For some time now, students have been asking for the ability to leave campus during their lunch hour in order to buy food from outside restaurants. While not letting us leave campus, the administration, with the help of Aramark, has done the next best thing: bring local restaurants to us.

Starting Tuesday from Feb. 4 – 6, the district will begin to implement a plan to bring restaurants to us, placing a survey online asking students for their opinion on the new program, as well as general questions. When asked about what motivated this decision to be made, Director of Aramark Food Services Scarlett Hugebeck said, “Our goal has always to been to see what the kids are eating, and we at Aramark have been working for a long time to implement this in high schools. Our goal is to offer students whatever they want to eat.” With this new program, Hugebeck, along with Aramark and IPSD, appear to be doing just that.

The survey that will be soon released was made to be very simple and will ask students how much they would like to pay for food items in the cafeteria, what days of the week they would like to have these food items available to them, and what restaurants they would like to be present in the cafeteria. After the survey is released Aramark plans to “tally up the data and just figure out what the facts are, and then our objective is just going to be to meet the requests of the students as closely and as timely as we can. The survey will tell us what local restaurants we need to contact and send out requests to and then we can see how things go from there.”

 By Jake Gallucci