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Training and Hiring Requirements

Training and Hiring Requirements

Farm To School Sub-Grant Application Requirements And How To Handle Supply Chain Challenges.

New Director Requirements

Directors, hired on or after July 1, 2015, are required to meet minimum education and work experience standards. Directors hired prior to July 1, 2015 are grandfathered in.


Annual Training Requirements

All training must be tracked on a training tracker with the key area and learning objective codes.

  • Food Service Directors: 12 hours
  • Managers: 10 hours
  • Full-Time Staff (> 20 hours per week): 6 hours
  • Part-Time Staff (< 20 hours per week): 4 hours

Training Tracker Tools are available from CDE and USDA.

Track Your Progress


School Nutrition Hiring Tools

Recruiting Tools:

A critical step in filling vacancies is to market open positions and attract qualified candidates. The School Nutrition Association has created a hiring toolkit which includes hiring videos, animated graphics, and social media posts all designed to help promote open positions.


Work in School Nutrition!

In addition to SNA resources, consider using CDE's customizable Why Work in School Nutrition flyers. These flyers can be posted on websites, social media, and printed to share at hiring and recruiting events, career fairs, or posted around the community at common gathering spaces like coffee shops and libraries. There are many reasons to work in school nutrition including: 

  • Meaningful work
  • Summers, weekends, and holidays off 
  • Set schedule 
  • Job security 
  • Health insurance & benefits 
  • Working the same hours as when kids are in school 

 
These benefits and more can be attractive to many potential candidates. Widening the candidate pool can help SFAs be successful in hiring vacancies as well. Recruiting, empowering and employing people with intellectual and developmental disabilities has been successful for districts across the county. Hiring student workers can fill vacancies while granting real work experience to interested students. 

Volunteers and Interns:

Volunteers and interns can be extremely helpful in filling gaps while recruiting for open positions. Review your district's policies on volunteers before hiring and follow the steps below: 

  • Create a school nutrition volunteer guide to specify standards for your program. The Lunch Box created a Sample Volunteer Guide to start. 
  • Invite college volunteers or other community members into the kitchen if there is not a strong parent/guardian presence available.
  • Leverage dietetic internship rotations. 

 

Additional Tools:

Additional Training and Hiring Resources