Ector County ISD’s Director of School Nutrition Katy Taylor Hoyng has started a blog to let people know how school district food service works.

“I’m trying to share all the things I’ve learned in my position; the things that when I get calls from parents that they’re frustrated about. It’s really that they just don’t know what we know. The same with principals and teachers. People in this district even don’t always know everything that goes into putting food on a tray for a child,” Taylor Hoyng said.

Over the past six years that she’s been in the district, probably her biggest frustration has been that everybody thinks they know what her department does or why it does it. She decided to create the blog so the general public can learn more about it.

During her time in school nutrition, some areas have changed and some have remained relatively constant.

“But there are a lot of opinions about what school food should be and how it should be and I want everybody to know that we are under a whole lot more standards than I think the general public realizes.”

Taylor Hoyng will be leaving next month to work for Titan School Solutions, which lets districts mange student accounts and parents to pay school fees and apply for free and reduced meals. She hopes to keep her blog going.

During her tenure, she has worked to come up with a way to handle students who don’t have money in their lunch accounts.

“We’ve been working really hard trying to come to a middle ground on something that works so parents know when their child owes money without that responsibility falling on the child. I will tell you there is no right answer. We are between a rock and a hard place. I can’t disclose a lot, but the district is looking at some pretty intense changes to that in a way that would be better,” Taylor Hoyng said.

Last year, a policy was implemented where the cashiers wouldn’t tell the children they were low because her department was getting complaints that it wasn’t the child’s responsibility.

“And I get that. We also were required to implement by the state that we couldn’t serve them something different as a courtesy meal, so when a child runs out of money we keep feeding them. We’re giving them food and then we get complaints that we’re giving them something that’s different, so there’s this difficulty of well do you feed the child so that they can learn, or do you not feed the child so they’re not getting something different,” she said. “It’s difficult, but the state came out and said we couldn’t feed them something different. We needed to be feeding them the lowest cost entrée, so we made the cheese sandwich available to every child, every day as the lowest cost entrée. And I can’t tell you how many kids eat that every day because they want to. So now there’s not a lot of stigma around the cheese sandwich, but also there’s a lot of taking advantage of the system because why would a parent pay for their child to eat a cheese sandwich if we would give it to them for free, if there was no money on their account?” Taylor Hoyng said.

ECISD was Taylor Hoyng’s first experience with school nutrition. She was the dietician for seven months and was made director when Terry Gooch retired. “I’ve been with the district for six years and I’ve been a director for five and a half of those. Before that, I was a dietician at an eating disorder treatment facility. I was doing counseling for people who were trying to recover from eating disorders and disordered eating,” Taylor Hoyng said.

It was called Ranch 2300 in Lubbock. Disordered eating is when someone doesn’t have a normal relationship with food and it’s causing problems in their life, but it doesn’t fit a true medical definition of an eating disorder.

For most of her time at ECISD, Taylor said she had wanted to start a blog, but she’s glad she waited.

“I think I have some more maturity now to keep me from saying maybe some things that I shouldn’t,” Taylor Hoyng said.

She said ideas come from what she thinks is most misunderstood or unknown. Lately they have come from calls or emails she receives.

“I know people are reading them some more than others. My intention is just for eventually people to know that it’s there and that they can look to that as a reference on some of just what goes on in general in school nutrition,” Taylor Hoyng added.

If you’re using federal money, you have to follow federal rules.

“If a school district isn’t on the national school lunch program, receiving money from the federal government, then they don’t have to follow those rules. It’s up to them to do what they want. In this district, we have too many students who rely on the benefit from the federal government to go off of the program. We need the program for our kids,” she said.

About 50 percent of students at ECISD qualify for free and reduced lunch.

“It tends to go closer toward like 55 percent when oil is down and it tends to be closer to 50 percent when oil is up because the parents are making more money so they’re not qualifying for free and reduced price meals,” Taylor Hoyng said.

Every district is different. Small districts don’t sell enough meals to cover the overhead.

The amounts districts get for each meal they serve is the same as other districts that don’t get reimbursement because they don’t have free and reduced students and can afford to absorb that and “serve some really great food that doesn’t have to follow any nutrition guidelines because they’re not taking money from the government.”

There are about 33,002 students attending ECISD schools.

Taylor Hoyng said her department wants all parents to apply for free and reduced meals, even if their child doesn’t eat lunch for breakfast. Free breakfast is served in the classrooms at all ECISD elementary and middle school campuses.

If high school students want breakfast, they have to go to the café. There also are coffee bars at Permian and Odessa high schools.

George H.W. Bush New Tech Odessa doesn’t have a coffee bar, but students can get breakfast from the café.

“My funds the school nutrition funds come only from the meals that were served. If we serve the meal, we get paid for it. If the class went on a field trip and we made all these lunches for them and didn’t know they were going on a field trip, we don’t get any money for that food. We get money for the meal that is given to the child,” Taylor Hoyng said.

Taylor Hoyng grew up in Midland. She has a bachelor’s and master’s degree in nutrition from Texas Tech University and did her dietetic internship at the University of Oklahoma.

She picked nutrition because she was interested in it. Going into school nutrition was not her plan, but “it turned out to be just a perfect fit for me, I think.”

“It’s so interesting working for a school district in this capacity. Even when I was the dietician for seven months, you’re not just planning menus. This is a business, too, so it’s given me an opportunity to have a job that really has just so many hats that I wear, and sometimes, that’s stressful but at the same time it’s given me so much experience that I wouldn’t have gotten in another position,” Taylor Hoyng said.

Working for Titan School Solutions, she’ll still be working in school nutrition, just from the technological side of things.

Burleson Elementary School is the guinea pig for the taste tests Taylor Hoyng conducts to help devise menus. Principal Tristan Specter said he has seen Taylor Hoyng’s blog and thinks she does a good job of letting people know how her department works and how meals are funded.

Specter said he’s sad that Taylor Hoyng is leaving, but happy for her new opportunity.

“She was a joy to work with. I love that she let the kids do taste test and not go on what adults think they should eat. She really did care about the kids and making sure that they got the nutrition that would support their learning,” Specter said.

“As a person, she is good as gold and would help out in any way. As a nutrition director, her focus was on the students, what do they like, what food is best for them and their growing bodies and minds (and) how can we make sure every kid gets food and is able to eat every day,” he added.