Intern Insights w/ Summer Intern Allie, signing in for her 5th Blog Post: Serving up meals with Student Nutrition Services

Hello, my name is Allie, a soon-to-be junior at Milpitas High School and 2024 Summer Intern with Milpitas Unified School District through the City of Milpitas' Milpitas Youth Force. I started this blog, "Intern Insights," to share my experiences while offering a student perspective throughout my internship this Summer!

Howdy Everyone! I’m currently in my 4th week working for the MUSD offices and this week has been quite different from the rest. It started off with me working two morning shifts at the Student Nutrition Services (SNS) Department at Milpitas High School. The SNS staff ensures all students have an option to receive free breakfasts and lunches as part of their Free Summer Meals program. When first arriving at MHS, I was escorted to one of the few mini food shacks near the theater to then start giving out breakfast to summer school students. While distributing breakfast and lunch, I must keep count of how many meals were given out to then later input these numbers into a system. When not distributing food, I was mostly prepping the next meal and doing other general cleanup work as all. 

The breakfast students could choose between cereal or a bagel with cream cheese. As for lunch, students had a choice of a vegetarian burrito or pepperoni pasta. I ended up having pepperoni pasta for my lunch, which was just a tomato sauce pasta with pepperoni pieces. This meal was quite enjoyable and I could see why most of the students ended up choosing this item for their lunch as well. In total, there were about 30 students who got free breakfast and about 89 students who got a free lunch. The menu during the school year and the one for the summer school are very similar as well, though still different as the pepperoni pizza isn’t offered at MHS during the school year. Additionally, all menu items which are distributed have to meet the federal and state requirements which are based on the USDA Dietary Guidelines. To learn more about the SNS department and how they are able to provide these free lunches, you may go to this LINK. 

All in all, it is never a dull moment working for MUSD and I can’t wait to tell you more about it when the next time comes! Thank you for reading and I hope you all have a good rest of your week! 

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