GILROY
– A 10-year-old girl who challenged the superintendent of
schools to try the
”
icky
”
food at Las Animas Elementary School got a surprise lunch date
last week.
GILROY – A 10-year-old girl who challenged the superintendent of schools to try the “icky” food at Las Animas Elementary School got a surprise lunch date last week.
Superintendent Edwin Diaz showed up Wednesday at the aging north-central campus asking for Victoria Galat, a fifth-grader next year. Diaz was responding to a six-paragraph letter she sent to him that also ran in The Dispatch.
In the polite-but-blunt letter, Galat called the school’s food “unacceptable,” complained about receiving expired milk and invited Diaz to try the food for himself.
He did; he ate a taco salad.
“It wasn’t ‘icky’ but it could have been better,” Diaz said. “It was a well-balanced meal in terms of what they were offering. But it’s one of those tough situations where you’re not going to get a significant improvement in the food unless you make significant investment in facilities.”
Currently, Las Animas School is one of the few campuses that serves its students prepackaged food. The school has no cafeteria, no refrigeration and nowhere to cook or re-heat food, so an outside provider ships in the lunchtime meals.
Las Animas is sched-uled to be moved and rebuilt in a few years and it will have state-of-the-art facilities then.
“It wouldn’t be fiscally prudent to make a major upgrade at the campus now,” Diaz said. “The next step up is to convert a classroom into a temporary kitchen.”
Diaz said such a project, which would cost around $150,000, is cost prohibitive in these tight-budget times.
Since his lunch visit, Diaz has spoken with the school district’s food provider – Marriott Foods. He is asking them to research all the possible ways to bring the highest quality food to the district campuses the company serves.
Although the food at Las Animas isn’t meeting the standards of newer Gilroy schools which have cafeterias, Galat was pleased by the superintendent’s visit.
“My friends were crowding me. Everyone was making him try different kinds of food,” Galat said.
Diaz says he had a good time, too.
“Going there was a lot of fun,” Diaz said. “The kids were so engaged in the topic. They asked me what I thought about every item of food, and they were watching my every bite.”
