Jeffrey Boyce
I’m Jeffrey Boyce and it is January 17, 2022. Gosh I can’t believe it’s 2022. I’m here in Okolona, Mississippi, talking today with Shelley Mohr in Iowa. Welcome Shelley, and thanks for taking the time to talk with me today.
Shelly Mohr
Thanks for having me.
Jeffrey Boyce
Could you tell me a little bit about yourself, maybe where you’re from, a little bit of educational background, and then what you’re doing now?
Shelly Mohr
Sure. So, as you said, my name is Shelley Mohr from Tipton, Iowa. I grew up in southern Iowa, in a rural community on a farm. I am currently working as a child nutrition program director. I’m working on my 23rd or 24th year. I lose track.
Jeffrey Boyce
Wow. Are you just wrapping up your day this time of day? I’m sure you start early.
Shelly Mohr
Yeah, normally. We did not have school today, so we’re off. So this was a bit of a break for me and for staff, but yeah normally right now we’re kind of winding down and making sure we’re ready for tomorrow, so tomorrow starts smoothly, no matter what.
Jeffrey Boyce
Sounds good, sounds good. Well let’s get into it then. We’re going to talk today about the Covid 19 pandemic and its effect on your program, so, can you tell me about some of the experiences you had? What were the challenges you faced?
Shelly Mohr
We sort of just stood in the kitchen in disbelief. Much of the first few weeks of Covid 19 when the kids didn’t come back and then the state and administration said they would like us to make sure that all these little pumpkins had food in their hands, and helping parents out a little bit. We just didn’t know what to do. We have a table in our kitchen that we call the green table. It has sort of a green Formica countertop and we stood around the green table for our meetings a lot trying to figure out how does this work, what does this look like, what’s our freezer space? How do we set the kids up to succeed, once we have this food ready to go, and where are we going to get all of our help, because we don’t have our full staff? We had people that we didn’t want in the building, because we didn’t know where this was going to go and we didn’t want them to take anything home. We had a new mom. We had people with compromised immune systems that we didn’t want around, and there were others who were just scared and said they didn’t want to come, and we honored that completely, and so we were left with about 30% of our staff who are willing to work, and then we just started problem solving and we had a lot of people that we connected with from other districts. The State was sending us information as much as they could, and just talking to people to figure out what’s out there, how are we going to make this happen?
Jeffrey Boyce
Let me interrupt one second and backtrack. Did I understand you right in saying that only 30% of your normal staff was available?
Shelly Mohr
Yes. So my district is very small, I think, in the scheme of things in the world, we have just under 1,000 students, and so we’re a staff of 12, including myself, and I’m what I call a position filler within the service operation or the production operation. I have an office position; that’s not to say I don’t find myself in the kitchens and on the line and on cleanup duty, a lot of the time, but that’s not my sole job.
And so we’re not a very large staff to begin with, but I think we were left with about four of us who were in the building out of that 12, and then within that we had a lady who needed to quarantine at one point just because of exposure and the way the exposure platform worked and the rules we were to follow if there was exposure.
Administration sent out sort of a 911 to all staff that nobody was going to lose their paycheck at all during this time. Contracts were going to be honored, no matter what your position and whether you were working or not. And teachers came to our aid and said, “What can I do? Where can I be?”
We’re pretty particular about who we let in our kitchen doors and who we let touch our food, and so we said, “Okay, you can come in and help us, but you have to go through a very quick food service training.” You know we talked about a shoe covering your foot, we needed a sleeve to cover the pit of your arm, your hair needed to be pulled back, and we talked about if you come in and you have you know if many people have pets, if you have fur on you, we may ask you to leave and go change your shirt or we may take the duct tape to your shirt and just clean you off and we need you to not be offended by that, but that’s our world and we don’t want any food going out of here that’s unsafe or deemed to be unsafe when it arrives into the hands of our students and their parents.
They came in and sat and listened and took it all in and nobody disrespected what we asked them to do, and came back on a schedule, we had quite a few teachers volunteer to help with our operation that we set up a schedule, because we didn’t have room, with a six foot social distancing, to pull all of them in at once. In addition, we didn’t know what that workload, work list was going to look like in a day. We just didn’t know. And normally when we go, and you know you had just asked me, are we going to be wrapping up our day at this point. Well, in Tipton and I think in many, many operations, before staff leave for a day they know exactly what their duties are for the next day and we’re already pre planned and pre prep for the next day.
We were really rocked and we didn’t want people to come in and wait to be told what to do next for duty, and stand around and wait for us. Now that did happen anyway, and they would keep saying, “Oh, can we do something? Just let us do something.” And we would say, “No, stay back stay away from us. We’ve got to social distance and we have to think.” And so one of the things that I pride myself in as a director and I call myself a caretaker of these people in this department, who work so hard for our kids, is that I listen to them and I hear what they’re saying when we try something new, or we need to change procedure, or whatever the case may be. And there were times in this where we would come up with an idea, one being let’s prepackage seven days’ worth of main entrees and label them, put them in a box, and put them in a freezer. And I had people telling me, “Shelly, we do not have room. Where are you going to put it?” And so we’d walk around the kitchen and look at what are our containers, do we have boxes that are safe to use, can they go and sacks? We don’t know. Can they just go in corners, can we just make a file? And people just kept saying, “No, you can’t do that.”
And so I got to the point where I said, “You’re going to have to prove me wrong. I’m not listening to you right now, and when this flops and falls I need you to pick me up and you take over.” And so we did that a lot, where we would have to stop our operation, and we would have to look at what was in front of us, look at what we had done, and then figure out Okay, where are we going to squeeze this in a refrigerator or the freezer until it’s serving day, and how do we package that bun and those sacks, so those students don’t get a mangled bun to eat their beef patty and put on it. And just playing with that and people having patience and giving grace to each other was enormous, and I was lucky enough to have that.
Jeffrey Boyce
That’s wonderful it’s so good that people volunteered and stepped up to the plate like that. What was the educational circumstance at this point? Where were the students? Had they been sent home? Was there virtual learning? What was going on?
Shelly Mohr
The whole educational piece I think was a voluntary. You know, we’re going to offer classes, but we’re not going to take attendance. You will not be penalized if you don’t come.
Because they just weren’t ready for it.
And so everybody was at home. Virtual learning was being offered in some form and teachers were learning how to use zoom.
Jeffrey Boyce
Weren’t we all?
Shelly Mohr
Yeah, and whatever platform was out there and then trying to figure out how to have classroom control with students, you know, during their time that they were meeting. That was very interesting to put food items and set up a work list in front of these teachers and listen to their struggles.
They would say, “I can work until two o’clock today, but then from 230 to four, I have a class time set up with my students, whoever wants to join.”
And the things that the kids learn how to do within the zoom meeting was just like we would be giggling and the teachers were so angry and frustrated that they couldn’t shut those things out of the zoom meeting.
And so, our frustrations became a bit trivial at that point that, listening to the teachers talk about their struggles and what was in front of them, and my heart went out to them, but it was still a point of humor for us because that wasn’t on our plates.
These kids come through ornery and loving life in the line and we get so frustrated sometimes and the teachers going, “We’re just glad you have that for the lunch line we need a break,” you know and just that total switch of frustrations of it all.
Jeffrey Boyce
Now, were are you serving some students in the building and sending some food out? How was it working?
Shelly Mohr
No, our building was locked down, so, people who had keys, I don’t think could even get in.
Jeffrey Boyce
So the classrooms weren’t in in your building.
Shelly Mohr
There were classrooms but our classrooms were virtual.
Jeffrey Boyce
Oh, okay. No one was coming into school.
Shelly Mohr
No, the only people entering the building where the custodians, the administrative staff, and food service.
Jeffrey Boyce
Okay I misunderstood earlier then. I thought you said some classes were still meeting.
Shelly Mohr
They weren’t. They were meeting virtually.
Jeffrey Boyce
Okay gotcha, gotcha.
Jeffrey Boyce
So tell me about your successes. What did you find out that worked and maybe what didn’t work also.
Shelly Mohr
One piece that I think was a true success is, when we put out our menus, when we put out our food items in front of our students, we want them to be able to go out into their own life someday and have a nutritious, well balanced meal planning piece of their life. That’s sort of what the child nutrition program is about. It’s balanced and when we started sending out the meals, one of the pieces that the teaching staff, they knew and they understood, but it really hit home with them, was the balanced pieces, the fruits, the vegetables, the serving size that go with it.
We sent a menu home with all those pieces on a seven day schedule and the parents would tell us, I heard by email, I heard in person, I even had some people texting me saying, “We love this. The menu comes home, it goes on the fridge; that sack goes in the refrigerator. We had a dry bag, we had a refrigerator bag, and we had a freezer bag and we tried to pack it so if people had really full freezers or they just didn’t have the space, that they could even take that bag, it would keep for seven days in refrigeration.
It was kind of pliable and you could wiggle it around you know, and we still would worry about those bread items, the bun, and the slice of bread, and the biscuits that we would put in. But they would just get packed away and parents would tell their children where these things are at.
The menu was posted on the refrigerator and the kids would go to the bags and pull the pieces out and take care of it by the menu. So, the menu was set up in my world, with the main entrée, the vegetables and the fruit, and then, if we had a grain based dessert, that’s at the bottom. So it’s always in the same order, so that piece of those kids having to go to the refrigerator, freezer, figure out what the menu is, and realize those pieces of it, was to me just a success, and in terms of what I try and do on a daily basis, anyway, I want them to have not only things that they like, but things that are well balanced in their components. And kids that I thought would maybe throw away some of the pieces if it were up to them, like the green beans or the corn or the carrots, they were cooking them for themselves and eating them. So that was kind of cool. That was my favorite part, the success story, I think, of it all.
Jeffrey Boyce
You really turned it into a learning experience for them.
Shelly Mohr
Yes.
Jeffrey Boyce
So how has your operation changed and how have you adapted to the pandemic? You’ve just described this. How often did these packages go out to the kids and how did they get them?
Shelly Mohr
We sent out a seven day meal sack and we did a Monday drive through pickup. Everything was cold or frozen or dry that all went in one sack. We tried to put it all in one sack. And then they had the gallons of milk, however many gallons of milk they needed, and it was once a week. They drove through, and we had reached out to the police department, because we didn’t know what was going to happen with bottle necking of traffic. Again, we’re very small community.
However, we’re two blocks down from the stoplight and my fear was that main street to come up to the school was going to back up to the stoplight and then I just envisioned quite a few not positive things happening.
Again, people in those lines were very graceful and patient and the police came and just were such a positive force there talking to people, while we waited to put them through the line and check off and make sure we got meals to everybody on our agenda.
Jeffrey Boyce
How did you do that? Were you required to keep a record of who had picked up or how did that work?
Shelly Mohr
We weren’t required to keep a record of it necessarily. One of the stipulations is that obviously only one student gets a meal per day. And so the only way that I thought that we could really do that and say, “Yes, we have followed the regulations,” was to keep a list, and so we had a teacher who was marking off who came through and how many sacks that family had ordered, and we had people sign up through Google Forms, something I never thought I would use.
That was a sheer panic point when I realized I’m going to have to figure this out, so that people can sign up and then also defined a back door for people to sign up who maybe didn’t have the capability of utilizing a Google form. There were some people who just didn’t have that technology in front of them.
And so we did have a teacher checking that off. And then one frustration was if we didn’t have a family who ordered the meals come and pick up, we would come back, and I had the central office, again another gracious place of help, was we were making phone calls saying, “Hey, did you forget to do pickup? Is something wrong? Can we get these to you?”
And in most times we got all of the meals in the places they needed to go.
And that, looking back on that, that was unbelievable.
Jeffrey Boyce
Sounds like you really are very flexible in how to get it done. How has your meal planning changed?
I’m assuming you might have had to serve some different dishes that weren’t capable of refrigeration and freezing and individual portions.
Shelly Mohr
Going from Covid 19 to where we are now so right now we are back in the building. All students are in person. We do not offer virtual learning right now, and so there are no meals going home. However, right now we are trying to keep little fingers from touching the same common areas so self-service bars in the elementary building have gone away, and we are pre portioning everything before lunch service time that we can fit into our day.
And so, when the kids go through the line they’re telling staff, “Yes I want that,” and their staff are saying, “Do you want the green beans?” They’re saying yes or no, and so.
When we pre portion those things it just makes that service line go faster.
When we get to our middle school buildings and our high school buildings, at middle school we’re still trying to pre portioned as much as we can, and let them take their own at high school. We’ve put the serving spoon in their hands, hoping for the best there; so far, so good, knock on wood.
So, in terms of pulling some things back it’s about prep time. Cheese sauce is a big thing that has had to be a little bit scarce because it’s just hard to serve, it’s messy, it’s hard to pre portion because it just doesn’t hold well. We took tacos and soup off the menu for the year that we did come back to the classroom, but we did not eat in the cafeteria.
Students would go back to their room and we just went through the menu and took off everything that if we were a teacher, we would not want to have ground into our carpeting, or flooring. So tacos and soups came off. Cheese sauce came off. I think we tried to pull some chips off, like our son chips and our Doritos.
Jeffrey Boyce
So the kids are being served in the classroom?
Shelly Mohr
So they were for last school year, which would have been 2021, and right now we are back to a communal eating area, so they’re in the cafeterias now. So we’ve gradually worked into trying to get back into a normal eating environment.
And as we go into menu planning we’ve tried to put back pretty much everything that we had before Covid 19 19 started for our kids. Soup at our elementary is still not happening just because of the slowness of serving it and pre portioned it.
But we’ve put most everything back on the menu for our kids at this point, a gradual progression.
Jeffrey Boyce
Did you have any difficulties in keeping the quality of the meals up?
Shelly Mohr
Right now, I think the biggest piece of quality issues is when we have to take taco meat and proportion it, to scoot the students through the line, is that it doesn’t hold as nicely as when it’s in bulk and we can just take a spoon out and put it in that taco shell, and hand it off to the students, as when they’re getting a bowl with the taco meat in it. It’s still fine. It’s just not quite as moist as I would like to put my name behind it.
Again, the cheese sauce has stayed off the menu. We just can’t pre portion that and keep that quality that really wants to.
It wants to get a dry layer on top of it and so we’re just kind of keeping that off for our lower grades.
Green beans and mashed potatoes would be the next things. Their quality really changes when they go into individual cups and we hold them until our students come through versus if they could be kept in a full size hotel pan.
It’s just a different product, but the ladies are holding fine, and our students are understanding, and I think we’re hanging in there with it.
Jeffrey Boyce
Sounds good. You mentioned the police cooperating with you. Have you been able to form any other partnerships with other organizations in your community to meet your mandate?
Shelly Mohr
One of the pieces that we always had in place was a relationship with our locker and our grocery store when we would get the commodity brown box trucks and get back to back orders.
It didn’t happen a lot, but when it did happen, we would get in trouble with freezer space, and so they would always graciously let us have a couple of weeks of storage when needed, and so there was a bit of a communication there in the first place, and also when we had emergency runs for things like bread or if we needed milk, if we were cutting it short for milk, they were always gracious to let us purchase what we needed.
And I think that they were always aware and we were always having communications about product availability and if they could do anything, but we really didn’t need anything at that point.
One of the things that did happen that was kind of neat and it wasn’t a huge deal I don’t think for the businesses, but we had a bank and a vehicle dealership in town that when we were trying to get word out to people about the drive thru service, they would put signs up on their digital boards in front of their dealerships about when service was going to happen and the timing and little bits of the procedure, so people would understand. We have a newspaper that goes out only once a week and we don’t have a radio station really close to us that we knew everybody would get the word from, and so they were helpful with that.
We put things out on the Facebook page and we put things out on our district website about it.
And then we also send out direct emails.
Jeffrey Boyce
Have there been any positive outcomes to your program in dealing with the pandemic?
Shelly Mohr
I think one of the things that I would say as a positive is just a general awareness that we don’t know where everybody stands, with how they might be affected by Covid 19, like we didn’t know and we really tiptoed into the whole situation with staffing and at the same time as we were tiptoeing we all knew we had to be honest and open, and I think that’s a place that has been a great building block for our staff is to not be judgmental of the people they’re working with and to wait for the pieces to come out about what somebody might be dealing with, are going through it, and not be so quick to judge.
And as far as food items and service, not so much. I think we do what we do really well and I think I speak for many, many districts. One of the reasons we do what we do well, is because we’ve been able to connect with other districts on many different platforms we have.
So today we have ICN, we have the state providing us information and also helping us with connections.
So if there was a positive, it was just a patience with each other that we’ve learned.
Jeffrey Boyce
That is always a good thing, patience. Is there anything else you’d like to share with me about your experiences today?
Shelly Mohr
I remember just sitting and thinking about what I would say to you and thinking about how the whole pandemic looked when they told us we were going to serve kids on a drive thru basis and thinking, there is no way this can happen gracefully.
And just the people that stepped up to help us make it happen were wonderful, and the parents on the other side of the table also, their patience was incredible for us.
Jeffrey Boyce
Well, thank you so much for taking the time today to share your experiences with me.
Shelly Mohr
You’re welcome thanks for asking me.
