The United Student Council launched an online survey on students’ satisfaction with the current food options at Houston Community College campuses.

“We started the survey so we can get an idea of what students want,” says Josue Rodriguez, the United Student Council President.

“It’s kind of obvious that the majority of students are not satisfied with the food options. What’s interesting is it sort of depends on the campus,” Rodriguez has been keeping up with the survey results submitted so far, “at some campuses, there is a bigger discontent, and other campuses are not necessarily the same thing.”

Students can take the survey here.

The survey will be open until the next United Student Council General Assembly meeting on Friday, May 6, which is from 10am–noon in the HCC Administration Building at 3100 Main St. in the second floor conference rooms.

At the next student body meeting, “We’re going to present the results,” notes Rodriguez, “and hopefully at that general assembly, we’re going to have the student body vote on what’s going to be the next step.” Next steps could include bringing the survey results directly to the college administration.

Within the first few days of the survey’s launch, the USC has received over 50 responses.

“One of the things that really hit me,” says Rodriguez about the preliminary survey results, “the majority of them right now want vegetarian options.”

Student dissatisfaction over the food options has been brewing for months. “There were a lot of concerns brought to the USC at the beginning of the school year concerning the food options, some of them were related to French Corner, some were not,” says Rodriguez.

In regards to the survey, Rodriguez stresses that the USC is “not necessarily going against the French Corner because some of the campuses don’t even have French Corner, and some of the campuses just use French Corner for catering…We specifically made the survey to be generic, just to get an overview of the broad opinions of what students want to see at HCC.”

Last fall, HCC Central Student Cynthia Franklin collected over 400 signatures on a petition to remove the only cafeteria vendor on the Central campus grounds and bring in a different eatery. The French Corner has two locations at the Central midtown campus, one inside the Learning Hub and another next to the campus bookstore. The petition was sent to Central President William Harmon’s office last semester.

“We want change. We want different eating establishments on this [Central] campus,” Franklin said at a USC meeting on March 11, adding that they are high priced, with rude service and “food not conducive” to students like herself.

Although Franklin’s petition was about the Central campus’ French Corner establishments, French Corner storefronts are also at the HCC Coleman campus, the West Loop campus, and other HCC locations.

The French Corner General Manager George Haddad recently attended a Student Government Association meeting at Central to ask what he could do to meet students’ needs. Some changes were quickly made after the meeting, including lowering the price of fresh fruit like bananas from $1.50 to $0.75.