5 things: NYC Schools to require all staff to vaccinate

In this edition of 5 Things, Food Management highlights five things you may have missed recently about developments affecting onsite dining.

Here’s your list for today:

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has announced that all Department of Education staff for public schools across the city must be vaccinated against Covid-19, without a testing alternative. Almost two-thirds (63%) of NYC DOE employees are already vaccinated against COVID-19 according to Schools Chancellor Meisha Porter. New York is the largest school district in the country and obviously now the largest to mandate vaccination, though several large districts like Los Angeles and Chicago have also announced similar policies.

Read more: NYC announces Covid-19 vaccine mandate for all public school employees, with no testing opt out

Due to staffing constraints and food supply chain challenges, dining operations campus wide at Binghamton University will have delayed openings or reduced hours to begin the semester. While all four resident dining halls are open with most food stations available, the remaining stations will open and hours will expand only when staffing levels are sufficient. Among retail outlets, the Nite Owl and one c-store will be closed until staffing levels are sufficient to reopen, the Jazzman’s Library Tower will have reduced hours, the Chenango Room will convert to online ordering only and Garbanzo’s Mediterranean Grill will delay opening until September.

Related:5 things: Aramark announces fall K-12, campus dining plans

Read more: Binghamton University Dining Services facing operational challenges

With the fourth wave of coronavirus prompting last-minute shifts to virtual schooling, the East Baton Rouge Parish school system in Louisiana is resuming home meal deliveries for virtual students, with participating families eligible to have a week’s worth of meal boxes delivered to their homes in lieu of what their children would have received at school. About a thousand children in the school system currently are learning virtually, a fivefold increase over the past two weeks, though far less than the 12,000-plus who were learning strictly virtually last school year.

Read more: Home meal delivery resumes in Baton Rouge for virtual school families and others

Almost half (48%) of American employees say a company’s policy on remote work is now their number one desired workplace attribute and the number one workplace feature they’ll be searching for post-COVID is the ability to work remotely when they please, according to a new study of 2,000 Americans who are currently working remotely by OnePoll on behalf of Kintone. Remote work policy is so important that nearly three in four (72%) said they wouldn’t even consider working for a company that didn’t offer flexible work-from-home policies.

Related:5 tech things: Robots continue to invade campuses

Read more: American's number one workplace attribute is a flexible work-from-home policy, new research shows

The cafeterias in Rapid City Area Schools in South Dakota, like many other districts, are short staffed to begin the school year, with 17 job openings across the district. “We’ve been making some changes to what we do, our priority right now is serving breakfast and lunch to our students so, we are moving people around, we are doing the best we can with the people that we do have and hoping to bring more people on board so, that we can so we can relive some of that pressure from our current staff and be able to do more for the students,” Student Nutrition Manger Krista Leischner says.

Read more: Short staffing continues in school cafeterias

Bonus: Elior’s K-12 Global Bites brings ethnic LTOs to schools

Contact Mike Buzalka at [email protected]