Cherry Creek schools adapt to high demand due to free meals program

DENVER ( KDVR ) — Demand in school cafeterias has gone up since the state started the “Healthy School Meals for All” program last year. Now, school lunchroom staff are serving more meals than ever.

The cafeteria staff at Cherry Creek Schools said the lunchrooms and kitchens weren’t built to serve this many meals, so after the first year of the program, they are making some adjustments.

Cherry Creek has 67 serving sites throughout the district for 53,000 students. During the first year of the free meals program, they served over five and a half million meals, about 35,000 meals a day district-wide.

This year, they anticipate that number will grow.

The cafeteria staff said they outgrew their warehouse where they make baked goods every day, so they are moving into a new facility to allow for more food storage to accommodate food allergies, as well as a staff training center. They had to meal prep more food ahead of time.

A few new gadgets will help kitchen staff prepare meals quicker.

“We have finally gotten a lot of the equipment replaced and added warmers and coolers and things for those schools that really needed more room. We’ve also purchased some food processors for our team. With that 40% increase in breakfast and lunch. It will help them to slice cucumbers, tomatoes and things much, much quicker. Because they’re making so many trays of fruits and veggies that cutting them by hand just wasn’t very efficient,” said Kim Kilgore the Director of the Food Nutrition Department at Cherry Creek Schools.

They are also trying to add a few more recipes they can make from scratch.

Their concern is also getting kids through the lunch line quickly.

Kilgore said there are about 3,000 kids at every high school and only two lunch periods with a 33-minute lunch break. That means staff has to get all those kids through the line in a timely matter, so they’ve updated software to handle that.

For example, one day, Kilgore said they were able to get 450 kids through the line in roughly 17 minutes. Still, that only gives some kids about 16 minutes to eat, so they want to make sure kids have other options and ways to get food.

At the high school level, they are adding a food truck option to help take some stress off the line inside.

“The food truck will actually be just really a mobile serving line. We’ll be able to serve between four and 104 and 500 kids out of that serving truck during the lunch period. The goal of this is really to add another point of service for students,” Kilgore said. “So I wanted to have a space where kids can have another opportunity to go outside do something kind of cool. They can still get a free meal and get the similar things that they would get in the cafeteria but my goal is really to reach more students. So by having another point of service will take the lines out on the inside and hopefully reach even more students than we already are.”

She added that sometimes if kids see the line is too long, they might skip lunch which is not what they want students to do. So they want to make sure the line isn’t a deterrent for kids getting food.

The district is also working on the diversity of the menu to incorporate all cultures.

Cherry Creek is likely not the only district impacted by this either.

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