On a recent morning, 303 children move through Beiger Elementary School's lunch line in just 90 minutes.
Cafeteria manager Debbie Hoffflander first asks each student whether they want a ladle of chili dropped atop their bean burrito.
"Corn?" Brenda Batchelor asks next.
The final server, Barb Obren, needs no words. Students simply point to either fruit cocktail or sliced oranges and she places a scoop on their tray.
The women, wearing plastic gloves and either hairnets or ball caps, bring more food from warming ovens to the serving line after each group comes through, and spend the rest of their day prepping food, sending trays, pans and serving ware through a sanitizing dishwasher, and cleaning up the kitchen.
About half of Beiger's students ate a school lunch on this day, in a scene that plays out at school cafeterias across the region.
When deciding whether to pack their children's lunches or buy them at school, parents consider the cost and their children's preferences. But there's another factor: How safe is your school cafeteria's kitchen?
(Search all school cafeteria inspection results in St. Joseph County)
Across the 84 public and private school cafeteria kitchens in St. Joseph County, there were 448 health code violations from 2010 through June of this year, according to a South Bend Tribune analysis of inspection records from the St. Joseph County Health Department. That comes from a total of 922 inspections, a ratio of nearly one violation for every two inspections -- or, stated another way, about 49 percent of inspections turned up a violation.