Ask Cory Alexander, the director of child nutrition in Arizona’s Osborn school district, what he does for a living, and he’ll tell you that he manages six successful small restaurants in central Phoenix.
It’s a tongue-in-cheek answer, but one that captures the vision Alexander has brought to Osborn’s school food program: meals made from scratch with quality ingredients, prepared by skilled cooks and bakers whose expertise is valued and visible.
The goal, he says, is simple: happier, healthier kids—and school meals the community can take pride in.
Today, district kitchens prepare about 60% of the food served from scratch. On any given morning, Osborn’s cafeteria staff might be chopping vegetables to prepare picadillo made with locally sourced beef or rolling dough for chicken pot pie—one of the district’s signature dishes.
Under Alexander’s leadership, the district has expanded training for cafeteria staff, pushed for more competitive pay, grown nutrition education for students and families, and sought out student feedback to develop menus that reflect the district’s cultural diversity.
These kinds of sweeping changes can be hard to enact in school food programs, where tight budgets, staff turnover, and aging facilities can often limit innovation.
“He’s a really big dreamer,” Theresa Mazza, a dietician and chef who leads nutrition education for the district, said of Alexander, a 2026 Leader To Learn From honoree. But he’s not just strategic, she said, he’s conscientious—adept at navigating technicalities and celebrating small wins on the way to bigger goals.
The careful work has paid off, said Colleen McCabe, Osborn’s chief operations officer. In Osborn today, 96% of students eat school lunch, compared with a 52% statewide average in Arizona.
“We don’t have that brown bag population,” McCabe said. “The kids are excited to eat the food.”
Why cooking from scratch with local ingredients can be challenging
Alexander, 47, hadn’t ever planned to work in schools.
After graduating with a dietetics degree from Arizona State University, he started his career in health care, counseling patients on diet and lifestyle modifications that could improve their prognoses. But after a few years, he wanted a more preventative role, one that could shape lifelong attitudes and approaches toward nutrition.
“It’s really hard to change somebody’s habit when they are in their 60s, and they’re having congestive heart failure,” he said. “I wanted to make a difference in somebody’s life earlier on.”
Research shows that schools are one of kids’ main sources of healthy food, especially after changes to federal mandates passed in 2010 under President Barack Obama’s administration, which improved the nutritional quality of school meals. Still, “everyone wants to see less processed food and more scratch cooking,” said Alexis Bylander, the director of child nutrition programs and policy at the Food Research and Action Center, a nonprofit research and advocacy organization that advocates for strengthening government nutrition programs.
Cooking in-house allows staff to control sodium and sugar, both of which are subject to limits under federal law. It can also make it easier to serve meals with fewer additives and locally sourced ingredients. But finding the resources to realize that goal—such as more staff, more training, and better equipment—is a persistent problem for school nutrition programs, Bylander said.
In a national survey of school meal program directors from the School Nutrition Association released this year, almost all respondents said they would need additional funding to implement scratch-cooking initiatives. More than 90% also cited the need for staffing, training, and upgrading equipment and infrastructure.
Recent rhetoric from leaders at the federal level has further complicated the landscape. U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has said that school lunches are “poisoning our kids” and called for eliminating processed food from the program in favor of whole foods and fresh produce, without proposing additional funding.
“We can’t ask school nutrition providers to do that without giving them more money,” said Meghan Maroney, the campaign manager for federal child-nutrition programs at the Center for Science in the Public Interest.
Over the first year of his second term, President Donald Trump’s administration has cut or rolled back some sources of funding that support school food programs. In 2025, the administration canceled a $660 million federal grant program designed to support farm-to-school partnerships and enacted changes to federal food-assistance programs that could disqualify some students from continuing to receive free school meals.
The shifting landscape worries Alexander, who notes that school food budgets are separate from district budgets and depend entirely on the number of meals served. “Without participation, we don’t have revenue,” he said.
Still, his ability to quickly navigate changing waters has helped the program grow, said Osborn’s superintendent, Michael Robert. “He manages to get it done.”
Taking small steps to realize big change
When Alexander left health care, he worked on nutrition programs at the Arizona Department of Education, and in compliance for a K-12 food service provider. When he started at Osborn as a nutrition coordinator, he found a mentor in the then-director, Sheri Ottersen, who had already begun introducing scratch-cooked meals, school gardens, and nutrition education.
Ottersen’s work laid a foundation. “They’ve run with it and surpassed my wildest dreams,” Ottersen, now retired, said.
In 2016, when Alexander was still coordinator, he advocated enrolling the 2,500-student district in the community-eligibility provision, a federal program that allows schools to serve free meals to all students. Schools can take advantage of this option if at least 25% of their students would automatically qualify for free meals, due to their families’ participation in federal assistance programs like Medicaid or SNAP.
The move increased participation in Osborn’s food program, which in turn boosted its budget. It also freed up administrative time that would have otherwise been spent on eligibility paperwork, Alexander said. Together, these two changes allowed him to seek out community partnerships and slowly add more scratch-cooked items to menus.
One key partner, Blue Watermelon, a local nonprofit that sends chefs into classrooms, provided lesson materials and delivered professional development workshops for cafeteria cooks and bakers. Alexander also brought on Mazza, the district’s chef on contract, who now works with nearly 50 teachers to deliver nutrition education in classrooms and launch new programs, like a grocery store tour for 5th graders.
Osborn’s kitchens scratch-bake breads for meals, from hamburger buns to pizza dough to the rotating flavor of the Wednesday muffin (carrot raisin and cranberry zucchini are both on the menu). In addition to picadillo and chicken pot pie, the kitchens have a host of meals staff makes in house—mac and cheese, beef and broccoli, and burritos, among them.
Students regularly participate in “taste tests” of potential new meals, and special events double as feedback opportunities. For National School Lunch Week this past October, the district piloted scratch-made veggie ramen bowls and collected student input, posting highlights on the food program’s Instagram page, @nutriliciousosborn. “My daughter came home saying this was her favorite school lunch!” wrote one commenter.
All of it has happened incrementally.
“[Alexander] really takes stock of how a new implementation is sitting in the community before moving on to the next step,” said Jilliann Sundberg, the executive director of Blue Watermelon and a former educator in the district.
That pacing matters, especially given the workload. Scratch-made chicken pot pie, for example, takes two days to prepare.
“Labor-wise, it’s a handful,” said Nayra Amado, one of the district’s cafeteria managers. Still, she said, “We have staff that really enjoy their jobs. They’re not afraid to take challenges.”
Staff members say morale is high in part because of Osborn’s dedication to treating cafeteria workers as skilled professionals. Alexander instituted end-of-year surveys for staff to offer feedback and pushed for changes to the compensation structure that would allow any food-service experience, rather than just time in a school cafeteria, to count toward seniority.
“Everybody here gets paid very well,” said Jennifer Houston, another cafeteria manager. “That does make a difference. … All of my girls have been here 10 or more years, and as of right now, they’re not going anywhere.”
Making hundreds of meals every day, all while complying with strict food-safety and nutrition-standards guidelines, requires know-how that should be recognized, Alexander said.
“This is a skill,” he said, “and something that not everybody can do.”
Staying the course amid a changing federal landscape
Just as important to Alexander as the shift to scratch cooking was a focus on high-quality ingredients.
Soon after taking on the director role, Alexander commissioned a menu audit and began swapping out some items with healthier alternatives. He also sought out partnerships with local farms and producers, including K4 Ranches in Prescott, Ariz., which now provides beef for the district.
It’s a way to keep federal dollars in the community, Alexander said, but it also results in better-tasting food. “The longer that something sits on a truck in transit, it’s not as fresh,” he said.
Osborn had historically purchased beef from a national wholesale distributor. Finding a local partner took persistence. “I was literally DM’ing ranchers through our Instagram,” he said.
K4 Ranches hadn’t worked with K-12 schools before, but was willing to give it a try. Alexander worked with the team there to refine logistics and pricing. “It took a little time, … but we figured out how to make it work,” said Ryan Person, the production manager at K4.
“He’s always so dang positive and willing to find a solution for something,” Person continued. “He’s invested in doing what’s right, not only for his school district and for the kids but … for his local community.”
Now, K4 supplies multiple school districts across the Phoenix metro area and Arizona at large. “All of that’s been because of the initial work we did with Cory,” Person said.
Maintaining those partnerships is a priority, Alexander said, even as funding sources have narrowed over the past year. He originally used federal grant money for farm-to-school initiatives, which the Trump administration canceled last year. Alexander has until June 2026 to spend the rest of the funds.
“I’m going to pull in all my beef again for the next school year, and I can keep it in my freezer, because it will be fine. And that gives me another year to figure out, OK, what do I do next?”
More uncertainty looms: Federal changes to eligibility requirements for SNAP programs that took effect this year could shift how many students in the district automatically qualify for free lunch. It’s unclear if that might change Osborn’s ability to participate in the community-eligibility provision down the line, Alexander said. And new dietary guidelines for Americans, which the Trump administration released in January, could mean big changes to school food program requirements.
Alexander hopes the district’s development of a new child-nutrition center with a central kitchen and storage facilities, funded by a recently passed local bond issue, could help manage costs. “The more ingredients that I can pull into our warehouse in bulk, the more I’m going to save,” he said.
But he also wants to see a broader national conversation about the resources, training, and equipment needed for scratch-cooking with local ingredients.
“It costs more to eat local, to hire skilled labor and invest in equipment,” Alexander said. “As policy changes, I think oftentimes, what happens is the funding doesn’t follow.”
