredericksburg, which is a small city of some 27,000 people. The school district includes two elementary schools, one middle school, and one high school, and it serves only around 3,700 students.

U.S. News reports that 58.5% qualify as economically disadvantaged. No other nearby district tops 40%, and few districts in the state have a rate anywhere near that high.  It’s also one of the most diverse schools in the state, with a minority enrollment of 80% and a growing immigrant population, largely consisting of Afghani and Central American refugees, many of whom speak little to no English. 

Some would say Fredericksburg is a tough district to work in. It faces funding problems the neighboring counties don’t because of the way the state funds school districts, and discipline issues and truancy are high. Fredericksburg also has one of the lowest graduation rates in the region, and often struggles with accreditation based on state test scores. Staff turnover is high. This year, the English department will lose its department head for the second year in a row. 

The entire administrative staff has turned over in just four years. Two administrators and no less than five teachers have been replaced during the 2023-2024 school year.

Kiernan, however, has thrived. “When I came to Fredericksburg City Schools in 2005, there was no ‘school nutrition director.’ That position didn’t exist. There were just admin types fussing about the budget, serving processed food. Once they saw that I knew what I was doing, I have to give them credit.  For the most part, they got out of the way.  We’re the only department in this school district that operates in the black.  All of our money comes from the Federal and State government programs; we take no funding from the district at all.” 

On this topic, Kiernan becomes very animated. He may not like bureaucracies, but he knows chapter and verse how the federal and state programs work and can talk about numbers and percentages with just as much passion as he talks about food.

“The bottom line is that, with more than 50% of our students qualifying for free and reduced lunch, the funding allows us to feed 100% of our students two meals every day for free. That’s a big deal. Then, it’s just about how to do that in a way that benefits all of our students. It’s about serving nutritious food that tastes good and doesn’t bankrupt the program. And ultimately, the food is it. That’s why we’re doing it. We’re feeding the kids in this community and not asking for a penny in return. We serve breakfast and lunch at the schools, and in the summer, we feed them from food trucks which roll through all of the neighborhoods in Fredericksburg all summer long. It’s a service no one else provides.”   

In the end, though, it’s all about the food, and Kiernan takes pride in the food he serves. “We make everything we possibly can from scratch,” he says. “We can’t avoid prepared and frozen foods completely, but we always try to make it better somehow. The chicken tenders we serve are whole muscle, not processed nuggets. We serve crab cakes that are made in house from real crab meat. I mean, seriously, where else can you get that in a school cafeteria? I can tell you: nowhere. Next week, we’ll serve peel and eat shrimp. The kids love that. This year, we’ll spend $200,000 on fresh produce.  Nobody else does that.  Certainly not a district as small as ours.”

“You have to offer choices that people like, you have to give them quality food made with quality ingredients, and to make it work on the kind of budgets I work with it has to be simple and positive.”

And at that, Kiernan has been incredibly successful. What was once a $1 million dollar program has tripled to $3 million dollars. Fredericksburg’s cuisine has been sampled in the Virginia State Governor’s Mansion and at the White House. During the COVID-19 pandemic, when school systems and city governments were struggling to figure out how to get food to hungry students who were not in school, Kiernan and his staff were traveling across the city in food trucks, delivering meals to students and families all over town.

Like a local version of Jose Andres’ paradigm-changing NGO World Central Kitchen, which finds ways to get good food to people in trying areas, Kiernan and his staff are bringing good food to people in need across the whole community every single day.   

“There are a lot of people who don’t get it; it’s not about money. It’s about the food and the quality, and about getting the kids to eat it.”

Thomas Conway is an English teacher at James Monroe High School.

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