High-tech cafeterias may brew better eating habits at school
Francesca Ayala | 11-18-2009 | Comments |
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Reinventing school cafeterias to remove free lunch stigma
Rolling out new technology in public school cafeterias may be the most effective way to alleviate hunger and malnutrition, according to district officials.
A much-needed upgrade will soon replace clunky cash registers and meal card swipers with touch-screen monitors and fingerprint scanners. This migration to digital technology will eliminate many logistical hurdles that public school cafeterias face to meet the growing demand for free lunches.
Florence Simpson, a supervisor for the Los Angeles Unified School District’s food services branch, said that budget cuts have left fewer resources available to children attending public schools. District schools can no longer afford to hand out free snacks to students on testing days. Cutbacks have been made on fresh fruits and vegetables. Summer lunch programs for children from low-income families have been eliminated entirely. There has been a 4 percent increase in the number of public school students who qualified for free and reduced price meals, Simpson said.
“Consumption is changing,” Simpson said. “Kids are eating more and wasting less.”
Using a finger print to pay
To meet this demand with faster and more efficient service, Simpson and her colleagues in the food services department plan to give all LAUSD cafeterias a technological upgrade within the next two years. This state-of-the-art cafeteria management system employs, for example, two ways of identifying students when they pay for meals: biometric scanners are used to read a student’s fingerprint or the student can enter a pin code onto a keypad. Then, the student’s information shows up on the cashier’s computer, including their name, their picture, what grade they’re in, if they qualify for free or discounted meals, what they’ve eaten and the number of times they’ve eaten that day.
The system is now being tested at the James A. Foshay Learning Center, located in South Los Angeles. LAUSD cafeterias currently use paper tickets and cards to identify students that need free and reduced meals. Foshay is a K-12 school with 3,300 students, 85 percent of whom qualify for free and discounted meals. Lunch break lasts for only half an hour, which means that cafeteria workers have to make sure the lines move as quickly as possible to ensure that every student is fed. In the past, students who forgot their meal cards had to line up elsewhere so they could be issued temporary cards to buy their meals with. With only four cash registers to service all the students, the result was a logistical nightmare.
All these factors—the large volume of students, the limited time allotted for lunch breaks and the existing logistical cafeteria problems—make Foshay the perfect candidate for testing out the new cafeteria management system.
“Students were forgetting or losing their cards,” said Simpson. “Instead of trying to stand in line and get a replacement, they just weren’t eating.”
This migration to fingerprint scanning and pin pads will also eliminate the shame many students feel when using paper tickets to get free or discounted meals.“In most of our cafeterias, students use paper tickets,” said Simpson. “As students hit middle school, it’s really seen as a stigma because their friends know they get free meals.”
A rise in the number of free and reduced meals
Within the first week that this new cafeteria system was rolled out, Simpson said there was over a 100 percent increase in the number of Foshay students participating in the free and reduced price meal program. “[Using] the cards kind of hindered us in a way,” said Jamila Richardson, a food service worker at the Foshay cafeteria. “[The students] can’t lose their fingers.”
Of course, new technology doesn’t come without its share of bugs. Krystal Chavez, a 14-year-old Foshay student, said that all the new machines in the cafeteria broke down last month. When asked what she thought of the new technology, Chavez said she wasn’t too impressed.
“It’s the same thing as using a card and sometimes it doesn’t scan,” she said. “The only difference is that the school doesn’t have any money to make plastic cards.”
“It’s hard because we’re the guinea pigs, so any glitches in the system… we get them,” said Richardson. “After we get all the glitches and the problems together and once it gets into other schools, I’m sure it’s going to run very smoothly.”
Other students, such as 14-year-old Victor Tellez, said that the new cafeteria system makes eating meals a lot less of a hassle.
“Right now I eat lunch at school because it’s been getting better and all you have to do is put your finger [on a scanner],” said Tellez. “So it’s easier to get [food].”
The next step for Foshay is to qualify as a Provision 2 school of the free or reduced lunch program, meaning that the federal government will subsidize meals for every single student. Until the school’s application is approved, administration is hoping that the new technology will bring them up to speed with the demand for free or discounted meals.
“We at least can count on the fact that [our students] are able to eat at school,” said Foshay principal Yvonne Edwards. “We can’t control what they eat at home or outside of school, but we try to make sure that they have a healthy meal at least twice a day.”
Tags: eating well foshay learning center free lunch los angeles unified school district reduced lunch south los angeles