It’s Tuesday afternoon and members the girls’ track team at St. Andrew’s Episcopal School in Potomac, Md., are making empanadas in the school kitchen. Before the high school students head home for the evening, they will have whipped up 75 to 80 of the tasty beef turnovers, along with nutritious side dishes and a huge batch of vanilla pudding. Across the hall, other members of the team are preparing bag lunches. The food will go to Bethesda Cares, a nonprofit that distributes meals to the homeless and other low-income people.

The meal preparations are part of a nationwide initiative called the Campus Kitchens Project (CKP). An offshoot of D.C. Central Kitchen, the CKP utilizes campus kitchens and recovered food to prepare meals for the needy. To date, 21 colleges and universities have established campus kitchens programs. St. Andrew’s is just the second high school to start a program, after Gonzaga College High School in D.C., where the CKP is based.

The goal initially is to have at least half the food used each week come from recovered supplies, so that there is less overall waste, said Chuck James, coordinator of the program at St. Andrew’s. While some of that food is from the school’s own supplies—prepared dishes that never left the kitchen or surplus items, such as meat or vegetables—other provisions are donated by outside groups such as the Marriott Corp., which provides unused products from their test kitchen. What isn’t readily available, such as fresh fruit in winter, St. Andrew’s purchases, but James is hopeful that local farmers’ markets might see the program as a positive way to unload excess produce in the summer and fall.
The program is supported by the school’s service budget and a small grant from the CKP.

 St. Andrew’s launched its program on Martin Luther King Day with about 130 hot meals. “What is so amazing is that the kids really jumped all over that, and so week in and week out we’ve had big crowds” wanting to help out, said the Rev. Luther Zeigler, the school’s chaplain. The program also has forged new connections between students, faculty and the kitchen staff, he said.

Sophomore Melanie Schlosser has been coming to the Tuesday afternoon meal sessions every week and is one of several students who have taken on a leadership role in the project. “I really like the idea that we can reuse leftover food and give it to the homeless who don’t otherwise have food,” she said.

Clinton James, a senior and son of the program’s coordinator, also has been coming regularly. He hopes to work at Bethesda Cares for his senior service project this spring, learning more about the business of feeding the hungry and sourcing food from local restaurants and groceries.

Student leadership is a key piece of the program. Over the next couple of months, James hopes that core groups of students will begin planning the menus, tracking inventory and expanding relationships with local restaurants and food distributors so that St. Andrew’s can know on a week-to-week basis where the food is coming from. The students also get instruction in basic cooking skills and kitchen maintenance from the school chefs, which they, in turn, pass on to other students.

Each week’s preparations begin with a brief discussion of what food came from the kitchen, what was donated and what was bought, James said. On this particular Tuesday afternoon, the students are busily chopping onions and red peppers to mix with ground beef and potatoes for the empanadas. Canned yams will be served on the side. Most of the food has been donated or acquired through food drives; St. Andrew’s only had to purchase the empanada shells.

On Wednesdays, parent volunteers transport the meals to Bethesda Cares, which offers a daily noonday meal program for about 75 individuals. Past preparations have included chicken cacciatore, tuna casserole, sliced spiral ham with herbed potatoes, salmon pasta and hot dogs with chili. The bag lunches are handed out for people to eat later in the day.

Eighth-graders from St. Andrew’s are bused to the nonprofit and serve the food, as part of a service learning class, James said. “Because we have an ongoing service program, I think our kids are hooked into the idea that homelessness and hunger are not necessarily someone’s fault, but a condition and, hopefully, a temporary one, and that intrinsically these folks are interesting to know,” James said. For the younger students, it is often a new experience to be among a group that is really in need, he said. They “start off a little bit at times wanting to know peoples’ stories.”

James would like to see the program operate year-round at St. Andrew’s, although no decision on that has been made as yet. “We say to the students, we don’t have the choice on a Tuesday afternoon to say, ‘I’ve got sports, I can’t do this,’ because people the next day would be affected.” At St. Andrews, he believes students get that and would willingly give of their summer time to help others.