Danville Middle, High School students say school served raw chicken for lunch; parents, restaurants step in

DANVILLE, Ala. (WAFF) - Some parents of Danville Middle and High school students say their school served them raw chicken three times in the past few weeks putting them at risk for salmonella, diarrhea and vomiting.

Some parents say their kids consistently complain about their undercooked lunches.

“I know how to cook in my home for my kids. I know how to present food to people that’s not raw or nasty. I would be totally embarrassed or anybody else that,” said Brittany Tucker, the mom of a Danville High School Student.

On Friday, some parents stepped in to make sure every student got a healthy lunch. They went around the community asking for donations and they got a large response.

Chick-Fil-A donated over 200 sandwiches, Big Bob Gibson’s gave them 10 pounds of barbecue and Lawlers Barbeque donated five pounds of their shredded pork barbeque.

“It’s important to help the community because the community helped you as a business. So, it’s important to help the community back as much as we can, especially when it comes to schools and kids,” said Caelan Mcaffee, an employee at Lawlers Barbeque.

Parents also say they reached out to Morgan County Schools to try and get this problem fixed. They said administration officials went into the cafeterias to try and train workers how to correctly cook food but, raw and undercooked food continues to be served on students’ plates.

“You wouldn’t feed that to anybody, especially kids. It may be the only meal they eat during the day. Why would you feed that to a kid? You wouldn’t eat it,” said Jennifer Tillery, the mom of two kids, one goes to Danville High School and the other goes to Danville Middle School.

Morgan County School’s Child Nutrition Program Director Julie Bone responded to a WAFF 48 inquiry late Friday evening. She admitted to one specific incident where the district accidentally served raw chicken to a few students, a couple of weeks ago. Bone says no illnesses were reported to the district.

Parents say their children complained of raw chicken being served to them at the cafeteria on two other occasions. Bone said students mistook cooked chicken as raw because the district recently changed the type of chicken served to students due to supply chain issues. She says they used to serve whole muscle meat but they now use processed chicken meat.

In an effort to avoid this kind of incident in the future, Bone says she’s retraining the cafeteria staff and Danville school administration on school lunch basics. She says training covers proper food handling as well as food presentation. Bone says the retraining effort started six weeks ago.

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