Give Schools the Tools to Solve Cafeteria Challenges

Jessica Donze Black Director, The Pew Charitable Trusts’ child nutrition project

Tyrone Turner: Courtesy of the Robert Wood Johnson

Across our nation, students are settling into back-to-school routines. Between their daily lessons in math, science and reading, there’s another subject important to their academic success but often overlooked and not found on their report cards: nutrition.

Yes, it’s time to talk about lunch.

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Each day more than 30 million American students get their midday meals at school. For much of the last three decades, as the nation’s childhood obesity rate surged, school meals weren’t as healthy as they could have been. But thanks to updated school nutrition standards issued by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 2012 — and the work of innovative nutrition professionals — cafeteria menus are now healthier than ever.

Today, every school lunch includes a serving of fruit or vegetables plus lean protein and foods rich in whole grains. Nearly one-third of schools have self-serve salad bars. And the stronger national nutrition standards have reduced geographic and demographic differences: Before the standards were updated, teenagers at larger schools or campuses with predominantly white enrollments were more likely to have healthy options on daily menus than students at smaller or more racially and ethnically diverse schools. But now, the smaller and more diverse schools have increased their offerings of nutritious items enough to close the gap.

Studies from Connecticut to Texas confirm what many school nutrition professionals are seeing in their lunchrooms. Under the healthier meal standards, more children are choosing and eating fruit and consuming more of their entrees and vegetables, increasing their nutrient intake and decreasing food waste. Parents and students alike support the healthier meals.

But like any classroom, successful nutrition programs and education require the right tools and professional training. Both are in too short supply. As Congress works on a five-year reauthorization of the Child Nutrition Act this fall, members should make greater support for training and new equipment a top priority.

When the updated meal standards took effect in 2012, The Pew Charitable Trusts and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation surveyed school meal program administrators nationwide and found that 88 percent of districts reported needing at least one new piece of kitchen equipment to serve healthier meals, such as ovens to cook baked potatoes and large-capacity slicers to cut fruit and vegetables. Almost two-thirds reported staff training needs, but only 37 percent said they had the necessary funding to provide the training.

The bipartisan School Food Modernization Act, pending in both chambers of Congress, would address these obstacles to healthy, efficient meal programs. The legislation would help schools obtain loans and grants to finance kitchen updates and training for food service professionals. For a while, Congress has appropriated about $50 million in recent years to help schools purchase new kitchen equipment, availability of these resources has been irregular and limited to a fraction of the almost 100,000 schools in the United States. The modernization bill would bring improved access and predictability for schools seeking assistance with equipment upgrades and staff training.

The difference made by these investments is tangible. Anna Fisher, director of food and nutrition services for the Mount Diablo Unified School District, about 30 miles east of San Francisco, recently made use of a federal grant to help purchase a new serving line that allows students to choose their own food from a display. “We’ve seen that when the children select their own food, less food gets thrown away,” Fisher reports. The grant also helped her district procure a walk-in refrigerator that lets the staff store and serve twice as much fresh produce while reducing energy costs.

It’s clear why large majorities of voters who have children in public schools, as well as adults nationwide, want to maintain the policies spurring this progress. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, healthy kids learn better. As Congress continues to evaluate the successes and challenges of the Child Nutrition Act, the debate should not be over whether to require that school meals include healthy food. Instead, lawmakers should look at how far schools have come and build on the programs that are working so well.

Todd Rokita wants to restrict free school lunches

Maureen Groppe and Chelsea Schneider, IndyStar Washington Bureau

There’s a food fight going on in Washington D.C.Rep. Todd Rokita has proposed a bill that would restrict access to free and reduced school meals at public schools.Rokita is focused on changing a portion of the program that allows some schools to pro Nate Chute/IndyStar

(Photo: IndyStar file photo)

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WASHINGTON — High-poverty schools would have a harder time qualifying for federal assistance to offer free meals schoolwide under a proposal by Rep. Todd Rokita, R-Indianapolis.
The bill, which a House committee will vote on Wednesday,  would raise the share of a school’s students who must be receiving other government aid in order for the school to be eligible to provide meals to all students. Those schools would still be able to provide free meals to students who qualify on an individual basis.
Rokita said the change would target assistance to those most in need, and the savings would be redirected to other nutrition programs for school-age children. The savings would amount to about $1 billion over 10 years.
“We stick it right back into their school,” he said. “I think that’s a pretty creative way to lead on this issue without adding to our $19 trillion in debt.”
The change would affect about 120 Indiana schools — including at least 14 in Marion County — that serve nearly 58,000 students who would no longer qualify for a schoolwide free meal program, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington.

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Indiana school officials using the program, known as community eligibility, said it has helped the families they serve.
“We know that there are more students that are eating, especially breakfast,” said Krista Stockman, spokeswoman for Fort Wayne Community Schools, which is feeding more than 21,000 students in schools that would have to go back to the old system under the proposed change. “It is a benefit that puts money directly back into families’ pockets.”
Sara Gasiorowski, director of child nutrition for Wayne Township Schools, with 11 schools participating in the program, said breakfast and lunch are important parts of the academic day for students.
If the program is rescinded, she said, “It would really, really be hard to go backward.”
Students qualify for free meals if their family income is less than 131 percent of the federal poverty level — about $31,800 for a family of four.
Students in families with incomes up to 185 percent of the poverty level receive meals at a reduced cost — no more than 40 cents for lunch and 30 cents for breakfast.
Students can automatically qualify for a free or reduced-price meal if their family is already receiving certain other types of government assistance, such as food stamps. Otherwise, a student’s family has to show a school their income is low enough to be eligible.

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When Congress reauthorized the school meal program in 2010, lawmakers allowed schools to offer free lunches to all students if at least 40 percent of their students automatically qualified for assistance.
Rokita wants to raise that threshold to 60 percent.
“Before you get reimbursed as a school for giving everyone lunch … let’s make sure a majority of them actually qualify for it,” he said.
Although a 40 percent threshold might sound low, it refers only to students who automatically qualify for subsidized meals, said Zoe Neuberger, a senior policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. In schools that meet that bar, about two-thirds of the students would qualify if administrators checked household income levels.
Before the community eligibility program, about 70 percent of Fort Wayne Community Schools’ students qualified for free or reduced-price meals. But district officials think a number of other families were either close to meeting the requirements or chose not to fill out the paperwork to receive assistance.
Not having to process student applications or monitor eligibility status in the lunch line saves schools’ resources, advocates say. Per meal costs also can be cheaper through economies of scale by feeding more kids. And serving free meals to all students can remove the stigma some might feel by applying for a subsidy.
Still, not all schools that are eligible for the program use it. That could be because they won’t save enough money to offset the cost of feeding more kids, since the federal government doesn’t pick up the full cost of the meals for all participants. Or schools could still be monitoring the program, which has been available nationwide for just two years.
In Marion County, the schools now offering free lunch to all students are Vision Academy-Riverside, The Challenge Foundation Academy, Arlington in Indianapolis Public Schools and 11 Wayne Township schools, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Rokita said any extra paperwork required for schools going back to the old system would be offset with the flexibility his bill would give them on meeting the tougher nutrition standards set by the 2010 law.
About 60 percent of the more than 760,000 Indiana students who participate in a school lunch program receive a free or reduced-price meal, according to the most recent statistics available from the Food Research & Action Center.
Cynthia Hubert, president and CEO of Gleaners Food Bank of Indiana, said she’s concerned about any change that could make it harder for students to get fed at school.
“If the children can’t get it there,” she said, “the charitable and private sector can’t do enough to fill that gap.”
One in seven Hoosier households was “food insecure” in the three-year period 2012-14, meaning they had difficulty at some point providing enough food for all family members, according to the Agriculture Department.
Federal spending on child nutrition programs — the largest of which are the school meal programs — has more than doubled since 1990, even after adjusting for inflation. Reasons include population growth, higher reimbursement rates to schools and policy changes.
Spending could grow an additional 26 percent in 10 years because of expected increases in food prices and demographic changes, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated last fall.
The savings from the change Rokita proposes would be spent on improving the summer meals program and increasing schools’ reimbursement rate for the breakfast program.
“When you’re getting a great deal, and you don’t have to do any paperwork for it, yeah, there may be some hesitancy to change,” he said. “But I am leading with a solution that solves a lot of their other problems. I’m just not doing it by adding to the debt.”
Neuberger, of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said it’s a “false choice to say you have to make it harder for low-income kids to get meals during the school year in order to make those improvements.”
“We can make investments in all of the programs,” she said.
Email Maureen Groppe at mgroppe@gannett.com. Follow her on Twitter: @mgroppe.

Hastings Public Schools ensures students have breakfast option

Children at Hastings Public Schools have the option to eat breakfast every day of the school week at school.
The problem, according to district director of finance Jeff Schneider, is the logistics if every student chose to take advantage of the program.
“We’d have to start serving breakfast at 6:30 in the morning to get everyone served,” he told the Hastings Tribune.
Both Hastings and Adams Central public schools offer a breakfast program to all students, both those who pay full price and those participating in the free or reduced lunch program. And while all students have the option, only a small percentage of students in both districts partake.
A report recently released by the Food and Research Action Center ranked Nebraska 49th out of all states and the District of Columbia in participation of eligible children able to receive breakfast at school. The Nebraska School Breakfast Challenge was created in early2012 as a way to encourage an increase in the number of students served across the state. Schneider said the school district always encourages children to have breakfast every day, whether that be at school or home.
The district provides a hot breakfast at all school sites along with cereal, fruit, juice and milk. In January, a total of 13,299 breakfasts were served across the district with about 12,000 of those served to students who qualify for the free or reduced lunch program. Those students also pay a reduced rate or receive their breakfast for free.
The number of breakfasts served is about a quarter of the 53,000 lunches served during the same time period.
“What we’ve found is it just depends on what peoples’ schedules are,” Schneider said. “For some people, it works great for their kids to go eat breakfast at 7:45-7:50 a.m. For other people, it just doesn’t.”
Jennifer Pohlson, the principal at AC’s Juniata Elementary, said she agrees that for some students and parents the breakfast program works well.
There are many students who would have to eat breakfast very early to fit into their parents’ schedule and that would mean a longer wait until lunch. With the breakfast program, Pohlson said students can eat and not have to worry about being hungry in their morning classes.
“It’s crucial that they have breakfast, otherwise they’re sitting in class thinking about their stomachs growling and about being hungry instead of concentrating on what they’re supposed to be concentrating on,” she said. “We just need brain food to be able to learn.”
When the school is in the middle of state testing, Pohlson said they will even provide all students with small snacks to help ensure they are concentrating on their work and not their stomachs.
In the Adams Central district, food service manager Angie Nissen ensures there is cereal, yogurt, milk, juice and granola bars or other snacks available for the cold breakfast at each of the three elementary schools.
The middle and high school students have the option of a cold or hot breakfast at the high school where Nissen and the staff serve everything from breakfast pizzas to pancakes and sausage.
“We even do biscuits and gravy,” she said. “That’s one of their favorites.”
At the high school, Nissen said about 50 students take advantage of the breakfast each morning along with other students who purchase a la carte items, including bottled water and juice, cookies, fruit and granola bars.
“We start serving at 7:30-7:40 a.m. and we don’t usually close until the last bell rings,” she said. “Some kids will straggle in and get their water or whatever else they need before class.”
The number of students served is less in the elementary buildings, where 15-20 is the norm. At Hastings Public, Schneider said he’s glad that the number of students served isn’t huge. That’s because it could cause as scheduling nightmare.
Lunchtimes are staggered each day to get all students through the cafeteria in each of the buildings. If all students also ate breakfast, Schneider said students would have to start eating at 6:30 a.m. or sooner.
That’s not to say Schneider doesn’t think the district should serve breakfast. In fact, he thinks the numbers increase a bit in the winter time as students arrive to school early and decide it would be nicer to eat a warm breakfast in the building rather than waiting out in the cold for the bell to ring.
“And it’s there for those that want or need it,” Schneider said. “We don’t turn anybody away.”

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