Last week was considered National School Breakfast Week. It started Monday, March 2nd, 2020 and ended Friday, March 6th, 2020. The Taft High kitchen staff cooked many delicious breakfasts for the students to jumpstart their morning. They had a variety of different foods that varied from croissant sandwiches to a breakfast version of a banana split, all of which were within the nutrition standards for school food.

For Taft High, having National School Breakfast Week was a way to promote the upcoming changes in cafeteria food starting the upcoming 2020-2021 school year. I spoke with Chief Business Official, Josh Bryant, about the certain changes we will be seeing in the near future with cafeteria food and how the National School Breakfast Week helped contribute to it. He replied, “We want students and the community to know how delicious and visually-appealing our meals are. Last week’s National School Breakfast Week and our focus on promoting what we’re serving for breakfast brought a lot of interest and compliments on, not only the visual appeal of our food, but it also brought tons of compliments on the taste, too! We’re going to keep promoting our daily menu via social media in hopes folks will consider dining with us at breakfast and lunchtimes.”

There are many plans in store for fixing the lines during lunch and making sure everyone is able to get their food to enjoy during the lunch period. Bryant talked about plans to help “shorten those lines even more AND cater to our student population on the north end of campus (Music, Science, Annex & Auto Shop buildings), we’ll be adding a booth out by the Science building for next fall from which we’ll be serving lunch daily.” This is to ensure they are able to grab something to eat without the need to rush towards the cafeteria.

Bryant said, ” The Cafe staff has also started doing “Breakfast-on-the-go” down by the Science Building daily, catching students who are in a last-minute hurry to get to class before first period with a pre-packed breakfast (including muffins, cereal bars, juice boxes, fruits, etc.). This is something we look forward to continuing as a service to our student community. An empty belly – especially at first period – is a tough thing to deal with!”

There are many things in store for the new school year regarding school breakfasts and lunches. The best thing about all this is the students will continue to eat the cafeteria food for free. As of next year, Bryant said that we will be, “bringing the Student Store into the Cafeteria mix and students will be able to get most of their favorite Student Store items just like they currently get their lunch items – absolutely free of charge. This includes the popular Pizza Hut breadsticks! It should also help alleviate some of the lengths of the lines in the Cafe, which is a bonus.”