Changing cafeteria blahs into food court appeal.

Increasing student participation in cafeteria lunches can be a piece of cake for administrators who follow these simple guidelines.

Complaining about school lunches has always been a rite of passage among American students. That is, until the day Ilene Murphy and Sophie Hoover, specialists at the Anne Arundel County Public School system's food and nutrition services division, noticed that writing off the boredom meant sacrificing their profits. And when your self-supporting arm has

"We experienced a lot of peaks and valleys - certain days students would participate more in the program than they would on others. Then we looked at the menu and realized that pizza and chicken nugget days were popular but then came sloppy joe day ... what happened?" says Murphy.

"We had a varied menu," partner Hoover adds. "But it varied by the month instead of every day. For instance, I may like tacos a lot, but if they're only offered twice a month, I'm only happy once every other week."

So five years ago they asked for students' input on favorite restaurants, put their heads together, and set about to recreate an already proven success: the fastfood food courts featured in malls across the country. They established up to 20 different menu stations (elementary schools have three or four choices, high schools receive the full complement) open daily under the headings On a Roll (sandwiches), Hot Stop & Go (chicken nuggets), Pizza XPress (includes Mexican and Italian food), Quick Pix (a la carte fare such as double cheeseburgers and pretzels), Sub Depot (subs and salads), Fast Favorites (hot dogs) and Winner's Circle (miscellaneous). Each line also offers several vegetable choices.

It was a radical step away from the "shut up and eat" mentality of the past the team says they are fighting, even though three licensed dietitians oversee USDA nutrition guidelines. "However, we always remind the students that we have many items out on the menu, some more nutritious than others. Life is full of choices and food is one of them, so how to balance their meals is a life skill," says Hoover. The number of meals they serve daily has jumped from approximately 36,000 to 40,000 (16 percent), with a total of 2.7 million items sold every year in the a la carte lines to supplement lunch box meals. And the price of a full meal has remained at $1.10 for the past seven years.

Murphy and Hoover experimented with an elementary and a high school to iron out the kinks. "We're trying to capture the youngest children because they are our customers of the future," Hoover explains. "And teenagers can go somewhere else - they have the money to be vocal."

They've proven in their own district that the concept can be transferred to any size cafeteria and school population with repeated results. Here are the four secrets to success:

1. Think redesign, not renovation.

Murphy and Hoover knocked out only one wall in the entire school district to create their food courts, and that was to enlarge a return window from an unused dishroom to use it as another serving line.

"We used innovative ways to redo what we currently had," Murphy explains. "We rearranged equipment within the line, but we used the same steam table, same warming cabinet and same milk coolers. We just flip-flopped one piece to another for better servability or access to the customers."

Paint and simple decorations comprise the other part of the secret. Each cafeteria features a different theme, from a sidewalk cafe to a lighthouse on Chesapeake Bay, an Old West stagecoach motif, a sound stage, an aquarium, a Caribbean beach and a contemporary environment where blue pizza slices dance on the walls. The specialists even turned old flour sifters into flower vases, invitingly opened doors with cardboard mascots and spread tablecloths over the tables for that garden picnic feel.

"We stay away from grays and tans. We go for oranges, mauves, raspberries, greens, royal blues and sunny yellows. The brighter the better," says Hoover. "Our bottom line is to have fun and to eat." (Incidentally, the color red is supposed to make children hungry psychologically, she adds.)

The first handful of cafeterias they did themselves; today, they sit down with architects to tie into any scheduled renovations or additions. For existing cafeterias, they hire a designer and negotiate jobs that the in-house staff could handle. For example, painting variegated colors of blue may require a designer's hands-on touch - painting the red background for this masterpiece can be delegated to the maintenance crew. And the school graphic arts departments create the plastic food station signs as class projects.

2. Prepared foods reduce labor.

Because the stations rely on freezer-to-oven meals, Anne Arundel County Public School uses fewer employees to create food from scratch. And when they do serve a more complicated meal, the sheer numbers game simplifies the task.

"Before, on a normal day a crew would fix 500 steak subs," Murphy explains. "Now they still prepare 500 meals, but that's not 500 steak subs, 500 chicken nuggets and 500 pizzas. You may need only 100 steak subs, 200 pizzas and 200 chicken nuggets."

3. Further cut labor with disposables.

Hoover and Murphy also switched to disposable utensils, which are recycled at the individual school levels. Eliminating dishes meant cutting the need to staff dishrooms and buy chemicals to keep the machines running. It also translated into more room to set up the rearranged food serving lines. And paper/plastic products go hand-in-hand with the overall fast food theme.

4. Sell it.

Even taking the simplest route, the duo budgeted a few thousand dollars per elementary school to transform it; the most expensive came in at $5,000. They figured on spending around $9,000 for the larger spaces of a middle school, and between $9,000 and $12,000 for a high school. (Many schools are folding this cost into the renovation budgets when it's their turn for these dollars.)

But the break-even answer depends on more than simply math, Hoover points out. "True, as you gain more customer satisfaction, you gain more customers. Eventually everything washes out. But employee training determines how quickly people buy into your program," she says. "Without good customer service, your idea is great, but you won't get good results."

Start with employee appearances. Murphy and Hoover tossed out the sterile hospital whites and hair nets in favor of uniforms that fit the school's restaurant theme. They followed that with personal get-togethers that stressed one main message: These students are not a captive audience. "We needed to get over that hump of 'Oh, they're here, they have to eat, so I don't have to be polite to them,'" Hoover explains. "We replaced it with 'How would you want to be treated as a customer?'"

"I've seen a big difference in our employees since we started this - they seem to be happier because the students are happier," Murphy adds.

Second, form a publicity campaign aimed at parents' perceptions, too. "A lot of adults have that 'this is it, take it or leave it' stigma from their childhoods. For us that's been one of the big obstacles to overcome," Murphy admits.

It's also one that may never be conquered. A high transient rate of military, government agency and Senate staff living in the area means new families move into the school district every year. Anne Arundel's food division tackles the challenge by inviting parents to serve as taste-testing panels at Back-to-School nights, and even setting up a booth at the county fair each summer. "You have to be part of that whole school unit as a team. I think we're winning the battle, but it's a long, hard battle to fight," Hoover notes.

This recipe has reaped anywhere from 10 percent participation increase in some of Anne Arundel's schools to a maximum of a 52 percent jump at one middle school in the first year of its implementation. "We couldn't figure out why they weren't eating at this cafeteria, because it was in a very affluent area," Murphy says. "But when I walked in there for the first time, I thought, 'This place looks like a dungeon.' It was dark, all stainless and beige with awful tile." Food court concept meant lights, lemon-yellow awnings and paintings of clouds and birds on the ceiling - a beautiful, appetizing garden cafe.

"A lot of the children know what they like, and they go to the same line every day. It's we adults that have the harder time choosing. So just do it," says Hoover. "Get your ducks in a row, then venture out to paint this school and call it a new restaurant."

RELATED ARTICLE: SKIP THESE LESSONS

Before you install that first awning or slap up a coat of paint, check with school and city officials to meet code. Sophie Hoover and Ilene Murphy's awnings at their first high school blocked the sprinklers, a dangerous situation they didn't discover until the fire marshal inspected the building two years later. "We had to take them down, so we cut the canopies off, left the frames up and wound flowers around the frames and made it a garden," Murphy says.

Because most fabrics and paint need to be fire-retardant, the team now requests material safety data sheets from the designers, and then runs them by the appropriate officials.

Second, listen to the staff's input. Hoover and Murphy fostered internal enthusiasm for the program when they realized that preprinting the paperwork to match the stations would save substantial record-keeping time. "When people complain, you have to ask why. Once you get those kinks out of the way, it is easy to sell more Schools on the concept," Hoover notes.

Julie Sturgeon is an Indianapolis-based freelance writer.