Pushing junk food on SFUSD's smallest students

SFUSD has been such a pioneer in banishing junk food from our schools — and has won such acclaim for it — that it's bizarre to discover a part of our district that's on an entirely different planet.

We still have kids who are routinely given an array of sweets and junk foods during class time, and teachers and administrators who look at you like you're speaking Urdu if you question it. (No insensitivity meant to Urdu-speakers.)

Child Development Centers, I'm talking to you.

The recipients of the junk food barrage are the tiniest members of our school community, the pre-K children. The National School Lunch Program provides two meals and one snack per day, but parents rotate providing the second daily snack. Lots of parents apparently use poor judgment, and Child Development Center (CDC) administrators provide no guidance. Here's an account from a parent at one of the CDCs who has run into a stone wall trying to advocate for healthier food:

These are some snacks I have witnessed being given to the kids at snacktime: gummy bears, cheese/cracker type Oreo cookie dipping packs, Otis Spunkmeyer cookies, microwave popcorn. I've also seen donuts, brownies, pastries, cookies and chocolates brought in for snacktime in the guise of 'fundraisers'. A common occurrence for in-class parties (open houses, parent meetings) are the ubiquitous cakes, cupcakes, chocolates, pastries, sodas, chips and corn-syrup 'juice-boxes'.

At an opening of a new art room, baskets of cookies and crackers were left out in the hallways, available to any child walking by. My top two are seeing a kindergarten-age child getting admonished for taking M&Ms out of the open dish on the teacher's desk without asking (in a shared preschool classroom), and hearing my daughter talk about the hard candy she was given by a teacher on the playground one day. It is common to have preschoolers coming in to the school with gum or lollipops first thing in the morning.

The Oreo cookie dippy snack thing occurred just yesterday. One of my daughter's teachers said he came into the classroom and saw the other teachers handing them out and he took them away and in frustration made a reminder notice about encouraging parents to bring in healthy snacks. (Note from Caroline: It's heartening that at least one teacher is clued in that this is a problem.)

Additional treats come not from the parents but from the CDC staff, apparently from a stash. The CDC mom says:

What I was told by the site director, and by teachers, was that they had a sort of reserve of donated snacks from Safeway that were primarily crackers and cookies, and I assume that many of the things I see in the classroom come from this.

The SFUSD Wellness Policy, which has mandated healthy foods in our schools since 2003, applies to all SFUSD schools including the CDCs. But it didn't explicitly mention the CDCs until new language was added this spring. A CDC director is reported to have said "No one pays attention to that stupid policy anyway," or words to that effect.

Well, it's time to pay attention. The Wellness Policy now explicitly restricts handing out unhealthy food to kids, and explicitly covers the CDCs. It's hard to imagine early-childhood educators' being unaware of the childhood obesity epidemic — or, more directly in their own interests, the impact of unhealthy food on kids' behavior. In my experience, including parent-provided snacks at co-op preschool and in two years of an SFUSD class where the teacher set up a program of rotating parent-provided snacks, most parents will follow guidelines about healthy foods if they are just given those guidelines.

So I'm publicly calling on the administrator in charge of the CDCs to impress — right now, today — upon her site managers and teachers that the Wellness Policy (if not common sense) requires them to tell parents that they need to bring in only healthy snacks.

None of you has to be the bad guy — not the downtown administrator, the site managers or the teachers — because the Wellness Policy lays down the law for you. All you have to do is follow the rules.

For full details, including a beginner's guide to the Wellness Policy guidelines and a list of the snacks that meet them, go to www.sfusdfood.org .

— Caroline