2014 Silver Plate: Sandra Ford

When people say they are going to leave the bitter Midwest winters for the sandy beaches of Florida, oftentimes they’re joking. Sandra Ford wasn’t. After a year in which both her mother and brother died, Ford and her husband packed their bags for the Sunshine State.

In 2004, Ford landed the director position at Manatee County School District, where she’s been ever since. In the decade since the sojourn South, Ford has done much to revitalize the program in Manatee and helped guide the school nutrition industry during the most tumultuous time in the past 15 years.

Building trust

“When I got here it was a program that wasn’t in financial trouble, but it had more potential,” Ford says. “The biggest thing I realized when I got here was the relationship aspect of our job was really broken down. The staff didn’t trust the district-level staff. Managers were siding with the principals. There was a lot of discontent and mistrust.”

Ford spent the first couple of years alleviating this problem. That started with “show and tell,” she says. “They had to see that, No. 1, I listened to them and that we could build a working relationship and do what’s right for the kids.”

A huge factor in this relationship-building process was providing the staff with the proper training to better perform their jobs. “When I came the training was really minimal,” Ford recalls. “I wouldn’t call it training. It was I talked, you listened.” Furthermore, most training was for managers only.

Ford changed that so that every employee would receive training. She added two contracted workdays for all staff to conduct training. The addition wasn’t popular at first. “At first it was met with huge resistance because [those additional two days] were days that school wasn’t in session. After two years, my senior staff kept saying, ‘They’re not buying into this.’ I just said, ‘We need to keep doing this.’ Now, they recognize that training is a value-added [benefit] for them. It’s not always training on how to serve. It’s customer service or how to read a financial report.”

Learning how to analyze financial data has become more important in the department. Three years ago Ford started dashboards, a comparison by school of common data points, including labor, participation and overtime. Once a month that data is pooled into a district-level dashboard with data including meals per labor hour.

Started as an internal tool, the dashboards have since expanded to help foodservice staff have meaningful conversations with other school staff, mainly principals.

“District administrators really saw that as a great tool because they were able to see on a month-to-month basis how the program was doing, how our finances looked, how we compared this year to last year. If things were off, I was able to provide an explanation of why things were different,” Ford says.

These financial conversations also helped build a better relationship between foodservice and school staff, which often were stressed. Ford made a point to reach out to school leadership staff to communicate that the department wanted to be a part of the learning process for students.

Now the department provides free breakfast to students during standardized testing. “It was just supporting [school staff] on their field days and providing them opportunities and not saying no to them every time they asked for a special favor,” Ford says. “It was looking for a case of oranges, which sounds really simple, but they were being told no to that.”

Kid-friendly

The last relationship Ford needed to rebuild was with the students. “We have 53 schools, so it’s really important that the local managers be able to build relationships with those kids, to call them by name, to say hello to them, to give them a smile,” Ford says. “I think [by encouraging staff to talk with kids] we gave them permission to do that.”

One school’s new manager went so far as to put up a photo of a line worker with a caption underneath saying, “Hi, my name is X. Say hi to me,” to encourage students to interact with staff to help facilitate the relationship-building process.

All these efforts are showing results. Since Ford’s arrival, overall participation is up 25%.

Ford’s influence also has been felt outside Manatee County. She was the president of the School Nutrition Association (SNA) in 2012-2013, when the latest USDA regulations began to be put into effect.

“Sandy was an exceptional leader through a transformative time for the association and the school nutrition industry,” says Patricia Montague, SNA’s CEO. “Her analytical thinking and decisiveness are strong positive attributes that really define her leadership role in SNA. While she worked tirelessly to implement the new school meal regulations in her own district, her open and honest feedback about challenges her fellow school nutrition colleagues across the country were facing in implementing new regulations helped champion grain and protein flexibility permanence.”

For her part, Ford says her time as president was her greatest achievement. “As I was growing in my profession I would always look at the president and say, ‘Wow, I’m not sure I would ever be able to do that.’ We had a great year and met some challenges head-on,” Ford recalls.