Photos: ASD develops new, healthier lunches

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Huffman Elementary School cafeteria manager Mica Night prepares meals during lunch on Thursday, January 14, 2016. The Anchorage School District is experimenting with offering new foods.

The Anchorage School District's dietician is fed up with kids who hate their school lunches, so much they walk straight from the food line to the garbage.

So dietician Laura Phillips and the head of student nutrition, Jim Anderson, have started to overhaul the school menu for the first time in years. They're having students taste-test new dishes, from all-beef hot dogs to chunks of sweet potatoes.

The plan is get more students purchasing lunch and actually eating the food they buy, Anderson said. But staff must walk a precarious line between what students want to eat and what their parents want them to eat, even as they wrestle with constraints like a tight budget and federal nutrition rules.

Read more: Anchorage School District plans new meals to sell more lunches