Alphabet Bar Lunch Day At Lake L.A School

Lake Los Angeles – Wednesday January 29 was a very special day for the students at Lake Los Angeles School. It was Alphabet Bar lunch day.

Four salad carts were set up with A to Z balloons, fruit and vegetable choices from A to Z., apples to zucchini, plus one that was a question mark, a mystery item, which was star fruit. Star fruit was a surprise to everyone and popular with staff and students. Lilian Arreguin, Director of Nutrition for Keppel School District said, “Our surprise for today was star fruit. This is how we introduce new food items and expose our students to new healthy fruits and vegetables.” Decorating the lunch counter were food characters made from construction paper created by the Kindergarten class from Pearblossom School. Their teacher Mrs. Gallup will share the patterns and forms with other Keppel schools to make more food characters for each lunchroom throughout the District. In the photo Mr. Strawberry can be seen. 

Lilian said, “We really appreciate the food characters gifted to us by Mrs. Gallup’s students. We will be making more at all of the schools. We work as a team across all of our schools to make our lunchrooms and our lunches fun and educational for everyone. I love to give special things and events to the students in our District. We all look forward to the Alphabet Bar and its surprises. Our lunchroom is a nutritional classroom as we teach our students about good nutrition with enjoyable lunches.” At 11:30 am the first swarm of hungry enthusiastic students file into the lunchroom and rotate until 1:00pm when everyone has had their lunch and enjoyed a special event. 

Lilian and her dedicated team have presented the Alphabet Bar, the Strawberry Shortcake bar, Healthy Banana Split Bar and coming soon will be the BBQ Bar which will include vegan options such as veggie burgers. Lilian told us, “On the last day of every month we serve our students Healthy Brownies for the student body’s birthdays. We serve the brownies at lunch and supper. Yes, we serve supper here. Supper and snacks are available to the students in the after-school programs throughout Keppel Schools. The most exciting part of all of this is we get to share some little life experiences with the kids.”

The closing photo shows the LLA School nutrition team ready for their students to come into the lunchroom and have an enjoyable break in their day with the good nutrition for all. Left to right, Paula Nash, Julie Loza, Daniel Weaver, Lynette Zuler, Debbie Gardiner and Lillian Arreguin. Operating a school district food service department is anything but simple. Even in the smallest districts, food service operations are businesses that must comply with many rules. There are numerous federal nutritional guidelines to follow. Some people take the school food service department for granted. Those of us outside the food service operation cannot fully understand the difficulty of balancing government regulations and feeding children correctly.

By Shirley Harriman