Juliana Elandary is the district’s nutrition coordinator. Elandary plans menus and school lunches, coordinates food and supplies deliveries and much more. She has been with the district for seven years.

At A Glance:

Favorite food: Italian and fresh seafood

Favorite drink:  Coffee

Favorite movie: “Sweet Home Alabama” and “The Proposal”

Hobbies: Traveling, cooking and watching sports

Looking Deeper:

The Red Ledger: How long have you been doing this job?

Juliana Elandary: I’ve been with Lovejoy ISD working for student nutrition for six years now, This year is starting my seventh. Before I joined the team here at Lovejoy, I worked as a sports dietician for Texas Christian University in Fortworth for two years. I’ve been a registered dietician for a little over eight years now.

TRL: What exactly does your work include?

JE: One of my primary roles is menu planning for Kindergarten through twelfth grade here in this school district. That includes special diet menus for students with food allergies or medical conditions that might need a dietary modification. I also plan all of the school lunch menus K-12 grade and the breakfast menu here as well.

TRL: Are there certain requirements that your menus need to meet?

JE: We have to make sure that all of our menus meet the USDA dietary guidelines, and our Kindergarten through sixth grade schools are on the national school lunch program.

TRL: Can you expand on that?

JE: We have some additional guidelines to meet there as far as the nutrition requirements go. We have nutrition standards for calories, saturated fats, sodium and trans fat there so we run nutrition reports. We also have different food components that we have to ensure that are on the menus, and so a big part of the position is menu planning, and then I do create marketing materials and nutrition education materials for our department.

TRL: What marketing do you do?

JE: I write a monthly nutrition newsletter for our district, I create all of our marketing materials for our serving lines in our cafeterias [and] I manage our social media. Another component of my job is working with our food companies [and food distributors]. So that’s networking, collaborating together to bring in some of the highest quality food products we can offer to the students here.

TRL: Do you have any previous experience in this line of work?

JE: Before joining this team here at Lovejoy specifically for school nutrition, during my dietetic internship, I did a rotation with Plano ISD, so I spent six weeks there during my dietetic internship rotation, specifically in school nutrition and food service. 

TRL: Can you elaborate on the food service part?

JE: When I worked as a sports dietician, I was also working partly in food service there because we had a fueling station for student-athletes there, and that was a spot they could come after a workout in the weight room, grab a smoothie, a snack, before or after their workout, so I did run and manage the fueling station there, which is a small food service operation.

TRL: So you worked in both food service and sports nutrition?

JE: A little food service and sports nutrition, they definitely go hand in hand, which can be surprising for some people to find out. Working in my internship before joining the team here, I really had to deep dive into food service operation and management while working here.

TRL: What’s your favorite part of the job?

JE: I love interacting and working with our students and staff here at the district. It really is a special place. I thoroughly enjoy menu planning and bringing some nutrition education and marketing nutrition services and programs. 

TRL: What requirements are needed for this position?

JE: For my position, as a registered dietitian, we have to have an undergraduate degree with the required coursework for dietetics. As an undergrad student, I studied nutritional science at Texas A&M, so I took all the prerequisite courses in order to be able to apply for my dietetic internship. In order to become a registered dietitian you have to go through a dietetic internship program. In addition to that, I also got my master’s from Texas Women’s University, and I worked on that at the same time. 

TRL: Has the system changed at all from when you were in school?

JE: Now, for dieticians in the future, it will be a requirement to have a master’s degree. When I was in school, it was still optional, but now it’s becoming a requirement to become a registered dietitian. So in order to get this position, I had to go through all of that schooling, became a registered dietitian, and then that set me up for success for this position here.