Nutrition manager’s provides healthy food to all students

Published 12:45 am Wednesday, March 20, 2024

(TUALATIN) — While serving as food service director in California’s Goleta Union School District, Kim Leung was challenged by her boss to see if Leung could get the boss’s son to eat kale.

Leung, the Tigard-Tualatin School District’s nutrition services manager, took up that challenge, responding by whipping up a honey sesame ginger and kale recipe.

“And by the time I left, (the boss’s) wife was asking for the kale recipe because his son purposely got the teriyaki chicken for the kale,” said Leung.

Leung, who joined the Tigard-Tualatin School District in 2021, said she would like to try something similar here, saying that healthy foods can be tasty if prepared properly. (That includes blending kale to the point it can be added to smoothies, something she also tried during her California tenure.)

“The point is to get kids to try different things in different ways,” said Leung, who oversees a school district meal program that serves 4,500 lunches and just under 1,000 breakfasts daily.

Leung grew up in Oregon, went to school in California and returned to Oregon to get her registered dietitian degree at Oregon Health & Science University. She worked for two separate school districts earlier in her career, including the Goleta Union School District, where she had extensive success with that district’s food service program.

“While there, she turned an operation with a $76,000 annual deficit into one that was $1.7 million in the black. She had forged community partnerships, including sourcing fish from the local harbor, and was proud of the fresh fare the operation served,” Leung told a reporter for Food Service Director, an online food service operators news source, in its Dec. 7, 2021, newsletter.

Leung said she’s extremely passionate about healthy eating and teaching students healthy habits, which she discovered while counseling people who had heart disease earlier in her career.

Since then, she said she wanted to make it her mission to help younger children develop healthy habits before they end up in the hospital with medical problems.

Coming to the Tigard-Tualatin School District during the COVID-19 pandemic, Leung had to deal with staffing and delivery shortages. But, she said she and her staff made it through all the challenges the pandemic threw at them.

“I would say our team at TTSD is incredible,” she said, adding that while it was a very challenging time, the pandemic displayed the “amazing problem-solving skills our team has and just the determination and flexibility of our team.”

While she admits hamburger, nacho and pizza days are the most popular with students (menus are often dependent on the location and demographics of the school), she’s also buoyed by the fact that there’s “such a huge opportunity for exposing kids to healthy food — kale, vegetables, different types of foods.”

At some point, Leung hopes to introduce black bean brownies into the district’s menu, saying that with the right equipment, district kitchens will be able to grind the beans so they are smooth. As a result, those brownies will turn out tasting like fudge, she promises.

So, what does she like best about her job?

“It’s so rewarding to see a kid try something new that they haven’t had,” said Leung, adding that that’s the goal of the entire food service team is “to nourish our kids, to build healthy habits and to get kids to eat our food. So when all of those things happen, it’s like, ‘Oh my goodness, that is incredible.’”

While she doesn’t get into the school cafeterias as much as she would like, the times she does, she loves hearing when kids come through and say that they “really liked a meal,” said Leung.

Community: Tigard-Tualatin School District

Why she is an Amazing Educator: Kim Leung wants to ensure each student enjoys healthy and tasty food.

“It’s so rewarding to see a kid try something new that they haven’t had.”

— Kim Leung

Tigard-Tualatin School District

6960 S.W. Sandburg St., Tigard

503-431-4076

ttsdschools.org