January 6, 2022

In this episode we visit Davenport, California, a little seaside town, south of San Francisco, not far from Santa Cruz. The town is home to a tiny district with just one school, nestled between ocean, farmland, and mountains. John Fensterwald is taking us there for lunch, cooked from scratch by the fifth and sixth graders.

Pacific Elementary’s unique Food Lab program is a boon for the district, boosting its enrollment by attracting students from nearby wealthier districts.

Guests:

  • Emelia Miguel, Food Service Director, Pacific Elementary School
  • Quinn Schromm, Moses O’Riordan, Shyon Johnson, Logan Franks, and other Student Chefs, Pacific Elementary School
  • Eric Gross, Principal, Pacific Elementary School
  • Doña Bumgarner, Parent and Librarian, Pacific Elementary School
  • John Fensterwald, Editor-at-large, EdSource

Read the EdSource article and watch the video:

Transcript:

Education Beat

Episode 20:

Published: Jan 6, 2022

Anne:

Welcome to Education Beat. I’m Anne Vasquez, executive director at EdSource. Like many parents of a teenager and a tween, I was thrilled to start this nerve-wracking school year with one less worry. Lunch at school was guaranteed. Whether I forgot to pack it or the kids left it behind in the rush out the door in the morning, I knew they would not go hungry. The only problem, my kids really don’t like school food. And I know they’re not alone. As it turns out, there’s at least one school district in California where students love the school lunch. What’s their secret? We’ve got the scoop.

Emelia:

We do a Hanukkah menu, a Kwanzaa menu, we do Feliz Navidad, which is today, Pozole, and our French menu where we make crepes.

Anne:

Here is this week’s Education Beat with host Zaidee Stavely.

Zaidee:

Today we’re going on a field trip to Davenport, California. It’s a little seaside town south of San Francisco, not far from Santa Cruz. The town is home to a tiny district with just one school nestled between the ocean, farmland, and mountains. John Fensterwald is taking us there for lunch.

John:

It’s lunchtime at Pacific Elementary School in Davenport, but this isn’t your average Lunch, and the average age of the chef is, well, about 10 and a half. What are you serving today?

Student:

Pozole, Quesadilla and Salad.

John:

Not your typical school cafeteria fair. No sloppy Joe’s or Reheated Pizza. The ingredients are fresh, organic, mostly local, and they’re cooked daily by the fifth and sixth graders at Pacific Elementary who have an Oceanside view.

Emelia:

So Logan, I love how you put all those onions in there, but let’s do it in two batches or else we will not have enough room in the Vitamix. Okay?

John:

That’s Emelia Miguel. She’s the food Service director of the Food Lab, as the lunch program is called. Every morning you can find her and the student cooks hard at work preparing lunch for 140 students. Plus of course the teachers and staff.

Emelia:

Yeah, don’t drop it in though. So I arrive in the kitchen at eight o’clock and we start cooking with kids at nine o’clock. Don’t splash yourself. There you go. We serve breakfast to the whole school. How many cups do you need? Then we start cooking lunch. The miscellaneous. Yep. And then we also do afterschool rec snack. Use your claw. So we’re cooking a lot. Okay. Ready? Okay. Don’t touch the lid. It’s really sharp. Okay. Okay, those are perfect.

John:

The Food Lab was started at Pacific Elementary back in 1984 by a woman named Stephanie Raugust. Two decades later, Emelia was shopping around for a good elementary school for her own daughter when she learned about the program.

Emelia:

I chose the school for my daughter because I loved the Food Lab program. And so I started working with Stephanie Raugust, and I worked with her for several years, and then she retired and I took over as Food Service Director.

John:

That was eight years ago. And why has Emelia stuck with it for this long? It’s simple.

Emelia:

Oh the kids, the students. They’re so much fun to work with and just seeing how their brains work and how they function and how they process. And, you know, give them a creative challenge and they always rise up to the challenge.

John:

And a challenge, it certainly is. The food lab has to turn out quality meals for the students and staff day in and day out.

Emelia:

Pumping out 140 meals for the entire school, <laugh> and just managing all of it at once. Parents come in and they ask for meals. Staff comes in and they want their lunches. And we also have to serve three different meal services. So that’s, yeah, it’s, it’s a lot of food.

John:

Wait a minute. Three different… Explain that.

Emelia:

So we feed preschool and kindergarten at 10:45, and then first through third grade at 11:55. And then at 12:35, we serve fourth through sixth grade. Three plated services.

John:

Teams of fifth and sixth graders take turns during the morning shift. Their teachers know the routine and keep the students’ studies up. As anyone who spent time in a restaurant or commercial kitchen knows the pace can swing from synchronized to chaotic. There’s a lot going on all at once in a cramped space. Kids call out “opening oven” when the muffins are ready to serve. But they really seem to know what they’re doing. Emelia, and a few staff assistants, of course, are there to provide guidance.

Student cooks:

How many do we need? Okay, we need 11…

John:

Kitchens are filled with hazards: knives, open flame, boiling water. So I wondered, with all these kids in the kitchen, is it dangerous? County health inspectors treat the operation as if it’s a restaurant. They have to meet all the health and safety regs and protocols.

Emelia:

The number one goal of a school is to keep students safe. And obviously we have to do that in the kitchen. So we just, the first few weeks, we just really focus on safety in the kitchen and we just give them the tools that they need and the trust. I mean, we trust them implicitly, you know. Well, we wanna teach knife skills, right? So we try not to use a lot of equipment to, you know, chop and dice and slice. I mean, we do have accidents in the kitchen. It, it happens. Mine I think was the worst. I cut myself and I had to get stitches. It, it happens.

Student cook:

I’m preparing carrots for next, I’m pretty sure tomorrow’s lunch. The salad, I’m pretty sure. Not cutting off my fingers.

John:

And cooking involves skills beyond dexterity, things like math.

Emelia:

We have to think about the multiplication of the recipes and, you know, create batches and multiply it.

Student cook:

Should I just multiply it by six?

Emelia :

Times four. We’re doing eight, eight quiches right? You can do it that way if you want to.

John:

Learning to prepare the food is of course, educational for the food lab participants, but often for the student body and staff who eat it, the meals are also an education.

Emelia:

So this month in particular is our holiday menu. So we do a Hanukkah menu, Kwanzaa menu. We do feliz navidad which is today. Pozole. And we do our French menu where we make crepes. And then in November we had this amazing opportunity. We had a student who had this amazing idea.

Quinn:

My name is Quinn Schromm.

John:

Quinn is a sixth grader who transferred to Pacific Elementary specifically so that she could join the Food Lab. The big idea came to her in one of her first days working in the lab.

Quinn:

So I was thinking about, I wanted to let kids here at the school experience and like be a part of different cultures of food around the world. So I asked Ms. Emelia, if we could do like maybe each day of the week a different food from around the world.

Emelia:

Then she chose five countries and we, each week we focused on that country. So we exposed kids and myself to so many different things that I’d never cooked before.

Quinn:

Poland, Brazil, India.

Emelia:

So Friday’s was Polish day. So we made Pierogis and we made this Polish street bread that I couldn’t even begin to pronounce. But it had ketchup on it instead of tomato sauce. So we made homemade ketchup and we <laugh>. It was tasty. It was really tasty.

Quinn:

I really wanted to let people understand different cultures and to see how they eat, what they eat, and why.

Emelia:

It was really fun. It was a great, great challenge.

John:

Many of the families who send their children to Pacific Elementary are farm workers and farm owners. Food Lab and Life Lab, the gardening program, are part of a school culture whose benefits are tangible, with healthy food, and intangible too: the confidence and sense of responsibility kids gain from learning by doing and making the connection between what they grow and what they eat. It starts with creating, then tasting, often unfamiliar food. And for those picky eaters, there’s Emelia’s rule.

Emelia:

I just ask them how old they are. That’s generally how I can get them to eat. How old are you? Oh, I’m five. Okay. Well, you have to take five bites for your food before you get up. And it generally works.

John:

And it’s not, not just the students who benefit. Food Lab, it turns out, is Pacific Elementary’s financial lifeline. Davenport, population 368, is not big enough to fill a school or pay for the program. Two thirds of the students at the school come from outside the district, some from Santa Cruz and others from Up the Hill in Bonny Doon. The families are attracted by the school’s close-knit culture and the unique do-it-yourself lunch program. Parents like Dona Bumgarner,

Dona:

Having my daughter know how to cook her own food was really important to me. And the idea of kids cooking for other kids. I work in the library. It’s about 10 feet from the kitchen, so I get to hear Emelia teaching. And those kids know skills that I don’t have in, you know, my 35 years of working in my own kitchen.

John:

Emelia runs a tight ship at the Food Lab. But as with any kitchen things don’t always go as planned. Do you ever question, do you ever have doubts around 11:30? Are you going to, is it gonna come together today?

Emelia:

Every day. <Laugh> I’m like, oh my gosh, that happened. I can’t believe it. Yes, every day. There was one time somebody put salt in instead of sugar, so we could not serve that. And that was a long time ago. Those things happened though, you know? And but there’s definitely plan B and plan C.

John:

Every once in a while that Plan C means getting help from the community. The principle of Pacific Elementary, Eric Gross, told me about what happened one day when the electricity went out,

New Speaker:

We put the word out to parents, we need barbecues because we couldn’t cook on our stove. And so parents rolled up with their own backyard barbecues and a camp stove. And you just do what you need to do.

John:

The community doesn’t just help out in emergencies. Much of the produce and meat cooked by the Food Lab is contributed by local farms whose kids attend the school.

Eric:

So yeah, there’s a real strong connection about the work that goes in and the product that comes out.

John:

Eric invites me to dine with him, so I get to try the famous Food Lab’s cuisine. The kids come out to service just as in a restaurant.

John:

Thank you for the invitation.

New Speaker:

Yeah.

John:

I’ve been looking forward to this.

New Speaker:

Now you get to experience it.

Student cook:

Would you like a milk?

John:

Yeah. Thank you very much. Mmm. Really good.

Eric:

It’s one of my favorites.

John:

With the cilantro. That’s great.

Emelia:

It’s a huge, huge task, you know, to produce all this food for 140 people. Keep them safe. And we trust them to do that. And I think that’s the most important thing. They’re so empowered and they feel so good about themselves that they can do these things.

John:

Empowered, yes, but also satisfied. I can verify that most of the kids like the food and they look up to the older kids working in the kitchen. Here’s Logan.

Logan:

It’s the best food ever.

John:

Of course, he’s not the most objective. He’s one of the chefs who made it.

Zaidee:

This is Education Beat, getting to the heart of California schools. I’m Zaidee Stavely. John, you made me wanna go to Davenport now. One of my favorite foods is pozole.

John:

I don’t blame you.

Zaidee:

So how did this food compare to your, what you remember of your school meals growing up?

John:

Well, I’ve tried to repress most of it, but a lot of it in elementary school was PB and J. And then in high school, a lot of scrapple, which I had to look up recently. It’s like mush, pork mush. And it had a Pennsylvania Dutch origin. So I guess you could call it ethnic food from the 17th century.

Zaidee:

That’s something that a California kid does not know what that is.

John:

Well, you’re lucky,

Zaidee:

<Laugh>. So how unusual is this program? Are there others like it in California?

John:

I had not heard of others. I think there are gardens that schools had and probably incorporate that. But this is really unusual.

Zaidee:

Do you think it’s scalable? Do you think other school districts could replicate that?

John:

I think it will be hard to do, but I think other schools could do things with cooking and having kids make things and bring and share them. Emelia is really an unusual person, incredibly patient person, and skilled. And there’s a certain culture at Pacific Elementary that dates back decades. And it really fits in with the whole atmosphere of working with kids and having kids helping each other, that that is what draws people to the school.

Zaidee:

I mean, it’s also a small school, and so it seems like it would be something harder to do in a big huge district. As I’ve said before, my parents both taught in one room schoolhouses, and one of those was in a tiny little community in Comptche in Mendocino County. And at the time, they had their own cook, and so she was able to cook from scratch and it was really good food. And I remember when I had to, you know, finally bus into the main school in Mendocino, the food was, you know, mass produced and we all hated it. So I kind of think in some ways it’s like the small school makes it easier in some ways.

John:

I think you’re right, and the community really rallies around this. They have fundraisers. They have pumpkin pie sales in the fall and the graduates of the school come back and help make it. They have a gourmet meal at a farm that Emelia helps make. That’s a big fundraiser. And a lot of people come from over the hill and in from Santa Cruz and attend it. So the community rallies, but at the same time, I sense there’s a bit of a return to bring kitchens back to schools. I mean, it was for decades a sense of the only way to do it efficiently is to have one central kitchen and send it all out in trucks. And I sense that now there’s available money to actually bring back kitchens, which is a good thing.

Zaidee:

Absolutely. And then the principal touched on this, but I think I wanted to hear more. He said that the program is expensive and it sounds like it actually would be a loss except that they get these students from other districts.

John:

That’s exactly right. It is a loss. Or it may not be principal Gross said, because now the state is enabling all students to have lunch in schools. Every student, a hundred percent. So that will help with the cost.

Zaidee:

But how is it that Santa Cruz and Bonny Doon are able to send students without feeling the loss themselves financially?

John:

It’s interesting. Many districts make it hard to transfer to another public school district. In Santa Cruz and Bonny Doon well, it could be that they’re just obliging because parents want to go to this school. But interestingly enough, those districts don’t rely on public tuition. They have enough property taxes to pay for their own students. So actually there’s nothing to lose by allowing a student to go somewhere else. They’re not losing any money from tuition.

Zaidee:

Because they have enough money from property taxes that they don’t actually get paid per student attendance.

John:

Exactly right. In fact, if a student leaves, technically, probably there’s a little bit more money for other students who remain.

Zaidee:

Interesting. What is the big lesson for you, John?

John:

Well, the lesson is schools like Pacific Elementary who have really distinct programs that the community values and are really good for kids, they deserve to be able to survive and thrive. And a little town like this couldn’t do it without other students coming from other districts. And somehow that choice is important and should be preserved.

Zaidee:

Thank you so much, John. It was great to go to lunch with you.

John:

It was a pleasure to take you to lunch.

Zaidee:

Thank you for listening to this week’s episode of Education Beat, getting to the heart of california schools, a production of EdSource. Our producer is Coby McDonald. Special thanks to Emelia, Miguel and the student Chefs of Pacific Elementary School. And to John Fensterwald, Andrew Reed, and our director Anne Vasquez. Our theme music is from Blue Dot Sessions. This episode was brought to you by the Heising Simons Foundation. I’m Zaidee Stavely. Join me next week and subscribe so you won’t miss an episode.