A new format

For weeks now, no students have set foot in a school building let alone a cafeteria.

Yet, thousands — far more than when classes are in session — are being fed.

Meals have been available for pick-up in school parking lots or delivered to homes during the coronavirus pandemic that has left Jay School Corporation buildings closed since the end of the school day March 13.

That’s the end product — food in the hands of students when they need it.

It takes a coordinated effort behind the scenes to make it happen.

“It’s been interesting, to say the least,” said Camila Green, who is in her first year as the Jay Schools’ food service director after previously working at St. Vincent hospitals in Winchester and Elwood for Compass Group, the parent company of new food service provider Chartwells. “It’s been a complete change to our jobs.”



Supply chain

The first step in the process of providing meals to students is getting food into the kitchen.

It’s been one of the challenges for Jay School Corporation’s food service staff, especially during the first week that schools were shut down.

“That has impacted us,” said Green. “All of the schools are moving toward that kind of a menu, so they’re looking to buy the same items.

“So when you think of all the schools doing that, the demand is a lot bigger than what they first had in mind.”

Jay Schools staff made trips to GFS stores in Fort Wayne, Anderson and Indianapolis to ensure that enough produce was available. (Each lunch includes fruit and vegetable components.)

“Overall, it’s been really good — simultaneously much better than I expected, but then there’s the things you don’t expect is ever an issue is a huge issue,” said Brandon McCarthy, who became the corporation’s chef in November after working at the Courtyard Marriott in Fort Wayne. “But as a whole, it’s held up.”

One of those unexpected challenges came in the area of paper and plastic products. They were in short supply in the first week that schools were closed, but have since bounced back.

The biggest change, McCarthy said, is the need for even more planning. Rather than having to look 5 to 7 days out, at least 10 days of lead time is required.

That’s in part because suppliers have cut back on deliveries. In some cases when deliveries would have been available five days a week, that’s been reduced to two or three.

Issues with getting products have also been less of a problem because department of education guidelines have been relaxed during the pandemic.

To help with coordination, Green was part of daily conference calls among all of Indiana’s Chartwells schools during the first week of closures. That’s since been cut back to every other day, but those calls allow Chartwells, and at a higher level Compass, to coordinate products with vendors and make sure its schools have what they need.

Jay Schools would not have been able to offer food service at the same level it has without those corporate resources, superintendent Jeremy Gulley said.

“We would not be pushing (this many) meals without Chartwells, because they have a powerful and reliable supply chain,” he said. “They have regional and corporate layers of support. … Their knowledge base has been very helpful.”



Storage

Getting the food to Jay County is step one.

Having somewhere to put it is step two.

Jay School Corporation typically uses eight kitchens — at Jay County High School, two middle schools and five elementary schools — to produce its food each day. Those operations have now been consolidated.

For the first week, all meals were coming from the high school. Now that bulk feeding — five breakfasts and five lunches in a single delivery — has been implemented, breakfast production has moved with four employees to East Jay Middle School.

But that still leaves a lot at the high school, where the walk-in coolers are jam-packed with food. Storage space is at such a premium that moveable refrigeration units containing milk have been rolled out into the hallways.

“But since we don’t have school we’re been able to spread out more,” said Green. “That’s helped a lot.”

Portable coolers, the ones that are used to transport milk and meals to homes or pick-up sites, are lined up in a corner of the commons. Boxes are stacked on tables where Patriots would typically be eating their lunches.



Making meals

Putting together a meal is not as simple as grabbing a few ingredients and placing them in brown bags.

Apples and oranges work that way. But other items — hot dogs, buns, breadsticks — need to be packaged first by the food service staff. They don’t come individually wrapped, something that typically would not be a problem if they were being served at school.

Some items that would normally be cooked or reheated in the cafeteria require instructions.

“It’s changed a lot just on how we have to organize ourselves,” said Green. “How do we package things? How do we make it simple for the parents?”

Once all of the items are prepared, they are placed on long cafeteria tables. Each table represents a day.

The assembly line process happens around noon, with each item being placed in a bag to create a lunch. Those bags are then put in boxes, which head to a walk-in cooler to wait to be distributed the next day.

The JCHS kitchen typically feeds about 500 students per day. Now, the eight or nine staffers from across the corporation who are working in that kitchen are producing 7,000 meals daily.

That number has been growing, as the corporation is offering food to all children, not just students.

The staff has occasionally had to kick production into overdrive. On March 27, for instance, the list of those who were unable to get food at the pick-up sites during the day was long. The food service staff responded by producing 2,000 meals that afternoon, enough for bulk feeding for 200 students, that were picked up at the high school that evening.



Transportation

After meals are prepared and packaged, there’s still the matter of getting them to students who are not in school.

During the first week that schools were closed, that meant taking them to six school parking lots where they were available for pick-up. Since then, the corporation has settled on delivering meals to “country kids” via their bus routes once a week and having bulk food pick-up for “town kids” at the Pennville, Redkey and Westlawn elementary school and East Jay parking lots.

The meals are packed into boxes and blue coolers labeled by bus — each cooler has one black number and one red number, differentiating the “country A” and “country B” delivery days — and are wheeled out on carts by food service workers and custodians through the cafeteria and gym to the northeast side of the building. They are placed next to signs labeled for each bus along the sidewalk.

Bus drivers arrive at JCHS at 9:30 a.m., get loaded and are on the road by 10:30 a.m. Each bus goes out with a driver and an aide (or two, depending on the number of meals involved), dropping off food either to students or parents who are waiting for it or leaving it in a cooler provided by the families.

Of the 36 drivers who are full-time on routes for the corporation, only two — one who is pregnant and one who was set to retire at the end of the year — are not behind the wheel.

“They were just overwhelmed with seeing their kids,” said first-year Jay Schools transportation director Melissa Stephen of the first day of home delivery. “Some of them are low income that probably wouldn’t get fed. And they know that. They know their kids.”

There are fail-safes in place to make sure each child who requested food receives it.

For town kids, an evening pick-up slot at Jay County High School is a back-up option. Also, community partners — Glad Tidings Church (Dunkirk), Faith Community Church (Pennville), Redkey Fun for Kidz, The Rock Church (Portland) and Holy Trinity Catholic Church (Bryant) — have stepped in to deliver missed meals when necessary. Families who have been missed are asked to fill out an online form, which the community partners use to coordinate delivery.

As for the country kids, if anyone is missed or additional food is needed, the bus drivers tend to return to JCHS to pick up what is needed and get it out immediately.

“They want to deliver to their kids,” said Stephen. “They don’t want somebody else. They want to go back personally.”



Meaningful work

It’s a massive operation, and the numbers are staggering.

A corporation that typically produces about 15,000 meals a week is now sending out nearly 22,000 in a format its staff would not have imagined prior to last month.

It’s a group effort, involving not just food service, but transportation staff, custodians and aides.

“It’s been really cool overall,” said McCarthy. “It’s multiple departments collaborating.

“Everyone has handled it really well. They’ve been awesome. … It’s a great staff to have as a whole, working together. Everyone’s been great. We’re getting a lot done, and we’ve improved a lot. … (This week) we are going to be very, very good at this..”

The food service staff is being pushed well beyond its normal workload.

Jennifer Cassel, who normally works about five hours a day serving 202 meals at Redkey Elementary School, has seen her hours increase to eight to 10 per day.

Others used to about 30 hours a week have seen their totals jump to about 55.

Mary Laux, who has worked in food service at Jay Schools for 31 years, is putting in 12-hours days.

It’s hard work, she said, but work worth doing.

“It’s wonderful really,” said Laux. “It touches you that you’ll be able to feed a family because some of them don’t have anything. Mom and dad are both out of work. …

“It’s a blessing that they can get this. So, I’m glad we can provide it.”