HELLO!!

This is the new and hopefully most fabulous JDLA Kitchen Blog.  It will be a product of my Supplemental Lunch Prep/Home Economics class.  I am really excited to be teaching/leading this class!  It is a new challenge for me and I love challenges!  First, a catch up on JDLA!  We are an alternative high school program in Northeast Kansas serving students from 7 different districts.  We serve students from 7th grade to 12th grade who have a wide variety of needs.  We use a large retinue of teaching techniques and strategies to meet our students needs.  We use service learning, check out our new service learning blog at http://www.jdlaservicelearning.blogspot.com/, an instructional technique that uses community based, authentic service to reinforce academics.  This allows students the opportunity to learn and then use their new knowledge in a real world setting.  We also have a thematic curriculum of Environmental Education (no blog for that yet!) but you can check out the KACEE site http://www.kacee.org.  There is significant research that indicates that PEOPLE learn better, are healthier, more engaged, more active and more attentive when they have time with nature.  (Long story on this so YOU google it and you will find the links!  GO OUTSIDE!  Take some kids with you!)  SO… Service Learning, Environmental Education, Individualized Instruction and state standards as well as hands-on, project based instruction equals JDLA!  Now, back to the kitchen story!

SO… about 80% of our students receive free and reduced lunch.  We are served school lunch from the school district nearest our location.  It is not fabulous and it is often not a lot of food.  They follow stringent and sometimes convoluted regulations about what they can serve in the school.  Our problem was that we had students who were still hungry for a variety of reasons.  Our solution is that we offer a “supplemental” lunch for students who choose it.  Anyone can order it for $1.50 each day.  We allow people to open an “account” or pay as we go.  Last year, this program was popular but it ended with a seriously negative balance and we can’t afford this!  SO… we almost cancelled the program but that would have unsolved the problem!  This is the exciting challenge that I asked to tackle!  I want to run the program with healthy, good food ending with a positive balance (maybe I can make a profit?) and I asked for at least three students so that I could teach them as I go!  I hope that they will learn some basic cooking skills, book keeping skills and writing skills with this blog!  They are GREAT so far!  Today was our tenth day in the kitchen and our ninth offering for supplemental lunch.  Yummy!  Chicken Stir Fry with Asian Vegetables served over rice.  We had ten orders and it was well received.  I personally think we should have made more vegetables but it’s tough to figure out our serving sizes at this point.  Everyone was pleased with their meal.

Oh, I forgot one of our challenges!  It is a 50 minute class period and by the time that we go from my office to the kitchen, wash up and get started we lose five minutes then we lose five at the end since we have to take our meal upstairs we really only have 40 minutes to do all our everything!  It is a whirling, speeding, multi-tasking 40 minutes flying past in seconds!  We are keeping the books, cooking the meal, prepping the next day and calculating the calories and cost of each meal mostly all at the same time!  Whew!  Fun times in the JDLA Kitchen!