Student Liaison Says Peers Fed Up With Food

The chicken nuggets taste like cardboard, the frozen pancakes are sometimes served cold and for the most part the food is “bland and boring.”

That was the assessment delivered to the Hopatcong Board of Education Monday by student Richard Lavery.

Lavery, acting as the student representative to the board, said he conducted a brief survey of students to gather their opinion about the district’s lunch program.

The overall opinion, he said, is that “things need to change.”

Among the top complaints, Lavery said, is that there is too much chicken, in all forms, on the menu, sometimes two and three times a week.

“There are other meats,” he said.

Sometimes it’s the form the food takes that is the problem, he said. Especially the chicken rings.

“The onion rings are fine, and even the potato rings, but chicken rings should not exist,” he said.

Lavery invited Superintendent Charles Maranzano and board to try a week of school lunches to see that the students were talking about.

Maranzano said he’d volunteer. “I’ll be the guinea pig,” he said.

Board president Clifford Lundin said this was the first time the board had heard complaints about the lunch program.