Building a Culinary Arts Academy: the 2004 Alabama Family and Consumer Sciences Teacher of the Year shares how she built interest in family and consumer sciences at Bob Jones High School through the development of a successful culinary arts academy.

Brown, Robert L.

When Judy Karen Brown arrived at Bob Jones High School (BJHS) in Madison, Alabama, in the summer of 1999, she immediately identified a need to build both student and community interests in family and consumer sciences (FACS). She noticed the student and faculty interest in the FACS department was extremely low. While BJHS emphasizes academics, not all BJHS students will attend college, and all need to better develop their life skills--or in Brown's words, "They all need to know how to cook."

She wanted to enhance career awareness, expand students' educational opportunities, provide students with valuable life skills and help prepare them to be productive in the community and worldwide workplace. Thus, Brown quickly realized the need to support the non-college-and college-bound students through a career technical program designed to expand educational opportunities and to develop skills required in today's homes and workplaces.

Her research indicated that one of the largest, fastest growing industries in the world today is culinary arts and hospitality services. This industry is continuously faced with a shortage of trained workers, and in recent years, there has been an annual average of 76,200 job openings for lodging and food service managers.

In the summer of 2001, Brown designed, planned and got City Board of Education approval to build a state-of-the-art culinary laboratory. With aid from several grants she received, the new, fully equipped facility opened in January 2003. Since then, the Culinary Arts Academy has become the most popular class at BJHS, with more than 700 students registering for the class in the 2003-2004 school year.

The program was designed to create career awareness, expand educational opportunities, improve life skills, and provide job skill training in the area of culinary arts and hospitality services. In 1998, the City of Madison, Ala., created a new city school system incorporating the schools within the city limits. The separation of the new school system from the county system reduced city schools' capability to provide important career awareness and job skill training. Brown decided to focus attention on these critical education/training issues.

Brown implements career awareness/job skill training by using unique hands-on lesson plans involving team teaching with biology, physical education, Spanish, history, and computer science teachers and classes. Initially, her classes prepared foods for dozens of school functions to increase the visibility of FACS classroom activities and to develop student job skills. Brown also works with local chefs, restaurant managers and hotel managers to give students an accurate vision of what to expect in the real world.

To the amazement of all, the class became extremely popular with both college- and non-college-bound students, who will one day be independent. Finally, Brown implemented many community activities to expose the Culinary Arts Academy to local Chambers of Commerce and industries needing employees.

As a result of the establishment of the Culinary Arts Academy and specialized unique, innovative lesson plans developed by Brown, community, faculty and student interest in FACS at BJHS is at an all-time high. Several graduates from the Culinary Academy have enrolled in prestigious culinary institutions such as Johnson & Wales, Culinard of Virginia College and the Art Institute of Atlanta. Many others have entered colleges majoring in FACS education, dietetics and fashion merchandizing.

In the spring of 2004, BJHS culinary students entered their first-ever state competition for culinary arts. One 2004 BJHS graduate has already received a large scholarship from Johnson & Wales, and a former BJHS culinary student will have several recipes published in the spring 2004 Johnson & Wales magazine.

Brown's accomplishments have not gone unnoticed by the community. Dozens of parents have taken her nighttime culinary classes, and many others have complimented her on their children's culinary skills when utilized at home.

Approximately 40 interested BJHS culinary students are working part time at restaurants throughout the Huntsville/Madison area to get hands-on, practical experience in hosting, hospitality, human resource development, and food storage handling and preparation methods.

As a result of Brown's efforts, the BJHS culinary arts program has become a role model at the local, state and national levels.

Judy Karen Brown, the 2004 Alabama Family and Consumer Sciences Teacher of the Year, teaches at Bob Jones High School in Madison, Alabama. She was a guest presenter at the Eighth Annual National Career Academy Conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico, this past November, where she spoke on how to build a culinary arts program from the ground up. Brown can be reached at jkbrown@madisoncity,k12.al.us.

How To Do It

The Bob Jones High School program includes culinary arts and hospitality, advanced culinary arts and hospitality, and culinary arts and hospitality careers for grades 11 and 12. For those who are interested in building their own programs, Judy Brown offers this information.

She successfully reached her goal of providing a world-class learning environment for career awareness and job skills training in culinary arts and hospitality by accomplishing several objectives, which started with convincing school administrators and city board members of the need for a BJHS Culinary Arts Academy. Her research identified real business-world needs for schools to help students master marketable skills by emphasizing career education and development. Students must handle diverse information, perform effectively in cooperative work groups, solve complex problems, and continue to learn in a rapidly changing world and workplace. The two areas that must be taught and understood in an integrated fashion that better reflects the workplace are foundation skills (the three R's) and basic competencies to include teamwork and interpersonal skills. According to the Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS) report, the most effective way of learning skills is in context, placing learning objectives within a real environment, rather than abstract learning.

One of the largest, fastest-growing industries in the world is culinary arts and hospitality services. Today, this industry is faced with a shortage of trained workers. Once the school administrators and board members were convinced of the potential success of a Culinary Arts Academy, funding was acquired and a state-of-the-art kitchen was designed and built.

Brown developed several innovative and highly interesting team teaching lesson plans that included teaming with classes such as biology (food-borne germs), physical education (nutrition and health), business education (business etiquette), social sciences (Civil War: foods they are and stored, multinational foods), and foreign languages (foreign foods and menu design). Each of these teaming lessons provided wonderful experiences for the classes involved, sensitized students to the field of culinary arts and hospitality services, and introduced them to other BJHS classes and students.

To make the classroom engaging and enjoyable and to develop student skills, Brown developed several classroom exercises requiring student communication, teamwork and leadership skills. To give the students an opportunity to demonstrate those skills, Brown developed a final exam involving a real-life experience.

The students would be totally responsible for implementing a Fall Holiday Tea and a Spring Barbeque. The students must develop the menu, buy the raw materials, prepare the foods, invite guests, serve the food and host the guests. The students are also responsible for cooking, cleaning and replenishing food supplies, and are required to dress appropriately. The guests consist of BJHS faculty and staff, the city superintendent, board members, and VIPs such as the city mayor, town council and state FACS personnel. Approximately 250 guests attend each event.

Overall, the exciting innovative lesson plans, interdisciplinary team teaching, hands-on classroom exercises, activities associated with the formal tea and barbeque final exams, and the satisfaction of students learning real-life skills has promoted a significant interest in the culinary program. As Brown set standards and brought in new teaching styles, students from various academic and diverse backgrounds began to enroll in culinary classes.

Time and Cost Involved:

The Culinary Academy was started in January 2002 and completed in December of 2002. The academy was part of a $3,000,000 addition of a new wing. The cost of building the academy is estimated at $1,000,000. The first culinary classes began in January 2003.

Judy Brown and the Madison City career technology director applied for and were awarded several grants totaling nearly $50,000 to purchase additional tools and equipment to fully furnish the academy..

Sample Lesson/Activity Sheets:

In one of Brown's lessons, the objective is to evaluate the importance of microbes as they relate to sanitation, food safety and nutrition.

Students also evaluate the applications and career implications of culinary arts in connection with biology and science careers. To accomplish this lesson, Brown uses interdisciplinary teaming to develop team teaching units that provide real-life problem-solving skills, or "learning by doing."

Brown teamed with a biology teacher volunteer during a weeklong lesson plan affectionately called "Germ Week." Biology and culinary arts are a perfect match for this lesson on germs. Biology teachers have worked with Brown twice a year for the last three years to implement this lesson plan. During germ week, these classes are combined each day as they move from department to department to study germs.

Students prepared biological cultures from sampled areas around the school such as doorknobs, bathrooms, water fountains, drink machines, etc., and then studied the results. They learned about microbes and sanitation from both the science and food handling perspectives.

Brown did demonstrations, PowerPoint presentations and lectures, showed videos, and invited guest speakers from the Health Department and local restaurants. Students performed lab experiments on hand washing and correct cooking methods for hamburgers, and reviewed cultures obtained from each of the various methods.

By Lt. Col. Robert L. Brown, USAF Retired