School foodservice directors' national training practices

Abstract

AbstractIn the United States, over 29 million students daily are consuming meals at school. This number continues to increase as more diverse meal options are presented and increased demand for meal assistance. Very young students (under the age of 5) are considered a high‐risk population for foodborne illness. Though numerous interventions have been implemented previously, several predominant food safety violations continue to persist. To better understand and improve targeted food safety trainings and interventions this study aimed to conduct a needs assessment of school foodservice directors' training programs and topics. A total of 1,250 electronic surveys were sent nationally to K‐12 school foodservice directors. Of that, 264 useable responses were analyzed. Descriptive statistics were used to summarize demographics, as well as identified training methods and topics. Structural modeling was used to identify relatedness ratings between training methods. Approximately 67% of directors reported currently make less than 40% of the menu items from scratch. On‐the‐job training (94%) was the most frequent training method, while augmented reality and virtual reality were the least with 1.9% and 1.5%, respectively. Structural modeling identified two central nodes, on‐the‐job (six pairings) and lecture‐style (four pairings). All other modalities had one to three relationship pairings. For the majority (73%), the average length of training is less than 2 hr. The top two training topics school foodservice directors reported providing were: food safety (95.5% very likely/likely) and food production (94.3% very likely/likely). Study results provide insights into current training methods and topics provided by school foodservice directors at the time of the survey.