Monroe County schools work to improve lunchroom experience

Lunchroom Staff at Hamilton say they have gone from feeding about 300 students to over 500 students

MONROE COUNTY, Miss. (WCBI) – Monroe County schools are stepping up to the plate to improve the lunchroom experience.

It started when a chef from Houston approached the superintendent at a conference in Biloxi to change the narrative of school lunches.

There is a stigma surrounding lunchroom food.

“We’ve taken great strides to change that,” said Monroe County Superintendent Chad O’Brian said.

In Monroe County, district leaders are working to improve quality and selection.

“Ever since I started teaching, even going back to my days in school, nobody was really beating the door down to eat school lunch because it’s just cafeteria food,” said social studies teacher Scotty Nichols. “The quality of the food has increased tremendously. We had a chicken wing bar and I was ecstatic about getting to eat.”

Superintendent Chad O’Brian said making the changes in the cafeteria lines has taken a good deal of rethinking and retraining back in the kitchen.

“This is just the first year of it, and up until now there’s been a lot of preparation,” O’Brian said.  “We’re really starting to see the professional development and the things being done behind the scenes, they’re really starting to come to the forefront with the food being served every day.”

Chef Alfred Walker of Walker Quality Services said they are bringing restaurant food to the cafeteria, and with that, lunchroom participation has gone up.

“We have wing bars, we have baked potato bars, we have stir-fry bars, we have mac and cheese bars,” Walker said. “More scratch-made food is healthier for them, not so much processed food. So, when we cook from scratch, kids love it, and it’s things they haven’t been getting at home. We try to bring that homestyle back to the school like it used to be.”

The students at Hamilton have shown their appreciation in more ways than one.

“I went out and interviewed some of the little ones and I said ‘How did you like your chicken?’ Next thing I know, I had like three of them hugging on me, like, ‘we love our chicken’,” said chef Daniel Cockrell.

“You see more kids eating school lunch than bringing their own lunch,” Nichols said.

Walker said his goal is to bring the program into more schools in Mississippi.

“It’s the best thing they could’ve brought to Monroe County,” said cafeteria manager Tanya Collum.

Lunchroom Staff at Hamilton said they have gone from feeding about 300 students to over 500 students.

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