Blanche Ely High School in Pompano Beach now has a fully equipped, commercial-grade food truck of its own, and the students are the ones running it. The truck, valued at more than $200,000, was donated through Intuit's Food Truck Program and unveiled at the school on Northwest Sixth Avenue on September 30. According to Broward County Public Schools, that makes Blanche Ely the first high school in Florida, and only the 12th in the country, to get one.

The truck has a name, too. The district's own post introduces it as SoFlo Delights, and describes it as a working lesson in entrepreneurship, culinary arts and money management, all at once.

A business, not a bake sale

What sets this apart from a typical school fundraiser is how much of the operation sits with the students. The district says Career and Technical Education students at Blanche Ely will handle the whole chain: cooking with the skills they learn in culinary arts, writing the menu, making the marketing materials, and then keeping the books. That last part is not a token exercise. The program puts bookkeeping, accounting and taxes in student hands, so the kids who sell the food are also the ones who know whether the truck made money that week.

To do that, the school gets access to Intuit for Education, the company's financial literacy curriculum, which includes QuickBooks, TurboTax, Mailchimp and Credit Karma. In practice, that means a teenager in Pompano Beach can run a sale, log it, track costs against it and email the truck's followers about where it will park next, using the same software small business owners across Broward County use every day.

Where the program came from

Intuit launched the Food Truck Program in September 2023, starting in California with the Compton Unified School District and expanding to districts in Los Angeles, San Diego, Dallas and Reno, Nevada. Each truck comes with a commercial-grade kitchen and point of sale tools, plus an 11-part curriculum that covers everything from business development and design to finance, marketing, truck maintenance and sourcing food locally and seasonally.

The company built it to reach more than one classroom. In Intuit's design, graphic design students can work on the menu and the truck wrap, accounting students can help manage the money, business and marketing students can work on growing the brand, and automotive students can handle routine maintenance and repairs. One truck, in other words, can become a project for half the school's career programs.

Three years after that first truck rolled out in Compton, the program has reached a dozen high schools nationwide, and Blanche Ely is the only one in Florida.

Why it fits this school

There is a quiet bit of history behind this one. The school is named for Blanche General Ely, who became principal of the Pompano Negro Grammar School in 1923 and went on to shape Black education in north Broward for nearly half a century. According to the school's own biography of her, she was behind four new schools in the area, including the elementary schools that became Coleman, Markham and Sanders Park. The same page notes that she and her husband, Joseph Ely, sponsored the first federally funded lunch program in Broward County.

So a century after Mrs. Ely made sure children in Pompano Beach were fed, students at the high school that carries her name are learning to feed the public, and to run the business that does it. The high school itself has its own long story: it closed under a federal desegregation order in 1970, the year she retired, and reopened as an integrated school in 1974 after community leaders pushed to bring it back.

Who was there

The district invited a full room to the noon unveiling on September 30: Broward County School Board members, the superintendent, Blanche Ely students, teachers and staff, the district's Career, Technical, Adult and Community Education team, Intuit representatives and community leaders. The district's career education office marked the moment as a first for the state.

What it means if you live in Pompano Beach

The practical upshot is simple: there is now a student-run food truck in Pompano Beach, and it is meant to be out in the community, not parked behind the gym. The district has not yet posted a public schedule, so the best way to find SoFlo Delights is to watch Blanche Ely's and Broward County Public Schools' social accounts, and to look for it around school events in the neighborhood around the campus on Northwest Sixth Avenue.

The bigger upshot is for the students. Most high schoolers learn about profit and loss from a worksheet. At Blanche Ely, they will learn it from a line of customers, a menu they wrote and a ledger they keep themselves. When you see the truck, buy something. Every order is part of the lesson, and the people taking it are learning how to run a business in the town they grew up in.