Along with the new Performing Arts Center (P.A.C.) Alliance High School also has a brand new cafeteria and with it a new enthusiasm for eating lunch at school.
Students eating at AHS enter the vender lines through doors south of the main office and choose one of the four serving lines to walk through to receive their main course, bagged salads or fruit, and milk, water, Sobe, or flavored water. The cafeteria tables curve around the outside of the P.A.C., but they are not all typical cafeteria tables, many are separate tables and chairs, so they have more of a restaurant appeal. While students sit and eat at the new tables they are entertained by music playing over the intercom system and will soon be able to watch videos shown on the televisions hung on the cafeteria walls.
Dr. Dan Hoesing, AHS superintendent, believes many students will enjoy using the school cafeteria, especially now that the school has not only renovated its facilities, but has brought in vendors to serve restaurant food. He says, “The new cafeteria will be a great alternative as the weather gets colder more students do not want to go out side and scrape their car windows at lunch.” And he is correct. Previously approximately one hundred students were served per day in the old facilities. However, since the new cafeteria opened up it has served up to three hundred students per day.
In addition to the new accommodations students are excited about the different food choices. They now have access to various vender choices such as Subway, Pizza Hut, KC’s Short Stop Subs, Sam and Louie’s Pasta, Papas Pizza, and China Buffet, in addition to the traditional school cafeteria lunches. Moreover, Wonderful Kitchen is interested in joining the ranks of vender suppliers and Taco Johns will be joining after their remolding is finished.
Dr. Hoesing says, “I choose the food vendors by asking the members of AHS Student Council which vendors they thought students would rather eat at; I then sent letters to the businesses and visited many that were interested.” Students can now have an inexpensive meal without spending gas money to leave the school. Junior Katelynn Grant says she would never stay at school for lunch before the new cafeteria was built unless she didn’t have any gas money, but now she is staying at the school everyday.
Seniors Sierra Gonzalez and Samantha Voderstrasse said, ”We love the new cafeteria and especially enjoy having the choice of getting Sobe drinks other than water and milk, but we wish we had music videos to go along with music!” Art instructor Jill Harris said she is now eating at the cafeteria four to five times a week instead of three because she enjoys the wide food varieties. Many students and teachers choose to go through the vendor lines instead of the school food lines, but the cafeteria workers are trying to be more competitive, putting bigger servings on plates and a tasty variety of food choices on the menu.
Dr. Hoesing added, “We want to make lunch more fun and enjoyable than before. What comes first is feeding our students and making sure they have a great high school experience. I want to listen to our students and see what they want, after all it is their lunch not mine, and hopefully having them sit down and talk with their peers more will help them have better communication. The school not only wants to have an increase in lunch patrons, but in other activities too because when students are more involved they are better connected outside of school as well.”
