San Diego Unified is now one of a small but growing number of school districts that are having students run their own food truck business.
High school students will write the menu, prepare and serve the food and manage the finances for the truck operations — just about everything but actually drive the truck.
Students who are enrolled in culinary programs at five San Diego Unified high schools — Morse, Hoover, Garfield, Mira Mesa and San Diego — will take turns running the food truck. They won’t provide daily food service but will provide food for district and school events, said Sarah Vielma, the district’s career and technical education director.
The truck was donated by Intuit, which has been a corporate partner of the district since 2019, Vielma said. Intuit has been donating food trucks to school districts for the past two years, said Silke Bradford, the company’s director of K-12 outreach.
The idea behind the truck — and behind career technical education in general, such as the high school culinary programs — is not only to give students practical skills but also to motivate them to attend and participate in school.
That’s something education leaders have said is relevant as schools continue to lose enrollment and as absenteeism remains higher than it was before the pandemic.
“They all have this problem of, ‘How do we give students hands-on, real-world experience?’ As students today, paper and pencil is not going to engage them,” Bradford said.
The Hoover High School mariachi band performs at the unveiling of the new San Diego Unified food truck at UCSD Park and Market in East Village on Tuesday, Feb. 27, 2024.
(Alejandro Tamayo/The San Diego Union-Tribune)
The food trucks are commercial-grade and would typically cost between $220,000 and $250,000 each, according to Bradford. Intuit is also giving San Diego Unified $40,000 to help with operational costs, she said. To pay for the truck’s operation, the district also plans to use government grant funding meant for career and technical education programs, Vielma said.
The program also comes with an entrepreneurship curriculum and professional development for teachers to help implement it.
Ashley Vazquez is a junior at Morse High who’s in the school’s culinary program. She has worked for the school’s own student-run restaurant, where students have food handler certificates and make and deliver food orders to other students on campus.
Vazquez said she’s excited about the food truck, especially considering how often she has seen such trucks growing up.
“It opens a lot of doors for people in high school,” she said of the culinary program.
