[title subtitle=”words: Dwain Hebda
images: courtesy Van Buren School District”][/title]
Roy Kendrick served the Van Buren School District for twenty years before finally ascending to the role of the district’s child nutrition director four years ago. But once there, he quickly demonstrated a knack for creative thinking.
“I had the idea of serving out of a food truck because food trucks are so popular everywhere,” he says. “I was trying to find a way that we could get our children excited and wanting to eat in our cafeterias. So, I started checking around and I found that in Oklahoma City they had a food truck and I contacted them about it. They said it was going good.”
Roy ran the idea past his superintendent, Dr. Harold Jeffcoat, who was similarly intrigued by the idea,and the process to create what would ultimately become Big Dog’s Grill was begun.
“We started that between myself and my assistant, Tessa Clemmons and Dr. Jeffcoat,” Roy says. “[Our mascot is] the Pointers, so we were trying to get a name that matched. We thought Big Dog’s and we wanted it to be a grill. The design took all three of us.”
The rig was built by Cruising Kitchens out of San Antonio, Texas, and has been in service for about a year. With its black exterior blanketed in orange flames, it’s hard to miss and that’s exactly the point. As the truck makes its rounds during the school year,the very sight of it causes a stir among students and the community alike.
“The thing I like about it, when kids come out to eat off it, they get excited,” Roy says. “We have music playing, the grill going. It’s a fun time for kids on top of getting a nutritious meal.”
The truck isn’t meant to be a mere diversion, although it certainly has that effect. It’s also meant to deliver nutritious meals to kids in a unique and grown-up environment than the typical school cafeteria lunch provides.
“We try to give them a little different food,” Roy says. “It still follows state regulations, but we might have street tacos, we might have something like danger dogs where we have hot dogs with bacon or we might have bacon cheeseburgers. A lot of times we’ll do pork sliders or some type of chicken salad or a chef salad. We give them things that we normally just don’t make in our schools and it makes it a little exciting for them.”
One of the priorities for the department was for the truck fare to be accessible to all students, which the district is able to do by making it an extension of the school lunch program and its pricing structure.
“[The truck] is served just like our meals in the cafeteria,” Roy says. “If you are a paid student, and you have to pay for your lunch, it’s the same price. If you’re a free student, you get it free off the truck. Or if you’re a reduced student that’s paying $.40 for a lunch, that’s what the truck costs you.”
The truck and its designated staff of three makes scheduled rounds when school is in session, bringing lunch to the district’s high school, freshman academy (junior high) and middle schools. It’s proven wildly popular at each level.
“In our school district, we’ll serve three hundred to four hundred at a time out of it,” he says. “Butterfield Junior High, for example, we feed a total of five hundred kids in the fifth and sixth grade lunch program. We go there and between two hundred and three hundred will eat off the food truck.”
The district keeps Big Dog’s Grill in circulation at various school events, too, such as home football games, the summer robotics and stargazing programs and community events such as Old Timers’ Day in Van Buren. They’ve even hired out to churches on occasion, which use them as a unique catering service for their events.
“Anything we sell off that truck comes back to our department which helps us greatly in the school district,” Roy says.
Big Dog’s Grill even keeps rolling through the summer months, serving meals at two locations of the district’s summer feeding program locations: breakfast at Blakemore Field and breakfast and lunch at the city library. The other two feeding locations – Van Buren Boys and Girls Club and Central Elementary – serve meals using their own kitchen facilities. All meals are free to children 18 and under and at a pittance for any adults who wish to eat, although at present the clientele is almost exclusively children.
Roy says the summertime program that servesroughly one hundred fifty meals per day out of the truck and hundreds more through the permanent locations illustratesthe level of food insecurity that exists right here locally. It’s a problem that extends well beyond the school district. According to Little Rock-based Arkansas Food Bank, one in five Arkansans doesn’t know where their next meal is coming from and one in four children in the state experiencesfood insecurity.
Roy sees these statistics in human form every day in his job. That’s why he’s passionate about the summer feeding program and how the Big Dog’s Grill allows him to cover additional ground. More stops, he says, equals more meals to kids who likely otherwise would go without.
“In the summertime, while a lot of parents are working, kids are home by themselves,” Roy says. “In my opinion, for a lot of kids, the only stable meal they get is when they’re in school. We try to make sure that children are fed whether it’s summer or not.”
“A lot of them will come by themselves. A lot of them, their grandparents will bring them. But we just want to make sure that even though it’s summertime, that every kid that’s hungry in our district or in our area has a chance at meals. So that’s what we try to do.”
