Editor’s note: This is reprinted with permission from the author. It was first published on Iserotope.com. It has been edited for print publication. Photos of food were included in the online blog version, and it was edited for length.

I bought school lunch for the first time in years.

Usually, buying school lunch on a regular basis seems something akin to a form of slow-moving assisted suicide for teachers. Only in dire straits would I resort to the combination of tater tots and Taco Bell–branded burritos that were available under the heat lamps.

But all that has changed in Port Townsend schools. This February, in what felt like an overnight makeover, everything was suddenly different about our school lunch program.

Students’ trays started showing up to lunch-time meetings piled high with kale chips, couscous salads and sandwiches on local, organic bread.

There were fish tacos made with fresh fish delivered from our city docks by Key City Fish Company, a vegetable bake, shepherd’s pie with kale salad, followed by mac and cheese with lentil salad.

Then came pizza day, with fresh sauce and cheese donated by our local Mt. Townsend Creamery.

And just like that, this year in Port Townsend schools has become the year of the school lunch.

Crazy things started to happen.

Our English teacher who teaches “Fast Food Nation” to sophomores every year and eats what can only be described as a radically healthy diet bought a school lunch for the first time in 20 years. Then he bought another. And another.

I was walking through the middle school commons with a group of community members who knew nothing about the changes in school lunch when they started exclaiming to each other, “That’s the best-smelling school lunch ever!”

How did it happen? Of course, this type of fundamental change required significant community, administrative, and kitchen staff support and coordination.

We were lucky to start off with a community that had already been supportive: an active Farm to School group, an elementary school garden, and a middle school orchard of fruit trees donated and planted by a local gleaners group to grow healthy snacks for our students.

We also had a superintendent and wellness committee committed to the change. “We just can’t keep feeding our kids the same processed food and sugar,” Superintendent David Engle said. “We want to see a transition from a feeding program to a meals program.”

This winter, he helped bring in Hope Borsato, a local chef and caterer with a background in large-scale food services and local organic cooking to help advise on the change.

All this sounds great and expensive, but according to Engle and Borsato, costs have been roughly the same.

Borsato explained that they’d made several fundamental changes to lunch delivery to increase efficiency and offset the cost of higher-quality, hand-made cooking.

Historically, our district had created three separate menus for our elementary, middle and high schools. Now, we all eat the same thing on a given day, freeing up kitchen staff to cook rather than prep three different types of reheated meals.

Instead of serving large pieces of low-quality meat, we switched to small amounts of high-quality meat in meals supplemented with protein from lots of bean and lentil salads.

The district has been creative about procuring affordable, high-quality ingredients locally. We’ve worked with the Port Townsend Food Co-op to purchase organic carrots at wholesale prices.

We replaced industrial bread with local, organic bread from Pane d’Amore bakery by taking its end-of-the-day loaves for $1 a piece. The next day, we get a sandwich bar.

The community has also played a huge role. Local chefs volunteered their time to work with our kitchen staff and help plan meals during the transition. A community member came forward with a $1,000 donation to support the purchase of the small-scale cooking hardware our food services staff needed to start making meals from scratch. Our local award-winning cheese maker Mt. Townsend Creamery has donated 30 pounds of cheese each month.

Looking forward, the district is working with Jefferson Healthcare, our local hospital, on preorders of fresh fruits and vegetables from area farmers – a sort of CSA for schools. This will help us source more local, and often organic, food for school lunches while supporting our area farmers. Students for Sustainability, a high school club, is working with the district to implement the use of reusable plates and silverware this spring.

All of these changes in school food have been the lunchtime conversation for teachers and students alike.

At our elementary school, students learned about planting potatoes from “Farmer Zach” from our local Dharma Ridge Farm. That day for lunch, we had a baked potato bar featuring organic potatoes from the same farmer’s fields. Later at the high school, local professor Wes Cecil and chef Arran Stark co-led an interactive lecture for our students on the history of the potato and its importance to the world.

Those are the kinds of interdisciplinary, real-world connections educational theorists dream about. In Port Townsend, they’ve become our students’ reality.

It’s easy to get bogged down in all the things that aren’t working well in public schools. Change like this gives you hope for what public schools can do and be.

Perhaps most hopefully of all, Port Townsend did it on its own.  In a small, rural district with an almost 50 percent free and reduced lunch rate, we didn’t wait for the state to fund it. We didn’t wait for a Department of Education mandate.

The community, schools and food services staff saw what was right and made it real. It was hard work and often a struggle for those tasked with implementing the change, but the results have been nothing short of revolutionary. 

(Benjamin Dow has taught English and social studies in China, Ghana and Port Townsend, Washington, where he currently teaches contemporary world problems. He is published in “Teaching Tolerance” and recites an annual poem for graduating seniors.)