An area high school's cafeteria kitchen is lacking the proper equipment to prepare meals.

The kitchen at Tornillo High School was never built to be a fully functioning kitchen.

"Well, we don't have the cafeteria done. We are only able to serve here," said Alejandra De Leon, kitchen manager at Tornillo High School.

It's been just under three years since Tornillo High was built. Every school day since then, the kitchen staff has had to cart meals from the junior high building to the high school.

"The winter, it's really cold. Then in the spring, the winds come and the dirt and it's hard," said De Leon.

That's because meals can't be prepared in house.

The work day begins at 6 a.m. for the kitchen staff. Employees are forced to cart the food from Tornillo Junior High School to Tornillo High every morning for breakfast and each afternoon for lunch.

Meals are sometimes dropped or food runs out, which forces staff to go back and get more.

"It lacks a hood, it lacks all the gas plumbing for the appliances, it lacks a dishwasher and it lacks walk-in freezers," said Jose Ramirez, ancillary manager at Tornillo Independent School District.

School employees said not only is it tedious and tiring from day to day, but the weather -- whether too hot, too windy, or too cold -- also takes a serious toll.

"When we had the freeze back in 2010, we didn't even get to serve that day here. We had to go to the junior high. It's hard because the junior high, they have their kids, because only so many kids fit in there," said Alejandra De Leon, Tornillo High's cafeteria manager.

Jose Ramirez said former TISD superintendent Paul Vranish and the former facilities director sat down with the architect to decide how the building would be built.

"To my understanding, that was only supposed to be a serving cafeteria, not a full functioning cafeteria," said Ramirez.

Vranish tells KFOX 14 some areas of the school were not built intentionally while the district waited for funding. Ramirez said there were never any plans to make it a fully functioning kitchen.

"The way the buildings set up, it's going to be hard for that to happen. It can be done but it's going to take some work and some money," said Ramirez.

That's money that the district will now use toward the project. TISD board members voted to approve the expansion of the kitchen at last month's board meeting on Dec. 19.

"It would be a lot of help and it wouldn't be so hard for us," said De Leon.

The district is looking to take bids from contractors in the coming weeks.

The project is set to break ground in May or June.

The district has around $400,000-450,000 in allocated funds for the expansion.