Stories - Food Rescue

Jennings County ends School Food waste

4/10/2016

Susan Harding is the Food Service Director at Jennings County School Corporation. Susan attended the Indiana State Nutrition Association Conference in Indianapolis in October of 2014, and Food Rescue provided her with educational resources and encouragement to begin the process of starting a K-12 Food Rescue program in Jennings County. She agreed to submit this guest blog post below.

Above are some pictures from some of our schools including Sand Creek, North Vernon, and Graham Creek, as well as a photo of the JCMS Homeless shelter. We are having great success with our sharing tables.

At the elementary schools they are in the process of creating a food bank for their students. At Jennings County Middle School, we donate items to the Wayside Inn, our local homeless shelter. At Jennings County High School we already have the Panther Pantry established and donate to that. It is a food pantry that is open to the community on certain days of the month.

Thanks for putting the pictures on your website. We are glad to have the sharing tables and to donate to our local non-profit organizations.

Susan Harding
Food Service Director
Jennings County School Corporation

Our new system has been working for us up here in Alaska. From the first day it was a hit!!! I was expecting some resistance from teachers who don't care to have food in the classrooms and also problems with garbage on the playground but.....none so far. The high school "hungry boys" love finding the fixings for PB & jelly sandwiches from the K-5 crew. A huge problem, that I cannot fix at this time is the recess timing. It IS after lunch and a LOT of kids will come in and dump their trays just to get outside. Maybe next year. All in all... it was welcomed as a great idea and the school news crew is going to be doing a section on your program...hopefully before school closes for the summer but if not we will be off to a great start next year. We are out the 27th of this month. I'm currently working on getting a summer food program started because I know a lot of our kids do not get to eat well at home. This has only been my 2nd year running the kitchen and I've made MANY changes to our waste problem. I've been in contact with a member of the Sustainable Southeast group that is working on a partnership with the tribal authority to help run an aquaponics site. Also...UAS in Sitka is doing a study on using recycled cardboard to grow mushrooms!!!! He is getting me that contact info soon. I'm soooo excited because mushrooms are seriously my passion!!! I'm already setting up to grow shiitake and other gourmet (but really medicinal) mushrooms at home using alder that has already been dropped around the island. I'm also going to set up at the school to sell and actually make money with our lunch program. I'm looking forward to working with K-12 Food Rescue your fabulous project and help change the habits of our locals. Please feel free to contact me with any more info you may have or just to check on our progress.

Sincerely,

Tricia Clough

STATE DIRECTOR'S OF STUDENT LEADERSHIP