Kathleen Britton, who has led child nutrition programs for Utah for the past decade and at the Park City School for 21 years before that, will retire at the end of the month.
You can say she has done as much as anyone to make sure schoolchildren don’t go hungry in Park City or the rest of the state all this time.
“A child that is hungry is distracted in the classroom, distracted within their own work,” Britton said. “I think a lot of people do not connect the nutrition part of the education system.”
From answering an ad for the Park City opening in 1992 to meeting first lady Michelle Obama in 2011 to being chosen from 70 applicants to lead the state effort, Britton said she never forgot her mission to feed kids who otherwise might go without.
The Long Island native graduated with an associate’s degree in dietetics from the State University of New York in 1983.
“I originally started in pre-med,” Britton said. “I met a professor that was teaching nutrition, and it just became a passion because I grew up on Long Island, where nutrition really wasn’t talked about.”
She became fascinated and started learning about the agricultural processes behind food production and the effects food has on people.
She moved to Park City the December after she graduated with plans to ski, work and save money to finish college.
She remembered waiting tables at a variety of restaurants — many of which she said have since gone under — and she supported herself to graduate from the University of Utah with a bachelor’s degree in environmental studies with a minor in nutrition.
“When I first moved here, I worked at the University of Utah Hospital in their dietetic department. Driving up and down the canyon was not much fun for not very good wages at that time,” Britton said. “There was more wages in waiting tables and skiing, especially if you’re 20. Then I got married, started having children, and realized I just didn’t want to wait tables all my life.”
In summer 1992, she started as the part-time child nutrition director for Park City School District.
“I thought, perfect,” Britton said. “It was part time. I had a son that was going to kindergarten and a daughter that just turned 2, so it worked out perfect.”
Life changed in a few years, though.
“I went through a divorce. I went from part time to three-quarters time to full time,” Britton said. “When my son was 8 and my daughter was 5, I became a single mom, and working at Park City School District allowed me that flexibility to be home when they were home for breaks and if I wanted to go see a school function.”
When she started, the high school had ended its lunch program to save money.
“At that time, my thought is, ‘What about these children that really need to be fed?'” Britton said.
She said Burke Jolly, the district’s former business administrator, helped her understand the financial components of the failed lunch program and helpfed as she sought to improve them.
“I remember this very clearly even all these years later. He said, ‘Kathleen, we need you to change the program around,'” she said. “When I left 22 years later, it was over $800,000 in a positive balance for the nutrition program. So financially, I pulled that program out of the hole into a positive balance. To me, it showed how I could run a budget, how I could make sure that everything meets and that we can still serve our children healthy meals.”
First, she had to show the school board the investment would be worth it.`
“It was quite a bit of a process. Since there was an investment in funds to do it, you had to show that it would be beneficial to students,” she said. “Hungry kids can’t learn, and they were basically living on Coke out of a Coke machine and a bag of chips.”
With the help of supportive community members, she was able to make sure kids in school were able to get their hands on something more substantive than snacks.
A decade later, she joined the system with the National School Lunch Program, which allows qualifying students to receive lunches at reduced or no costs.
“Those kids still need to eat, too, if they can’t afford a lunch,” Britton said. “At the same time, I went to the school board and asked for all of our schools to serve a National School Breakfast Program.”
During her time at the district, Britton also helped design kitchens in Jeremy Ranch Elementary School, Ecker Hill Middle School and Trailside Elementary School and helped remodel the facilities at McPolin Elementary School, Treasure Mountian Junior High School and Parley’s Canyon Elementary School.
She said she considered the difficulty of finding workers when approaching the design process, which led her to work toward kitchens that could operate with a minimum number of staff members. She used kitchen design skills she had learned in New York, and the district sent her to large equipment shows.
In 2011, she was invited to Washington, D.C., to meet Michelle Obama and be recognized for helping Park City School District become the first in the state to receive a Healthier US School Challenge award.
“After that, the state was looking for a state director and I was approached to put my application in,” Britton said.
She was hesitant at first. Her daughter, Amanda Figge, remembered pushing her to try for the position.
“You were scared to,” Figge said. “I made you. I was like you can do this.”
She started in 2014.
“I felt like I could take everything I did in Park City and just spread it across the state. It wasn’t that easy,” Britton said. “But I and my team did make changes.”
The job was big change from working at a local school district, but she also found her experience made a difference.
“When I was hired as a state agency director, I was the first child nutrition director they hired from within a school district, and I felt it brought a lot better collaboration from the state level to the local level,” she said. “We got rid of that gap of people feeling that the state was not there to help them, and we then became mentors to the local level and let them realize we’re here for you, we’re not here against you.”
She said they helped pass a bill that requires every school in the state involved in the National School Lunch Program to also offer breakfast. During the pandemic, state programs were important in making sure all children could receive free meals.
“I’m very happy with what I’ve done,” Britton said. “I feel like I can give differently to the community, and since I’ve been gone from Park City for 10 years I feel like I need to be back with the community that has given so much to me over these 40 — almost 41 — years. It’s been great raising my two kids here. I’m really sad that they can’t live here now because it’s so expensive.”
She plans to continue working with Get Healthy Utah and Voices for Children, and she decided to run for the Park City School Board this year.
“I watched several of our low-income children grow through our school district,” Britton said. “We may be an affluent town, but there’s a lot of people that we don’t know about that don’t have money that help in this town. … To me, and as I’ve always approached the boards about this, if we help one child, we made a difference. And I watched how we didn’t help one child, we helped hundreds of children go through the Park City School District and have healthy meals.”