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July 23, 2020
ADAMS & JEFFERSON COUNTY, COLORADO
A publication of
WestminsterWindow.com
VOLUME 75 | ISSUE 39
More than 700,000 served
As back to school prep begins, Adams 12 summer food program comes to a close BY SCOTT TAYLOR STAYLOR@COLORADOCOMMUNITYMEDIA.COM
Adams 12’s school food program will take a break for a week or two next month after a busy spring and summer. “We went from giving out cold sandwiches in March, blended in April and May with hot entrees served daily and now we’ve gone to frozen meals, they can finish at home,” said Molly Brandt, Adams 12’s administrator of nutrition and Before and After School Enrichment, the BASE program. “And if someone doesn’t have access to cooking equipment at home, we can help them there, too.” The school district provided 715,916 meals to area residents — including students, siblings and adults — since March 17, when the COVID-19 school closures forced the staff to retool. “We had basically one business day, between when we closed our schools and took learning on-line, to flip out the whole model and make things grab-and-go,” Brandt said. The Adams 12 district’s board and leadership are currently discussing what the 2020-21 school year will look like — whether students will return in person to buildings or use video and teleconferencing software to continue their education at home. That means the district’s food service staff must be prepared to retool yet again, either preparing to feed local students in the buildings, with social distancing guidelines in place and masks a requirement, or continue providing grab-and-go meals for hungry students working out of their homes.
“We will know more when that decision comes down,” Brandt said. “But right now, our meals are set to go through August 7. That gives us time, the whole week of August 10, to sanitize, get our deliveries in, train our staff for the school year and potentially reopen all 45 kitchens for the school year. We are going to need time to reopen the other 40 kitchens we have not been using.” Like the COVID-19 pandemic itself, local school’s need to provide meals to house-bound students arose suddenly in March. The staff began offering five meals per week. “We realized at first that many of our meals couldn’t be packaged like that, to be grab-and-go,” Brandt said. “For the first two weeks, we did things that were easiest like peanut butter and jelly, ham and cheese sandwiches or turkey and cheese.” Brandt said the staff began trying different things in April. “There was some menu fatigue, always eating the same thing, so we did some other things, like hot dogs or corn dogs, hot cheesy breadsticks and those kinds of things,” she said. “At our highest point, before school ended, we were serving 16,000 meals per day,” she said. “April and May were our peak months.” Demand began dropping as the schools closed in May and the staff changed their plans again. They began offering seven meals per week, with staff delivering meals for Saturday and Sunday along with Friday’s meals. “We changed our menu again started providing some cooking options,” she said. One popular offering has been the lasagna roll-up, a sheet of pasta rolled around the traditional lasagna meat, sauce and cheese. The meal can be warmed up at home in a microwave or oven or SEE FOOD, P2
Cars line up at Northglenn High School July 17 to collect three days worth of meals. The Adams 12 School District food service department has been providing the meals to students and their families since schools closed in March due to COVID-19 but is scheduled to end the service Aug. 7. Scott Taylor
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