State College’s food service director earns statewide award after mobilizing pandemic effort

The State College Area School District’s food service director Megan Schaper was recently named the School Nutrition Association’s Director of the Year for Pennsylvania, an award that recognizes nominees’ dedication to their careers.

For Schaper, the past year in her role couldn’t have been more challenging or different — making the honor even more valid.

Travis Folmar, elementary cafeteria supervisor and one of the many SCASD employees who nominated Schaper, said staff always looked to her for leadership and guidance. But when the school district closed suddenly in March 2020, she proved herself to be “a cut above the rest.”

“She has a passion for what she does and it flows down through the rest of our team every day,” Folmar said. “This passion mixed with her many years of experience have set high standards for how we operate and it shows in the commitment, dedication and execution of her employees.”

Schaper has been with SCASD for the past 28 years, but finding herself in the role of school food service director — a role that requires oversight of all food services and cafeteria activities for the district, from menu planning to food purchases — was a bit unexpected.

“I was a hotel and restaurant management major at Penn State and really thought I would end up working in restaurants,” she said. “About five years into that, working weekends and until 2 o’ clock in the morning and holidays, it started to get a little old. I was flipping through a trade magazine, living in Pittsburgh at the time, and saw one of the management companies who runs school cafeterias was looking to hire.”

On a whim, she interviewed.

“It was an excellent career move. I get to do all the things I love in running a restaurant, but get to work somewhat normal hours,” she said with a laugh.

But while Schaper works more traditional hours than a restaurant owner or general manager might, she was not one of the many employees who found themselves working from home once the pandemic began.

“When schools closed in March of a year ago,” she said, “everyone stayed home, but food service staff came in the very next day. Things closed down while State College was on spring break and the Monday we were supposed to come back from spring break, I had staff here in the kitchen, packing meals and taking them out. No one ever said, ‘I don’t want or I can’t.’ I had people calling and emailing me over spring break asking me, ‘What are we going to do about our kids?’”

The school district’s food service department often provides a safety net for families, Schaper said, ensuring in-need children have the food required to fuel their learning, no matter where they might be learning from. The pandemic only made that mission clearer.

“We did a lot of adjusting through the year, just to make sure families always did have access to food, whether they were sending kids into school or keeping them home for full remote (learning),” she said. “We had to make sure we had meals available and accessible for families in a lot of different ways. That meant serving meals in school; for students coming in every other day, having meals that they could pick up as they left the building, so they had a meal for the next day; and the weekly meal distributions we’re doing, handing out a full week’s worth of groceries to families.”

When she received the notification that she’d been named School Nutrition Association’s Director of the Year for Pennsylvania for the 2020-2021 school year, Schaper said she was “very surprised.”

“I’ve just been doing my job,” she said. “This is my job, to make sure kids have access to food. I love that some people thought I was worth nominating for the award, but this is what I’m supposed to be doing.”

She views it an a group award, crediting her staff for their dedication over the past year.

“We’ve had to change so many times what we were doing, to continue to meet kids and families where they were. ... It really was a huge effort to do what we did,” she said. “While I maybe was the one to tell people what to do and when to do it, we all worked together to figure out how to do it, so I look at this as a department award. This belongs to my staff and my supervisors and my secretaries. Everyone really pulled together.”