School operation teams, the backbone of making the school day happen across the country, are often invisible. With little acknowledgement of success, it’s easy to notice when things fall apart: when buses don’t arrive on time, admission numbers are lower, computers stop working, or thousands of dollars are wasted on food ordered, but never eaten.
High Tech High (HTH), a group of sixteen charter schools in San Diego, California, is connected to a graduate school, the High Tech High Graduate School of Education (HTH GSE).
In 2023, leaders at HTH and HTH GSE decided to leverage this connection—specifically, HTH GSE’s work in the field of continuous improvement—by applying the tools of continuous improvement to HTH’s school operations teams (specifically IT, food and nutrition, facilities, and admissions) to investigate the question “How can continuous improvement optimize school operations outcomes?”
To launch this collaboration, the directors of each operations team partnered with an improvement coach from the HTH GSE’s Center for Research in Equity and Innovation (CREI). This is an account of the work done by one of those partnerships, between Director of Food and Nutrition, Kelly Verburgt, and Improvement Coach, Garett Brownlee Plantz, written by Garett.
In the 22-23 school year, High Tech High over-ordered 55,272 lunches that never made it to a student’s tray. These wasted lunches led to significant financial losses, not to mention the environmental negligence. Having a background in national school lunch and nutrition programs, I was matched with Kelly Verburgt to use improvement science to do the following:
At this point it’s worth mentioning a factor that contributed to this project’s success that was beyond the scope of the project itself: In 2022, the Food and Nutrition team had added the Food and Nutrition Department Supervisor to the team and increased base-wage to lunch service teams. Staff stability was important to the project, because it helped eliminate a common culprit to improvement – inconsistency. The conditions were set for the system to be more change-ready.
Kelly and I first met to try and understand the problem of how much waste was happening and where. We looked at waste data over the previous year to understand the extent of food waste and its distribution across campuses over time. Visualizing the data on a chart revealed which schools were generating the least (and most) waste. This analysis highlighted schools with minimal waste—the early”bright spots.”
In order to develop an aim (that is, a “goal”), the team needed to address two questions: “What is a reasonable amount of food waste for a school to generate?” and “Which schools should we focus on?”
When you are trying to feed a large number of children and your paramount concern is ensuring they all get enough to eat, some degree of waste is unavoidable, so we knew we wouldn’t be aiming for “zero waste” in this improvement project. By looking at the data broken down by school we were able to identify a target that looked aspirational but realistic. We set the target at “no more than 10%.”
In order to choose which schools to focus on we had to consider a few factors. First, designing a multi-school improvement project within a system that values independent operations and decision-making posed a challenge. This implied that we might want to limit our work to a small number of schools. We also considered focusing on the schools generating the greatest quantity of food waste, since they appear to be the schools with the widest scope for quick improvement.
In spite of these considerations, we decided to work with every school in the organization, because we predicted that the challenges of coordinating across multiple schools would be outweighed by the benefits of learning from variation.
Consequently, the group initiated this improvement project with the goal of reducing waste overall by about 6 percentage points – from 15.6% in 2022-23 to no more than 10% of the ordered quantity at each serving site during the upcoming school year. If achieved, this aim would reduce food waste by over a third , saving the schools significant money.
Before implementing changes, the food and nutrition team conducted empathy interviews at “bright spot” schools to identify effective practices. Speaking directly to school leadership and lunch service staff provided context to the challenges. For example, the Food and Nutrition teams at individual schools knew they were ordering lunches for students who weren’t there to eat them, but often felt helpless because teachers weren’t telling them when their students wouldn’t be showing up at the lunchroom (for example because of field trips or potlucks). On the other side, we learned that in most cases it wasn’t that school leaders or teachers didn’t know how to tell the Food and Nutrition team that their students would miss lunch, it just didn’t feel like that big of a deal. After all, small groups missing here or there is not the largest problem in a teacher’s day—in fact from the perspective of the teacher, it isn’t a problem at all. For the Food and Nutrition Team, on the other hand, it’s a disaster. Consider this for a moment: if the tenth grade teachers decide to have a pizza party for all the students, and don’t tell Food and Nutrition Services about it, over a hundred meals will go directly into the trash.
This provided the Food and Nutrition Team with a clear goal: increase lunch order accuracy through closing the gap of predictable absences at school lunch.
In order to achieve this, we needed school staff to know what to do (report field trips, pot lucks, and pizza parties) and we needed it to be simple to do.
The “field trip” problem had an obvious solution: teachers needed to tell Food and Nutrition Services they were going on field trips, with enough lead time for them to change their orders. To address this, the food and nutrition team created a simple Google form, dubbed the Field Trip Form, for each school. This allowed teachers to indicate upcoming field trips and request to-go lunches—they just needed to do so at least two weeks in advance. The first version of the form was designed to be comprehensive, but the number of questions was keeping people from using it. In response to teacher feedback we simplified the form and tasked Lunch Managers with sending confirmation or denial emails letting teachers know whether it would be possible to provide to-go lunches. This tweak increased submissions significantly across all schools.
While this seems like an obvious solution for any school problem, school sites that know kids (and their preferences) perform better. Observing students’ eating patterns in the lunch line allows for real-time adjustments in the menu, reducing waste. Knowing student preferences allowed food and nutrition staff to modify their orders more strategically.
Here’s an example: if Ms. Petersen’s class is going to miss lunch on Tuesday due to a field trip, and you know that none of the kids in Ms. Petersen’s class eat sun butter sandwiches, you know you don’t need to modify Tuesday’s sun butter sandwich order.
Gabriella “Gaby” Parsons, a School Lunch Assistant and mother of a High Tech High graduate, began meticulously tracking lunch participation by grade using pen and paper. Through daily tallying, she gained a deep understanding of each grade’s and even individual students’ participation patterns based on menu items. For example, if a student consistently opted for breakfast burritos but avoided chicken nuggets, Gaby would pick up on these preferences and adjust the next order cycle accordingly. Over time, she memorized these numbers, giving her a significant advantage when preparing for irregular days, such as field trips. Gaby quickly checked the student field trip list to predict their lunch preferences accurately, helping her minimize waste by adjusting food orders as needed.
It’s worth noting that Gaby’s site is an elementary school, where lunch participation is highly consistent as it is integrated into the students’ daily routine. In contrast, high school students make daily decisions about school lunch, often influenced by menu choices and social plans with friends, which may result in more variable participation rates. That said, when the Food and Nutrition team learned about Gaby’s pattern of noticing and tending to students’ patterns, they shared it with lunch staff across every school in the organization.
Expanding on this concept, Jen Alviar, the Food and Nutrition Department’s Supervisor, assumed the responsibility of supporting the lunch staff and overseeing food orders to reduce waste. Recognizing the impact of the daily menu choices on student participation, Jen created a spreadsheet to track the two. For instance, she monitored the maximum number of breakfast burritos served at each site as well as the average number served. This additional analysis tool helped Jen serve as an eagle eye to the food orders each week, reducing outliers and high variability. Before Jen took on this responsibility, every individual lunch team was responsible for doing this on their own, in addition to their responsibility for actually making sure every kid got a good meal!
Collaborating on food orders between the lunch staff and supervisor improved accuracy. The lunch staff accounted for predictable factors in their initial orders, while the supervisor ensured orders were reasonable based on past data. This double-checking process proved to be more reliable, leading to more consistent orders across all sites. Most staff welcomed the additional review, giving them peace of mind knowing Jen was supporting them. Ultimately, everyone was motivated to minimize food waste, making the collaborative effort a success.
A significant reduction came after sharing lunch-waste data publicly across all the schools. Starting in September, Kelly sent a monthly email to every staff member across the organization, showing every serving site’s waste generation for that month. This helped everyone put their own actions in a larger context, fostering a broader understanding of individual actions within a larger context and indirectly stimulating schools’ competitiveness. Ray Trinidad, Dean of Students at High Tech High Media Arts responded to the initial email from Kelly by writing “OUCH! Thank you for this email and for giving it to us straight. Well done.”
An important component of this change idea is that we didn’t just start sending an email, we also stopped sending a different email that provided details like menus items or weather reports (a variable for outdoor eating). Although initially deemed “nice,” this communication proved to be time-consuming and of limited value. By making this process simpler, school staff compliance with using the field trip form and communicating plans to the on-site lunch manager improved. Teams were starting to feel a sense of achievement in finding a solution together.
So far during the 2024 school year (August – March), HTH sites have reduced total lunches wasted from 39,865 to 26,715 as compared to the same span of the months during 2023 school year. Initially, the project gains were over 50%, now stabilizing at 34%. From August 2023 through April 2024, the amount of money saved in waste compared to the year before equated to $53,935. Moreover, these improvements provide encouraging evidence that basic improvement practice and support can make significant gains across school systems desiring for better.
As we look ahead, there is still much to be done. The journey towards sustainable practices and implementation of effective change ideas (and spread of those ideas) is ongoing. The stories of individuals like Gaby Parsons and Jen Alviar exemplify the transformative impact of dedicated individuals within a system, and how simple changes, like noticing and sharing data, can be transformative.This not only gives us hope but also provides a platform for implementing changes across campuses in a way that’s easy to understand, making the whole process of change a bit more digestible.
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