The Journal News has a local version of the cafeteria story which ran on the front page of USA TODAY which also mentions New Rochelle.
The New Rochelle and Katonah-Lewisboro districts, which had the most number of unacceptable ratings in 2008, have reduced their serious health code violations to one each so far this year. The violations occurred at Ward Elementary School in New Rochelle, where inspectors found pizza not warm enough and tuna salad at 60 degrees Fahrenheit, 15 degrees warmer than it should be, and at Lewisboro Elementary School in South Salem, where they found shredded cheese at 54 degrees.
Rest assured that the district will rush to take credit for “fixing” the problem they created but have never publicly acknowledged. This goes to the heart of the problem with the district’s mentality. They never want to admit a problem, take responsibility for it, take ownership of it, make themselves accountable and then work to get positive results and turn things around. Instead they want to suppress “bad news” and broadcast “happy news”. The question is whether the school board should function as a PR agency or an elected, deliberative body. So far it appears to be the former. The community can only wonder whether they are ACTUALLY fixing things or just papering them over or, in the case of Isaac Young “fixing” a failing school by simply cheating on state exams and inflating test scores while lying up the number of violent and disruptive incidents at the school in their state VADIR reports.
Assistant Superintendent John Quinn is responsible for overseeing the cafeterias. Under his watch, the district has had 15 failed health inspections, the most ever in the history of the New Rochelle public school system. That is some records. Yet without any sense of the irony, he is quoted by the JN saying “I’m rather hands-on, but the Department of Health sees things I don’t necessarily see. There were certain things we needed to do. We made some physical changes and we looked at training.”
They “looked at” training? Instead of “looking at” training how about actually providing training and requiring that workers demonstrate a grasp of the information provided in the training. You know, like you give a class and then test people to see if they understand the concepts taught in the class. I am reasonably certain some in the the school district is familiar with this concept.
This is the same sort of thing he said two years ago after the district failed 2 inspections each in 2006-07 and 2007-08. Remember? He said they bought some thermometers. The result? The following year (2008-09) the district failed TEN inspections.
Here’s a thought. How about showing some leadership and announcing a zero-tolerance policy on health safety issues across the board, starting with the cafeterias. Kids can’t learn if they are being made sick by school food.
Let me digress here for a moment. Some readers have responded by saying that they used to brown bag their lunch or that their kids bring their own lunch or they make lunch for their kids. That’s fine for many families but a very large percentage of children in New Rochelle are in the “hot lunch” program meaning they get free meals at breakfast and lunch. They are not getting brown bag lunches from home and that is not likely to change so these kids are basically stuck eating at the cafeteria whether they want to or not. The eat 10 meals a week at the school cafeterias; if they eat 3 meals a day or 21 meals a week that comes out to about half their meals are coming from our cafeterias. To a large extent, THESE are the kids who basically hostage to these cafeterias. It is easy to say their parents should do something about it but the KIDS are not to blame.
Back to Quinn; this is the same John Quinn who has been quoted in Journal News stories about public salaries saying that he would be reducing the amount of overtime paid to buildings and grounds workers. Each year under his watch that figures has gone UP not down and each year he blames “snow removal”. Funny though that the guy getting the most overtime gets the same amount of OT two years running despite a wide variation in the amount of “snow fall”. It would seem if you are going to blame “snow removal” for high OT then there might be some correlation between “snow fall” and the need to pay for “snow removal”. Except in New Rochelle where apparently do to certain mysterious meteorological conditions the amount snow the needs to be removed remains constant regardless of the amount of snow that falls.
