Since Wednesday, March 18, AVI Food Service Director Mark Jacobs and his food service team have prepared and distributed between 350 to 400 meals daily. They make sure that any student who lives in the Shaker Heights Schools attendance zone and who needs or wants breakfast and lunch every day gets those meals, weekends included.
Whether Mr. Jacobs and the AVI team are officially classified as “essential workers” makes no difference to them. What has been essential to them is that no Shaker Heights Student goes hungry during the school closure or, moving forward, into the summer.
“We’re a tight-knit bunch,” says Mr. Jacobs, a food service industry veteran who just joined the AVI team at Shaker Heights Schools this year. “And our goal is to come in and to do what we have to do to provide the students with what they need.”
On food delivery days, Mr. Jacobs arrives at the Shaker Heights High School kitchen, where the meals are prepared, between 5:30 and 6:30 a.m. to start the prep work. The rest of the team arrives by 8 a.m. and together, they prepare the meals until 10 a.m., when the food is loaded onto school buses for delivery. Initially meals were delivered weekdays, but by early April, deliveries transitioned to Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays to maximize social distancing and to provide food for students over the weekends.
Early on, the challenge was determining how many meals to make. If the team didn’t make enough food, then students would be hungry. Sending out too much food would lead to waste. So Mr. Jacobs kept track of meals delivered in the first week to determine demand and a safety buffer. He’s successfully managed the count ever since.
Despite food supply chain challenges, Mr. Jacobs reports that sourcing food has not been a problem. “AVI is a food service provider for many districts in the state, so we were able to pull product for some items from districts who weren’t providing meals for students. That was helpful,” he says.
The AVI team was also sure to include variety in meals. Mr. Jacobs refused to include the same cold turkey sandwich in a meal day after day. “We found these really nice food containers that could be used to heat up food in the oven or in the microwave,” he says. That discovery enabled the team to mix up the variety and prepare meals like build-your-own pita pizza kits, chicken parmesan, Swedish meatballs and sweet and sour chicken with fried rice.
“It’s been interesting. None of us have gone through anything like this and there certainly have been challenges,” says Mr. Jacbos, reflecting on this experience. “But Shaker is my home now and I’ve got to take care of our kids.”