Pictured is a food truck from the Frontier Central School District. In Clymer, school officials are looking to bring a similar truck to the district to help provide career education for students.
Submitted photo
CLYMER — A local school district will soon take ownership of a food truck to help provide career education for students.
Secondary Principal Brianne Fadale said Susan Watrous, director of food services, came up with the idea. It started with a discussion surrounding how food could be distributed to students and families if another shutdown were to occur.
Watrous brought up the idea to Clymer’s superintendent.
“My superintendent, Beth Olsen, was like actually, ‘That checks a lot of the boxes,’” Fadale said. “If we could bag up food like we did last year … we could use a food truck for that. We can make it a mobile hotspot for WiFi if needed.”
Aside from the pandemic, she said there are several ways the food truck can be used, such as teaching entrepreneurial skills and providing a possible career path for students going forward.
A design created by Clymer ninth grade students on how the school’s food truck will look.
Submitted photo
“We just started brainstorming and just thinking of the different career paths it offers,” Fadale said. “How do you come up with a menu? How do you design graphic designs? How do you come up with a logo or how do you advertise? We thought, ‘Wow, this is just a lot of opportunities.”
She said the district got the approval for the project and soon formed a committee.
“All of these different people came together and we’ve been meeting as a committee talking about how we make this happen,” Fadale said. “Because we’re such a small school, creating new courses is challenging because you have to have the people and you have to have the resources that can make this happen.”
A group of administrators, including Fadale, took a trip to visit another school district with a food truck over the summer. Frontier Central School District was happy to answer questions for Clymer staff, Fadale said.
“We got excited by seeing it and we had (them) bring that truck down for inservice day so our teachers could see it,” she said.
Fadale said the food truck could also present fundraising opportunities for the school.
“There’s just a lot of different opportunities that can get kids exposed to a lot of different things,” she said. “That’s really the why behind it — to try to get something different for the kids. I never thought I’d be doing this as a principal.”
Students recently held a competition to help design what the outside of the food truck will look like, and the district held an assembly to unveil the idea to the students.
Fadale said there isn’t an exact date set when the district will receive the food truck, but the district plans to do an unveiling event.
The district also created a video regarding the project that can be viewed at clymercsd.org/live-feed
Source: https://www.post-journal.com/news/page-one/2022/03/food-truck-to-serve-clymer-an-educational-tool/