his National School Breakfast Week, No Kid Hungry Ohio is recognizing several districts across the state in how they ensure school breakfast serves the unique needs of their students! Check out our story with Dawson-Bryant Schools below.
In a small, close-knit community at the southern tip of Ohio there lives a small but mighty school district by the name of Dawson-Bryant. With a little over 1,200 students from pre-k to high school, Sharon Brammer (Food Service Director), and her team are helping Dawson-Bryant make its mark in rural Ohio by providing fun, nutritious meals for every student.
Dawson-Bryant has many traditional breakfast serving models that work well – preschoolers eat in their classroom and students in elementary school eat in the cafeteria via a serving line. But the middle school doesn’t have a kitchen, so the team had to get innovative. Grab and go breakfast was implemented to give the middle school students a chance to get the nutrients they needed in the morning.
They also added some creative solutions to increase community interest in the food service program. From family nights that engage the community in trying different cuisines to consistently researching new ideas and ways to make mealtimes more enticing, they never stop working to making sure all kids are getting the meals they need. “We try to have either a hot or at least a warm entree every day, but we also have maybe 10 other choices for them for breakfast,” said Sharon.
Sharon added that communication was another key in getting the buy-in and help of her staff. She introduced the new models as a trial to her staff and told them they would see how things would go for a month. “…at the end of the month they were amazed at the difference in how many breakfasts we were serving and it didn’t take anything more than that for them to see how many more kids were eating,” said Sharon. And, once administration and staff saw the tremendous increase in student breakfast participation, everyone was fully on board.
Thanks to the support of Sharon’s team, they’ve seen an incredible rise in the number of students who are now accessing breakfast each day. Their hard work has made a huge difference in the lives of their students.