Sherri Knutson, Rochester School District 535

With more than 16,000 students and 23 schools, the Rochester School District 535 is growing fast. The city’s two major industries, the Mayo Clinic and IBM, have rendered it (thus far) immune to the state’s economic slowdown. Sherri Knutson has been the district’s foodservice director for the last eight years, and has worked in school foodservice for 18 years. The school serves meals to 80 percent of its elementary school students in the district, and 70 percent of secondary school students, including breakfast programs.

Other districts are trying to source locally grown product. What’s Rochester doing?
We’ve done some for three years, and last fall worked with a local vendor, starting with apples in three elementary schools. It went over so well that we decided to do it district wide, and the produce purveyor was able to keep up with the quantity. Then we went to fresh watermelons weekly from them, then tried a few other fall vegetables, including squash. We’re trying to get students used to some different vegetables that they maybe don’t see at home. And it’s not saying, “Here’s your vegetable for the day, it’s squash, take it.” We’re saying, “It’s squash, locally grown, try a small sample.” And we kept coming back week after week, so it wasn’t just going away. We hope to expand it this spring, and we do quite a few summer feeding programs, so we’ll see what happens.

Do you see this as a direction more schools will take?
I truly do. It’s not only good for children to eat fruits and veggies from the region they’re grown, but also, obviously, good for the local produce industry and farmers to sell their product to us. Unfortunately, we’re not a warm climate and don’t have the abundance year ’round, but there’s great potential for many school districts to utilize their local produce vendors and farmers. It’s a great teaching opportunity too, to tie it to what you see in the lunchroom back to the classroom, and make a visit to a farm to see how items are harvested.

What other goals do you have for the district?
We have really worked hard in the last years to focus the nutritional value of the foods we’re serving, and trying to make our school meals as healthy as we can. We are looking at the types of a la carte offerings we have at our secondary sites. We’re in a medical community that’s known worldwide, so there’s a real health and wellness component within the community. We work with individuals from the Mayo Clinic, and have presented at their obesity summit for several years to let the medical community know what we’re doing in the school environment. We also worked closely with the Olmsted County public services in what we do in our school foodservice. There are a lot of good community partnerships supporting the concept of what we’re feeding children.

Some districts are moving away from a la carte, but you are still working it into your menus?
Yes, we’re not moving away from a la carte items, we’re trying to find items that meet the nutritional criteria we set, to replace traditional items with healthier versions. For example, to replace the nacho cheese and chip type of thing—we’ve found an individual packaged type of tortilla chip, and serve it with fresh salsa. We’ve gone away from ice cream and serve no-fat, no-cholesterol yogurt, and fruit toppings in a cone for example.

Are more foods being prepared from scratch?
I think we’re all slowly moving in that direction. We’re trying to see if we can get back to some of the more traditional home-style meals for the children. And it takes time. We’ve moved so readily into the whole pre-prepared, fast foods. I think what people don’t realize in this profession is we’re all hands on deck. We have to serve so many students in short time periods, and we have to prepare food in reasonable time periods. And it presents a real challenge.

Do you have a central kitchen to accomplish this?
No. I like to do food prep per site. We’re able to do that in this district, and I think there are advantages to do that—the food is a little bit fresher, hotter, and there’s more ownership on the people that are serving the food if they’re preparing it. We’ve been very lucky. Most of our sites are able to prepare the majority of their food items on a daily basis.

How has Rochester’s population changed since you arrived?
Rochester is growing, and we’re seeing an influx of diverse students. The community just supported building another new elementary school on the north side. The school board and staff are very proactive in this community with putting dollars back into their facilities and upgrading them as much as possible.

In the foodservice operation, we’ve used our excess revenue dollars for remodeling schools. All three of our high schools have been remodeled since I’ve been here, and five large remodelings at elementary schools. We also upgrade the kitchens with new equipment, and that’s been positive for us. We’ve been trying to create warm and friendly environments in our cafeteria area for students, which parallels upgrading the kitchens for our staff.

That’s been a really positive for our program. Our staff is very excited about who’s next on the list for remodels and facility updates. The fact that we’re able to support some of these remodels through our own excess revenue dollars is quite exciting.

So you don’t have to pitch levies on the community?
It’s been mixed. There has been some of the upgrades have been levies, and others have to spend on their five-year capital plan. These upgrades are a great opportunity for our staff, too. When you start looking at these upgrades and they start looking at blueprints and visiting other schools, and sit down with the architect, it’s exciting.

Have you changed menus because of changing student demographics?
We are trying to do that. We’ve looked at what other districts are doing, and working with chefs. We’ve asked staff members from different countries to choose some of their recipes for menu items. We work on adjusting for quantity, got the ingredients and prepared the dishes. It works extremely well. We have one employee form South Korea and another from Cambodia, and they prepared their meals in the high school environment and we’ve run out of food every time we have it. It’s a good way to involve our own staff to show a bit of their ethnic background.

The students at Mayo high school were so impressed with that, they did a very nice, two-page article in their student newspaper about what was going on in the kitchen.

What are some of the immigrant groups moving to Rochester?
The three largest are Hispanic, Somali and Hmong. I think there’s a lot more creativity and work we can do in these areas to expand our menu choices and look at the religious concerns of these students. We’re trying to be more respectful and more receptive to that.

You have a program with Panera Bread?
We’ve looked at partnerships with businesses in the city that have products that students are interested in, and that meet the nutritional criteria we set. We started this year working with Panera; we buy their bagels. Each high school is getting 12 to 15 dozen bagels every morning to use for breakfast and make sandwiches for lunch. We’ve had another serious conversation with Panera to expand some food choices in our lunch, maybe some soups, salads and certain sandwiches. We’re trying to build on this partnership. We have partnerships with other businesses, and we’re always watching in the neighborhood other businesses for partnerships.

What is your dietetic internship program?
I’m a past president of the MSNA, and have been involved with the organization for 12 years. I think they do great things with educational training at their conferences. The partnership with the Mayo Clinic and their dietetic interns was an opportunity for us to work with young professionals in the field, and I feel that school foodservice is a growing area of dietetics. We have the opportunity to have these interns, who already have a four-year college degree in dietetics and received a year-long internship at the Mayo Clinic, work with us on three-week rotations. It’s a great way to bring in creativity and new ideas into our foodservice environment, and give them the opportunity to learn hands-on about this profession.

Do you harvest new ideas from these interns?
They do some wonderful things. One young woman we had, we did presentations in the city and the outlying communities in second, sixth and seventh grade classrooms about nutrition, food safety, the food guide pyramid and what to buy in the grocery store. This is the fourth year being able to work with the Mayo Clinic and dietetic program, and it’s brought some really wonderful things to our program.