This Phoenix district has been making more meals from scratch. The students have enjoyed it

Nearly every student in Phoenix’s Osborn School District eats school lunch every day. That’s almost twice as high as the statewide average. And that’s on purpose.

Cory Alexander is director of Child Nutrition in the district and has been making a concerted effort to incorporate more scratch cooking and locally sourced ingredients into meals there. He’s also been working to find funding to make those things possible.

Sarah Schwartz wrote about Alexander and his work in the Osborn District for Education Week. She talked about it with The Show.

Jaclyn Borowski/Education Week

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Handout

Full conversation

MARK BRODIE: So I want to start with one of the opening lines of your piece when you talked to Cory Alexander and asked him, like, to describe what he does. And you quoted him as saying he manages six successful small restaurants in central Phoenix. What did that tell you about what he was trying to achieve in this school district?

SARAH SCHWARTZ: Yeah, he has this vision for what school lunches can be that I think is so different from what you or I might remember as school lunches from our youth. I think there's this perhaps unfounded idea that there's a lot of pre-packaged food, that maybe there's some mystery meat involved.

And that's really what Cory was trying to move away from. He wanted to see meals that were tasty, that were healthy, that students would really want to eat. And also he had a vision for how to treat staff in a way, that treated them as professionals and as food service professionals.

BRODIE: So how did he go about trying to do this? Because it would seem as though making school lunches more nutritious and tastier would take a lot of money.

SCHWARTZ: Yeah, so doing what he has done, which is bringing in a lot more scratch cooking and bringing in more local ingredients, that is expensive, and it's something that's hard for a lot of districts to do. A big part of how he was able to make this change, he told me that back when he was a coordinator for the program, before he was director, he was a big part of pushing for enrolling the district in something that's called the Community Eligibility Provision.

And this is a federal program that allows schools to serve free meals to all kids and get reimbursed for every meal served. So not just the kids at the school who would qualify for free or reduced meals, but every kid at the school. And you can do that if a certain threshold of your students would already qualify for those free meals. And that was the case in Osborn.

So when they were able to enroll in that program, it upped the number of students who were participating, who were taking breakfasts and lunches, which then increased their revenue. And it also freed up some administrative time, which allowed Cory to then do things like seek out community partnerships or find community farms that he could partner with to bring in local ingredients, think about how to do more scratch cooking, those kinds of things.

BRODIE: Yeah, I'm curious how those conversations went when he would go to a farm or, you know, you wrote about how he worked with a cattle rancher to get beef in the schools. And obviously, there's a lot of farms, a lot of in Arizona with whom to work.

But as you also write, like sometimes the economics on that don't always work out when you're talking about a school district.

SCHWARTZ: Yeah, so a lot of local producers might not be used to working with school districts. They may not have before, which was the case for this ranch that Cory formed a partnership with. It's called K4 Ranches, they're in Prescott. And now they do actually work with more school districts after having started that partnership with Cory.

But they had to do some negotiations between Cory and the Osborn School District and K4 Ranches to figure out how they could get the price down to a point that would be sustainable for the school district. Initially, some of that was grant funded through a federal grant program that actually no longer exists, but Osborn is figuring out ways now to be able to keep that partnership going.

BRODIE: So what are some of the top dishes that have come out of this that the staff enjoys preparing and the students enjoy eating?

SCHWARTZ: This is one of my favorite parts of reporting the story, hearing about all the cool food that they're making there. So they make a picadillo completely from scratch. They make beef and broccoli, they make burritos, they make mac and cheese.

Apparently there is a district-wide famous chicken pot pie that they make. They make the dough themselves, they make the filling themselves, and then they also do, they did this past, a few months ago, they did a special series of meals for school lunch week, and they did a scratch-made veggie ramen that apparently kids are actively asking them to bring back, which I thought was cool.

BRODIE: Yeah, wow. Are there concerns about federal cuts? I mean, so many federal programs have seen funding cuts over the last number of months. Is this program potentially one of them?

SCHWARTZ: Yes, so I mentioned that grant program that Osborn was able to use to initially start up that partnership with K4 Ranches. That was a grant program, a federal grant program that supported farm-to-school partnerships. It was nationally about $660 million in federal grants. The Trump administration canceled that program in 2025. And there was reporting at the time about how that was affecting school districts and causing them to have to cancel some of these partnerships that they had rolled out. That's not the case in Osborn. They're figuring out ways to make that partnership keep working going forward.

But when I spoke with Cory, he did say that we're in a pretty uncertain situation where we don't really know how things with federal funding are going to change going forward or what that might look like. And so it's just meaning that he's having to spend more time than usual working on contingency plans and ways to make sure that things can keep moving forward despite that uncertainty.

BRODIE: Is this kind of thing replicable? Like, is this something that other school districts, not just in Arizona, but across the country, could in theory do?

SCHWARTZ: When I talked to experts in this field about this, they were saying that Osborn is an example of a district that is kind of doing everything right, but it's not something that other districts couldn't do. There are some barriers to doing things like this.

With scratch cooking, a lot of the barriers come down to facilities and staff. So there are factors about school kitchens that I had never thought about before that that could prevent you from doing scratch cooking, things like not having enough outlets to be able to plug in all of the equipment that you would need. And then there's also a lot of staff turnover in in school kitchens, usually because there is there's more competitive pay and other food service jobs outside of schools.