Citrus College Development Center Offers Free Meals to Community

A state and federally sponsored program designed to ensure that children of the Orfalea Family Children’s Center receive adequate nutrition is being sponsored by Citrus College.

According to director Mickie Allen, who’s been in charge of running the center for the past six years, about 215 children or 47 percent are from low income families and qualify for free meals at the center, which services the campus, its staff and students and the community.

Priority registration is available to the students and staff of Citrus College, with Additional spots going to families who reside within the Citrus Community College District, which includes various San Gabriel Valley communities such as Glendora, Azusa, Duarte, Bradbury, and Monrovia, as well as portions of Pomona, La Verne, San Dimas, Irwindale, and Arcadia.

The food program is administered through the California Department of Education, which Allen said makes it easier for Child Development Center staff to prepare healthy options following state mandated guidelines.

Breakfast, lunch and afternoon snacks are served daily, but great care is taken to provide children, ranging from 2 and a half to pre-Kindergarten age, with healthy alternatives to the prevalent junk and fast food found elsewhere.

“We really want to serve the healthy part of the food,” said Jennifer Joanis, Food Service Team Leader at Orfalea, who said meals are made from scratch and added the kitchen staff only uses ground turkey to prepare meals.

“For most of the kids, this is the best meal of their day, and they say they love it,” Joanis said.

Even though the Center gets reimbursed for every meal, Allen said one big challenged the center faces is the slow rate of reimbursement, which forces the center to subsidize the program out of its own budget.

 “Good food, especially healthier options tends to be more expensive.”

Funding to run the center partially comes from the city of Glendora’s Community Development Block Grants (CDBG) program. According to documents made public by the city, low and moderate Glendora households are provided with access to licensed family day care and pre-school services for their children.

Glendora families presently make up 20 percent of the students attending the day care program.

Joanis said her favorite part of the jobs is interacting with the kids and introducing them to healthy foods they may have never tried before.

“I am really lucky because a lot of centers don’t do casseroles. We serve some very unique things to them like keesh and broccoli, the kids often come up and say they liked it. It’s a hard job, but a great job.”

Joanis also acknowledged the challenges of trying to operate a center during tougher economic times. “We’ve been fighting to stay alive, hopefully we will be here for a long time.”