Fast Food Goes to Capistrano Valley High School : Nutrition: As the school year begins, students will be given a chance to select the lunch foods they like through an agreement of the school district and a major business.

When the school year begins at Capistrano Valley High School on Thursday, students will have the unique opportunity to experiment with choice--through a new and innovative food court at the school. This is the first time in the nation that a public school system and a major business--PepsiCo Corp. and the PepsiCo family of Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, Frito-Lay, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Pepsi, under the leadership of Taco Bell New Concepts--have taken a powerful step toward making school lunch foods available to students in a nutritious and convenient way and with a variety of options.

Public schools have been advised for years that they should operate more like a business. Capistrano Valley High School will now lead the way in attempting to do just that. Times are changing, and the realities are clear. Everyday thousands of students depart in a flurry from their high school campuses and dangerously race to local fast food restaurants to purchase their lunch, choosing from varied menus. Now they will be able to make many of those same choices on campus.

The fast food industry once had a reputation of serving high-calorie, high-fat food. However, this industry has made remarkable adaptations to meet the demands of our growing health-conscious society. When Kentucky Fried Chicken markets skinless poultry, McDonald’s offers non-fat salad dressings, Taco Bell uses low-fat milk in its cheeses and Burger King even offers a low-fat/low-cholesterol hamburger, it is clear that the public’s demands are being heard by the fast-food industry.

Before our Capistrano Unified School District board approved this new program, considerable discussion took place about its nutritional merits. The trustees learned that the fast-food meals we will be serving stack up quite favorably to traditional school lunches.

By placing a food court on the campus of our high schools we expect to encourage students to remain on campus by choice, not because they’re forced to. While nutrition certainly cannot be legislated for young adults, there are several steps that school officials can and should take to guarantee that all recognized nutrition standards are met. We know what students want to eat, they leave campus to buy it. Now we will provide that food on campus, but in a nutritious manner as part of a well-balanced menu. Fresh fruits and vegetables will also be available to provide additional nutritional balance.

We expect the new food court at Capistrano Valley High School to be an enormous success and plan to expand this concept to our other high schools. We see it as an opportunity to feed students, on campus, in a timely and nutritious manner. We have obtained a license to prepare the foods to corporate specification and pay a royalty on actual sales. This is the kind of partnership that school and business should establish and expand to help foster a successful, healthy society.

An added benefit to this new relationship is one of training high school students to work in the food industry. Plans are underway to provide many of our students the chance to gain marketable skills before graduation by working in their school’s food court. We have also been able to guarantee that no employee will be displaced; all of our food services employees will be used in the new program.

The food court program at Capistrano Valley High School is more than a new way of serving students. It represents a new way of thinking in public education. I salute our director of food services, Bill Caldwell, and his staff for this creative idea. Capistrano Unified School District, along with school districts throughout Orange County, is full of educators and other support personnel who are continually looking for new and better ways to deliver a comprehensive public school experience to our students.