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Nutrition services orientation revised with audio2
- 2. Orientation Overview • Evaluations • Professional Development • NSLP • Attendance policy • Sub Procedure (if applicable) • Sick Policy • Cell Phone Use • Leave • Dress Code • Payroll Info
- 3. Attendance Policy • Attendance is an essential element in this position o Expected to work days and times as stated in position posting o Unpaid time off is NOT an option • All leave must be requested in advance o Exceptions for emergencies or sudden illness o Unpaid Leave will be excepted for those circumstances that fall under the Family Medical Leave Act
- 4. Sub Procedure • Substitute Kitchen Assistants are expected to inform Lauri Troutman at the beginning of the week of their availability for that week • Expect subs to be in contact with Lori every week • The more you communicate, the more you will work • Expect subs to say “yes” more times than “no” • Subs will be given a paper timecard to be filled out and signed by the kitchen manager. It is the subs responsibility to bring their timecard to each site and turn it in to the office at the end of the month
- 5. Sick Policy • Employees must call their Kitchen Manager at least 2 hours prior to the start of their shift if not reporting for work that day • Any employees experiencing GI upset, fever, vomiting, and flu-like symptoms should NOT report to work • Employees should return to work 48 hrs after symptoms subside
- 6. Cell Phone Policy • Cell phones should be stored in employee’s locker o Only used on breaks or lunch time • Not allowed on kitchen floor • Office phone may be used, if necessary, for personal calls, but please limit them to 3 minutes
- 7. Leave • Must be requested at least one month in advance • Submitted to Kitchen Manager, who will sign it and pass it on to Area Manager to approve • Requests CAN be denied based on needs of the kitchen • If a sub is needed to cover for your position, you need to indicate that, as well as the hours you work on the leave form • 3 hr or less employees may take up to 4 unpaid days off during the school year
- 9. Personal Leave • Granted to employees who work 4 hours or more per day • These employees are given 3 personal days per school year ( July to June) • If hired in the middle of the school year, personal day amount is prorated for the rest of current year Start Date Amt Personal Time July 1- Sep 30 3 days October 1-December 31 2 days January 1- March 31 1.5 days April 1- June 30 .75 days
- 10. Sick Leave • 4+ hour employees may accrue sick leave- based on actual hours worked previous month • Must be pre-approved • May be used for illness/ injury of employee, or the employees immediate family, doctor’s appointments, surgeries Years in District Sick Leave Accrued Per Hour Worked 0-4 .030769 5-6 .034610 7-8 .042372 9 or more .046296
- 11. Bereavment • Employees may take up to 5 consecutive working days of paid leave in the event of the passing of an immediate family member o Immediate family members include spouse, child, employee’s parents, spouse’s parents, grandparents, grandchildren, siblings
- 12. Snow Days • Employees must check the district website (www.dcsdk12.org) before going to work to see if schools are open or closed for a snow day • If schools are closed, employees may use their personal time, or not get paid for that day • Late start days- report to work at regular time
- 13. Holidays • 4+ hr Employees will have two paid holidays per year o Christmas o Thanksgiving • Any other holidays that occur during the school year are “no school” days and you will not get paid for them
- 14. Dress Code • Clean, professional, well-groomed appearance at all times • Uniform consists of NS provided polo shirts, apron, visor/cap • Jeans or pants-blue, black, white, or khaki o No “bling”, fraying, low-rise, holes, fading, sweatpants, scrub pants, capris, shorts, skirts, knit pants, spandex • Shoes must be closed toe, closed heel, non-skid o No canvas shoes • Jewelry limited to post earrings and a wedding band
- 15. Dress Code (cont..) • Nails- must be trimmed, clean, and free of polish • No artificial fingernails are permitted • Employee badges should be worn at all times clipped to the shirt- Lanyards may not be worn during food prep • Long hair must be pulled back when wearing the hat/visor • Clean aprons should be worn at all times
- 16. Payroll • Employees must clock in and out at each shift • If a swipe is forgotten, or an employee does not work a regularly scheduled shift, a timecard Exception report must be submitted to the Kitchen Manager • Exception reports will be used for personal days, sick days, missed swipes, etc.
- 17. Payroll (cont..) • Payday occurs the 20th of every month o If the 20th falls on a weekend or holiday, payday will be the business day prior • Payroll Specialist, Laurie Troutman, can answer any questions regarding pay checks or leaves(303)387- 0329
- 18. Benefits • DCSD offers medical, dental, vision, life, and disability insurance • Employees who work 4-6 hours per day will have 50% of medical benefit costs paid by DCSD • Employees who work 7+ hours per day will have 100% of medical benefit costs paid by DCSD • New employees have 30 days after hire to sign up for benefits • Questions regarding benefits can be directed to HR Benefits Department- 720-433-1250
- 19. DCSD Website and Email • www.dcsdk12.org- contains info for employees o Ebenefits- where you will sign up, or view, your benefits (if applicable) o Current Job postings o Contact numbers • Nutrition Services webpage: www.dcsdnutritionservices.org o Menus o Calenders o Parents can add money to child’s account o Free and Reduced Application • Google Email o Listed as first.lastname@dcsdk12.org or first initial last name@dcsdk12.org o Important to check regularly (once per week)
- 20. SRP and Child Abuse Training • All DCSD employees must complete two online trainings and tests when they start working for the district and annually after that o Child Abuse Mandatory Reporting o Standard Response Protocol for School
- 21. Evaluations • Pay for Performance • Goal Setting o Done with your kitchen manager o Based on job description, specific, measurable goals • Goals are set at beginning of year, and monitored twice throughout the year for progress • Final evaluations will be done at the end of every school year • Goals are evaluated on a 4 point scale • Annual raises will be tied to these scores
- 24. Professional Development • Manager in Training Program- 6-10 week program that trains Kitchen Assistants in all managerial duties o Includes rotations at elementary, middle, and high schools o Includes some after work classes on interviewing, applications, managerial skills, etc. o After graduation, MITs are often hired as Kitchen Managers when opportunities become available • HR offers free classes on various professional development areas
- 26. NSLP • National School Lunch Program o Federally assisted meal program to provide nutritious, balanced meals to students o Provides free and reduced lunch to some students o Those that participate must serve lunches that meet Federal requirements and regulations • HHFKA of 2010 o Increases availability of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains o Set caloric limits for each age group (k-5, 6-8, 9-12) o Reduction in sodium levels o Each meal served that meets these requirements will lead to Federal reimbursement for portion of the costs**
- 27. NSBP • National School Breakfast Program o Only done in a few elementary schools in this district o Due to low participation • Follows similar regulations
- 28. Meal Components • The new meal pattern identifies 5 meal components for every meal produced o Fruit, Vegetable, Fluid Milk, Meat, Grain • For a meal to be made reimbursable, a student must select 3 of the 5 components o One of the components must be a fruit or vegetable • A child on the free or reduced lunch program must take a reimbursable meal • Offer vs. Serve o Schools must offer all 5 components o Students may select which components to take
- 29. Ala Carte • All levels are able to sell snacks and Ala carte items that are NOT part of reimbursable school lunch • Students must pay for these items (including free and reduced students) • These include whole grain cookies, baked chips, yogurt tubes, Gold Fish crackers, juice, rice krispie treats, non-menued entrees etc. o Elementary schools have much shorter, stricter lists of what can be sold than secondary
- 30. New Competitive Food Regs • Beginning SY 2014-2015, new rules on all ala carte items will come into effect • These rules will apply to any items sold outside of the school lunch meals, including vending machines and school stores • Stricter rules on calories, sodium, etc
- 31. Thank you and Welcome!
Editor's Notes
- Welcome to Douglas County School District Nutrition Services New Employee Orientation. We would like to welcome our new employees to our department and are excited to have you join our wonderful team. Today we are going to go over basic department policies and procedures.
- This is an overview of the topics we are going to discuss today. Again, basic department policies and procedures as well as a quick overview of the National School Lunch Program and the regulations we folow. You will go more in depth on this topic in subsequent trainings.
- Attendance is the most essential element in our jobs. If we do not have employees at the schools, we are unable to feed the kids as quickly or efficiently as we need to. You are expected to work the days and times assigned to you. The great thing about this job is you know your schedule for the entire school year, so please plan trips and appointments accordingly. All leave, when known, needs to be requested off in advance. The different types of leave will be discussed shortly, as well as the form you will use to request days off.
- -Now we are going to talk about our substitute Kitchen assistant procedure. This is helpful to know, not only for our new subs, but also for our current kitchen assistants. Substitutes are used to fill in at schools when assistants have called in sick, taken a day off, quit, etc. Substitutes are expected to inform the payroll specialist each week (preferably sundays) of their availability for the upcoming week. That way, our specialist will only contact you to work on days when you have said you were available. We start calling for subs at about 7am. We expect a sub to work at least twice a week or eight times a month, with some exceptions. - Subs will fill out a paper timecard for each month, and have each kitchen manager at each site sign off on the day you were there. On the last day of the month, you or the manager of the school you were at, need to scan the timecard to the payroll specialist in order to get paid. You may also drop it off if you are in the Castle Rock area.
- -Now we are going to go through our sick policy. We ask our assistants to contact their kitchen managers at least two hours prior to the start of their shifts if they are not able to report to work that day. We prefer even earlier if possible, as all subs are placed by 7:30 in the morning, so if you let you manager know after that time, there may not be subs available. Please make sure and exchange numbers with your manager right away when you start working in your new kitchen. Make sure you know how they would want you to contact them (cell phone, home phone, etc.). Any employees experiencing GI upset, fever, vomiting, or flu-like symptoms should NOT report to work, and should wait 48 hours after the symptoms subside before returining. Working in food service, we have to be very careful about foodborne illness so we cannot have sick employees handling food. The children that we feed do not have fully developed immune systems and can be susceptible to illness so we need to be very careful to follow this procedures
- We ask that no employees keep their cell phones on them while they are working. There is the possibility of damange to your phone if you drop it or get it wet. And there is also the possiblity of contamination of our food if the phone gets dropped into a large pot of spaghetti sauce. Please keep you phone in your locker, if you have one at your site, or wherever you keep your personal items at you school. You are welcome to use your phone on your breaks, or you can use the manager’s desk phone but please limit personal calls to under 3 minutes. The only exceptions you may see to this rule are your managers. It is sometimes required for your manager to text with their area managers durind the day if there is an issue that is being figured out. This is often the easiest method to communicate so please excuse them if they use it during the day or keep them in their pockets.
- Now we are going to talk about the different types of leave available to you as an employee. Regardless of the type, we ask that you request off days at lease one month in advance, earlier if you already know the day. I will show the leave form next. Please fill this form out and have your kitchen manager sign off and approve it. They will then send it to their area managers to sign off and approve. These are always kept in your employee file. Please remember that requests CAN be denied based on the needs of the kitchen. If we have a three person kitchen and two people request the same day off, it may not be able to be accomodated. Again, one advantage to this job is that you know your schedule for the next year so please request off important days, such as a kids graduation, as soon as possible as we have many employees requesting those same days off. The further we know ahead the more likely we are to be able to figure out a back up plan. If a sub is needed to cover for your position on the day you are off, please indicate that on the form as well. Your kitchen manager can help you with that question. Often, an elementary is only three people per kitchen, so if one person is off, it is more of a burden on the other assistants than at a secondary school where there are 6-8 employees who can pick up the extra work. Three hour or less employees can take up to 4 unpaid days off per school year because they do not get paid personal time
- This is the form you will fill out to request off a day. Your kitchen manager should have some of these printed off or they can print one if you need it. At the top you will fill out your name, todays date, the school you are at, and the day you are requesting off. Below that is where you will mark whether your kitchen will need a sub to cover for you on that day. Below that is the different types of leave. Please check off the most applicable one. The one titled Vacation should NOT be used by our employees as no one in this department gets vacation time. If you are requesting a day off for personal reasons, or no reason at all, please use the personal leave line. At the bottom is where your manager and area manager will sign off.
- -Personal leave is granted to employees who work 4 hours or more per day. These employees are given three personal days per year if you are hired prior to October 1. If you have been hired after October 1, please look at the chart on the page to see how many personal days you will have for this current year, as it is prorated for this year. Our fiscal year follows the school calander, so it runs July 1 through June 30, so your personal days will be in your account after July 1. If you do not use all of your personal time by June 30 of each year, you can carry over one personal day to the following year, so you will start with up to 4 days at a time. Any unused personal time beyond that will be added to your sick leave bank. - 3 hr or less employees will not receive personal time
- -Now we will talk about sick leave. Four hour or more employees are able to accrue sick time based off of how many hours you worked the previous month. On the chart below is the accrual rate. The difference between your sick leave and your personal leave is that personal time is given to you at the start of the year and then uses, whereas sick leave is accrued as you work so you will start with zero. Any unused sick leave will carry over to the next year. Sick leave can be used for pre-approved times like appointments, surgeries, etc of the employee or the employees immediate family memebers. It can also be used for sudden illness or injury of the employee or their family.
- Nutrition Services and Douglas County School District also offers bereavement leave for those employees affected. We hope that no employees need to use this, but we will discuss how it can be used just in case. Employees may take up to 5 consecutive working days of paid leave for bereavement. Bereavement is limited to the empployees’ spouse, child, parents, spouse’s parents, grandparents, grandchildren, or siblings. Your area manager will need to know specifically who passed away as this is required to put into your timecard in order for HR to grant you leave. We apologize in advance for having to ask but please note that it is required. - Also, it is important to keep in mind that bereavment leave must be granted in 5 CONSECUTIVE days off. This means that if a family member passes away now, but will not have a memorial for one month, you must choose if you want to take the 5 days off now or for the memorial. They cannot be split up. You can use the bereavement leave for one trip and personal leave for the other if needed.
- On to more happy topics! There is a possibility of snow days during the school year. To see if the district has decided to close the schools, simply log on to the district website at dcsdk12.org and the banner at the top of the page will say if schools are open or closed. Please make sure you know what feeder area your school is located in. These are based off of the high school that your school feeds to. It is possible that one feeder area could be closed and others could be open. For example, if a storm is worse in the south and the Castle Rock schools close, Highlands Ranch may not have been hit as badly and may choose to stay open. This rarely happens in the district as they mostly decide to have everyone stay open or everyone close. The only exceptions to this are some of our schools that are on the outskirts of town, such as Larkspur Elementary, Sedalia, Cherry Valley, etc. Just remember that you are asked to work the schedule of the school you work at, so if your school is open, but your schools closest to you are closed, you will still need to report to work that day. You can also call the districts snow line at 303-387-SNOW to see if schools are open. Employees do not get paid for snow days, but you can choose to use personal time in order to get paid, or else it will simply be a no school day and you will not get paid. The district could also choose to have a late start day in the event of snow or extreme cold. If the schools have a late start, Nutrition Services employees should report to work at your regularly scheduled time. Often lunch is served at the same time or even earlier on a late start day, so our operations run on a normal schedule. Just keep in mind if you have children in the district that they may be going to school after your time to report to work on these days. Please have a back up plan in place if this happens or keep in contact with your kitchen manager if there is a conflict.
- Four hour or more employees will have two paid holidays per year. These are Christmas and Thanksgiving. Any other holidays that occur during the school year, such as labor day, president’s day, MLK day, etc are simply classified as no work days and you will not get paid for these days. - 3 Hour or less employees will not get paid for any holidays
- You will all be asked to read over and sign off on our department dress code, if you have not done it already. We will review it here. -Please be clean, professional and maintain a well-groomed appearance at all times. Our department uniform consists of navy Nutrition Services polo shirts that are provided to you by the department. Most of our employees wear this with long jeans or you are welcome to wear other long pants such as black, blue or khaki colored pants. Please keep in mind that all pants worn should be in good condition and appropriate for a school setting. No bline, fraying, holes, low-rise, etc. Also, no scrub pants, spandex, shorts, capris, knit pants may be worn. This is for your own safety. If a pot of boiling water gets dropped, these will not adequately protect your legs from burns. Shoes worn must be closed toe, closed heel and non-skid. No canvas shoes such as converse, or mesh topped sneakers may be worn. Again, these are a safety concern. If a knife is dropped on your foot there would be no protection. Sneakers are a great choice as long as they have a soldi or leather top. Stores such as payless also carry a restaurant line of shoes for an affordable price. Jewelry is limited to only post earring, no dangly earrings are permitted. You are also allowed to wear one ring, such as a wedding or other band. No watches are to be worn during work time as these can be a health department concern as they can get food in them. Please remove these prior to the start of your shift.
- Continuing with the dress code, your fingernails must be trimmed, clean, and free of polish of any kind, including clear nail polish. No artificial nails are permitted also. These are both health code violations. Area managers will be checking for this when they visit your school. Enjoy those colorful nails during the summer! Employees will all receive a badge after they have been finger printed. These picture ID badges should be worn at all times on the school premises. This is a saftey concern. We want all employees and visitors to know who we are and why we are there. In the event of an evacuation or drill, you will be required to show your ID in order to re-enter the building. Please wear this at all times. It is best to wear these ID badges on a clip on your apron, shirt collar, or pants. Lanyards are not allowed to be worn during food prep due to the high probability of accidentally choking yourself with it when you put a pan away, or accidentally having it dip into food when you bend down. Our dress code also requires you to wear a visor at all times. We wear these instead of hairnets, which I know you are all sad about. These foam visors were provided to you when you got your shirts, but you are also welcome to purchase more at local craft stores for about $1 a piece. You are welcome to wear multi-colored and fun-patterned visors as long as they are appropriate to a school setting. Please make sure there are no jewels on these that could fall off into food. You also have the option of getting a Nutrition Services ball cap if you prefer these. Please request one from your kitchen manager and they can order one. If your hair is long enough to be pulled into a ponytail, it must be in addition to the visor. Clean aprons should also be worn at all times to protect your clothes. White aprons are to be worn during food prep, and black aprons should be worn during serving of food. Please make sure to switch these out depending on the task you are doing. Aprons will be found at your kitchen site and provided to you. If you spill or get your apron dirty, you should change out into a new one.The kitchen manager should have plenty of these on site. Let’s all remember how we want the people who serve food to us to look and keep that professional and clean appearance in our cafeterias. These students and staff are our customers and we want them to get a good impression of us from the moment they enter the cafeteria. Remember, first impressions matter!
- - Payroll is done using an online time card called Kronos. Employees, once they receive their badge, will be able to swipe in and out at the beginning and end of each shift. Until you get your ID badge, you will fill out a paper timecard. -If a swipe is forgotten, an employee will need to fill out something called an exception report. This report is used anytime a supervisor ( a kitchen manager or area manager) need to go into your time card and manually adjust something. This will also be used when you want us to enter in personal or sick time, or forget your badge for a day. This is the paper trail we need in case of audit to show why we made a change to your timecard and that you approved of us doing it. - We use an online exception report made by your kitchen mangager through Google Docs. This allows you, your kitchen manager, and your area manager to have access to view this at anytime to do month end payroll. Your kitchen manager will show you this form and teach you how to use it.
- Payday is the 20th of every month. If the 20th falls on a weekend or holiday, pay day will be the business day prior. For your first pay check, you will receive a paper check in the mail on the 20th. All subsequent paychecks will be delivered via direct deposit into the account you have set up. Pay day is for the prior month’s hours. For example, all the hours your work in August will be paid to you on the Septemember 20th pay day. Please note that depending on when you start work in a month, if you start towards the end of the month, it is possible that HR cannot process you in time for the next month’s pay day and you will get paid for all of your hours on the second pay cycle after you start. Any questions regarding your pay or paychecks should be directed to our departments’ payroll specialist at 303-387-0329
- Douglas County School District offers benefits to some of our employees Employees who work 4 or more hours per day are eligible to sign up for medical (paid at 50% of costs) and dental, vision, life, disability,e tc. These benefits are also extended to the family if the employee wishes to add them at an additional cost. Employees who work seven hours or more per day will have 100% of their medical benefits paid by the district. They are also eligible for all of the aforementioned benefits. This is generally only our kitchen managers in this category. All benefits are done through an online system on the Douglas County website called Ebenefits. This is where you will get an email prompt from the district that you can now sign up or view the benefit options. This is also where you can decline to sign up for benefits. You will get this email once you are given a district log in New employees have 30 days after they are hired to sign up for benefits and they are retroactive to your official hire date. After this 30 days has ended, May of every year is open enrollment where you can add, delete, or change benefits for the following school year. This is the only time these benefits can be changed barring any qualifying life events. Further questions about benefits should be directed to the district benefits department as they are the ones who administer the benefits for our employees. - All district employees are also enrolled in PERA, rather than Social Security, so please talk to benefits if you have any questions about what this means
- I have listed the link for the general Douglas County School District Website here. Please make sure and look around through the website as it has links to answer most questions. There is a link for A-Z where you can easily find Ebenefits, contact numbers for other departments, and current job postings. Our current employees will still use this area when they are looking to move up in the department to positions with more hours or at another school. You will apply through this online system just like you did recently to get hired with us. Nutrition Services also has our own website. Please look around as it has many helpful links. Because you are all visible to the public and school staff, it is important that you know a few important links as you may get asked about them. Our online menu is posted for every school and meal. It is an interactive menu that allows parents to filter the options based off of carb counts, gluten-fee, dairy-free, vegetarian, etc. If you hover your cursor over each entree, it shows a picture of the meal, as well as lists the full nutrient panel for that meal. There is also an app that can be downloaded onto phones that has our menu Nutrition Services website also contains a link to my school bucks, our online payment system. Many parents use this to add money to their childs account, sothey don’t have to send cash or check with their child to school. They can also view what their child is purchasing on any day this school year. This can be helpful if a parent is wondering how their high school student spent $15 in one day! Parents can also set alerts on their childs account to tell them when it is at zero, or at $5 so they know to add money before it goes negative or their child doesn’t get a lunch. There are no fees for parents to use this online payment system, they just have to create an account. Our website also contains a link to the online application for the free and reduced lunch program. We will talk about this program more in subsequent trainings. This online application directs them to apply for lunch dot com. If parents fill out this online application, they can get approved for this program in under a week usually. This is the quickest way to get kids on this program. We always want to make sure that any students that can benefit from this program are able to easily know how to apply. So now that you will be on the front lines for Nutrition Services, please make sure you know how to answer these questions or direct them to your manager if you forget where the application is. All employees except for subsititutes, will receive a district email address. This is a gmail account through Google. Usually it is your first name dot last name at DCSDk12 dot org. If you included a middle initial on your application they may add this in to your email address. You will receive this when you have a district log in, again sent to you via the email address on your application. All communications from the district as well as from the central nutrition services office will come to this address so please check it at least once per week.
- There are a few more mandatory trainings that you will be asked to complete for the district as a new employee once you are finished with the hiring process and have your district log in. The first will be titled the SRP or Standard response protocol. This training was created in response to the school shooting in Bailey, Colorado. This training will take you through all of the drills that the schools in Douglas County have in place. This will include lock out, lock down, evacuation and shelter in place. This online training will walk you through what you as an employee are expected to do in all of the scenarios presented. All of our schools will do several trainings to practice these. The second training is called the Child Abuse Training. As school district employees, you are all mandatory reporters for suspected child abuse. If at any point you suspect that a child is being abused or neglected you are legally obligated to report it to our security. This training walks you through the signs of abuse to recognize, as well as who to report it to. You will complete this training as soon as you can as a new employee, and then our department takes it annually after that in the Fall.
- - Our department follows the district’s evaluation procedure. We will be conducting annual evaluations. When you start at your school, you will sit down with your kitchen manager and set at least one personal goal that you would like to accomplish. This will be added to your evaluation. Sometime at the end of January or beginning of February you will have a mid-year review with your kitchen manager. At this time they will let you know how you are doing so far, including any areas they feel could use improvement or any areas they feel you are excelling. At the end of April, the final evaluations and scores will be done and sent to HR. Your scores should not be a suprise at this point as it should have been a conversation throughout the year. Every category is evaluated ona 4 pt scale from ineffective to highly effective. Annual raises will be tied to these scores.
- This is an example of the front of our evaluation form. When you create your personal goal, you will find which of the four categories and boxes it fits into and write it in.
- Not only will you be evaluated on your personal goal, but every employee in the district will be evaluated on 10 competencies set by the district. These include adaptability, safety, integrity, customer focus, etc. You will see that each competency has a rubric next to it about what a person in that category may look like. You can ask your kitchen manager to please print a blank evaluation off for you to take home and read so you know what you will be evaluated on.
- Nutrition services is please to offer various professional development opportunties. The main one that we offer is called the Manager in training program. This is a program for current kitchen assistants who are interested in moving up to a manager position with us. You will apply and the top 6-8 candidates will be selected. We try to hold 2 classes per year, one in the spring and one in the fall. During this class, you will attend Monday morning sessions at the central office where area managers will teach you a skill, such as invnetory, ordering, production,etc. You will then go to a different site each week for 6-8 weeks to practice that skill. You will rotate through elementary, middle, high school, charter schools, etc. Our goal is for you to see every program we have to offer and give you a good idea of what it takes at each level. You will also be asked to fill in for managers who are out on leave of any kind to give you real world practice. Once the program is completed, these kitchen assistants are often the first ones we hire as manager positions become available. Outside of our department, the district has a professional development department that offers hundreds of free classes to our staff. Our employees are classified staff, so any classes open to classified staff are available for you to take. Simply go to the professional development website through the dcsdk12.org and look for the course catalog. There are a variety of classes such as Excel, Google Docs, bullying prevention, 7 habits, etc. The district also offers something for classified staff called a professional growth incentive. You can take at least 15 hours of these classes and submit your transcript of what you took to HR and they will send you a $300 incentive bonus check. You can do this twice per school year, for 30 credit hours and $600. This is a great benefit of working with us so please take advantage!
- This video provides a quick overview of the school lunch program as it is today.
- The National School lunch Program is a federal program that allows us to provide free and reduced priced meals to students who qualify. Participating in this program means that all of our participating schools must follow strict nutritional guidelines for all meals we serve to students. The Healthy Hunger Free Kids Act of 2012, which is the law Michelle Obama has championed, led to many of these changes. This las has increased the availability of fresh fruits and vegetables to students, as well as ensured that all grains served to students are whole grains. This includes pasta, breads, pizza crust, etc. The rules also include caloric limits that our meals must fall between for each grade level. You will learn more about these specific regulations in following trainings. Each meal that we serve to our students that meets these federal regulations allows us to receive federal reimbursement back from the government. For every full paying child, we receive 36 cents back from the government. For every reduced price child, we receive $1.50, and for every free child we receive $2.99. Our department is an enterprise fund, which means that we are self-supporting. Nutrition Services receives no money from the district or from tax dollars. What this means, is that maintaining revenue is very important to us and our jobs. We truly are a business. Participating in this programs allows our schools to receive some revenue from the governement for following these regulations.
- - A small number of our elementary schools also participate in the National School Breakfast program. Currently, we have less than 10 schools out of all 83 who choose to participate. The reason this is not a more popular choice is due to the low participation rates we have historically seen. Douglas County is one of the top five wealthiest school districts in the country, meaning our population of students on the free and reduced program is very low in comparison to other districts in Colorado. Right now, we are at about 6% of students participating on the free and reduced meal program. These are generally the students who choose to participate in the schools’ breakfast programs. We are instituting more grab and go breakfast concepts which have shown to be more successful with our demographic of students. You may see this program in your school.
- This is a quick introduction to the meal components that make up our meals. You will do a training focused on this later, but this gives you some information. The new regulations state that every meal we serve must contain 5 components. These are a fruit, vegetable, fluid milk, meat or meat alternate, and a whole grain. - For a meal to reimbursable from the federal government, students must choose to take at least three of the five components. At least one of the components the student chooses must be a fruit or a vegetable. We implement a program called Offer versus Serve, which means that we always offer all five components to students on every day we serve, however it is up to students to select which components they would like to take. The old style of institutional food service where the same meal is slapped on every tray and students get no choice what they eat is no longer the model that we use. The more choice students have in what they get on their tray, the more satisfied they will be with their food and more likely to eat what is on their tray. Our beautiful harvest bars, stocked full with various fresh fruits and vegetables everyday is a great tool we use to encourage all students to take that fruit or vegetable. They can take one of each item to try, or load up on their favorite orange smiles, their choice. Whenever a students comes to your register to buy their food, you are always making sure that every student has a fruit or vegetable on their tray. If they do not, you are gently encouraging and asking if they would like to go back to the harvest bar and try something. We never force any kid to take any component, but we always encourage kids to make good choices with fruits and vegetables.
- Our district also offers some ala carte options at the different grade levels. These ala carte options may be purchased for a set price, regardless of the status the student is. At the elementary level, we sell Chobani yogurt tubes, whole grain goldfish crackers, whole grain cookies, applesauce pouches, and more. At the middle schools and high schools we sell more snack options for the kids including baked chips, whole grain soft pretzels, popcorn and more. These ala carte options are important in helping our department meet our revenue needs.
- Begninning July 1 of 2014, new regulations covering all items sold on the school campus during the school day. Before now, USDA regulations only extended to items sold as part of a school lunch. The new competitive food regulations changed that. They created regulations for all food sold on the campus from Midnight to thirty minutes after the bell rings at the end of the day. This now regulates and sets strict nutrition standards for vending machines, school stores, ala carte offerings and more. We are compliant in this category. The also regulates food fundraisers done by the schools on the campus. Our department is committed to helping school administration to understand and comply with these rules. The nutrition standards include limits on calories, sodium, fat content, sugar content, etc.
- That concludes Nutrition Services New Employee Orientation. You will now complete subsequent trainings on further details of your kitchen positions. These trainings will help to give you a good idea of what to expect from your new job. Please ask any questions to your kitchen manager when you go to your school site. Again, thank you for joining us and welcome to Douglas County School District Nutrition Services!