SAN ANTONIO – Trinity University dining hall staffers chose to stay overnight and continue to feed students on campus as a historic winter storm swept the area.
Tess Coody-Anders, Trinity’s vice president for strategic communications and marketing, said 14 Aramark dining services team members volunteered to stay on campus.
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“For their own safety, but also because despite our campus being shut down, we have residents who live on campus and depend on Mabee dining hall for dining services,” Coody-Anders said.
According to Coody-Anders, about half of the 14 crew members stayed overnight on Sunday in available on-campus dorms while the other half decided to set up camp in Mabee Dining Hall.
“So, those 14 individuals have been feeding all of our residents on campus and making sure everybody was well fed and well cared for,” Coody-Anders said. “And we really could not appreciate their going the extra mile more.”
To ensure COVID-19 saftey protocols for dining students and overnight staffers, Coody-Anders said officials had created “different rooms and partitions” within the dining hall to create safer dining spaces.
“So Aramark folks, they set up sleeping spaces, cots, space with cots and other things to make the make it as comfortable as possible,” Coody-Anders said.
Coody-Anders said the group is feeding around 1,100 students on campus currently and plans to rotate staffers out of their living quarters, dubbed “Camp Mabee,” in shifts.
”So many of the dining services folks have worked here for years and years and years, they get to know students over the course of their four years on campus and they built those relationships,“ Coody-Anders said. “And I think that that’s probably why they were so committed to making sure that everybody can wake up with a hot meal the next day.”
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