Most school cafeterias flunk - Health Dept.

WOULD YOU EAT at a restaurant where rodent feces dot the area where your food is being cooked?

How about a place where employees preparing your meal don't wash their hands or wear gloves? Better yet, a place where there's black mold in your ice?

Not too appetizing, is it?

But if your child is in school in Philadelphia, chances are she or he is eating every day in a lunchroom with similarly unsavory conditions.

More than half of the schools in the Philadelphia School District - 53 percent - failed their most recent health inspection, according to state Department of Agriculture records, while a staggering 66 percent of charter schools were out of compliance.

Of the 40 schools in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia that were inspected last school year, 35 percent were out of compliance.

Some schools on the list were hit with as many as 20 risk-factor violations, ranging from mouse feces found on cooking utensils to food being stored next to chemicals.

Justin Carter, a recent West Philadelphia High School graduate, said he gave up eating school lunches long before he graduated. He said the news doesn't come as a surprise.

"It's atrocious," he said, recalling his food woes at his alma mater, which was hit with 10 violations last spring.

"They served chicken twice a week, and it wouldn't be cooked all the way through - it was soft and pink in the middle. The food worker would put it in a microwave for five minutes like that would make it better. It would be the same way every time."

Lunchrooms in other school districts around the region fared much better than in Philadelphia.

In Lehigh and Berks counties, for example, every school is in compliance, according to the Department of Agriculture.

Although not many local school districts have results posted online, eight of the 10 schools in the Chester Upland School District passed their latest inspection, while all four schools in the Springfield School District in Delaware County passed.

The reports are considered a "snapshot" of the day and time of the inspection, according to the Department of Agriculture.

In the city schools, violations included milk being stored at an improper temperature at more than a dozen schools to roaches and mice infestations at others.

At Philadelphia Academy Charter High School, on Tomlinson Road near Jamison Avenue, in the Northeast, a food server was seen cleaning the top of a service counter and letting the debris fall into a pan of french fries on a full-service line.