News From the School Lunch Campaign Trail

I recently discovered a great blog devoted to the school nutrition issues that are near and dear to our heart, School Lunch Talk. The blog "dishes out the latest on public school food, from chicken nuggets and chocolate milk to legislation and regulations." Ann Cooper, a noted school nutrition leaders, is one of the editors of the site.

They provide a consice update on the progress on the legislative effort to update federal nutrition policy in this post: News From the School Lunch Campaign Trail:

The current Child Nutrition Act expires September 30, 2009, meaning it’s up for reauthorization, and in that process we have a chance to really improve on how food for our smallest citizens is funded, sourced, defined, and prioritized. Remember in 1981, how under Reaganomics ketchup was classified as a vegetable and 2 million children were dropped from the National School Lunch Program? The Act has far-reaching impact, beyond school lunch, to the WIC, Child and Adult Care Food, and Summer Food Service programs, and others.

Follow the link and read the whole story to find out how you can raise your voice at this critical juncture.

An end to the taco war?

Because we just can't get enough of this issue... Breaking news from Mission Loc@l: El Tonayense Taco Truck’s New View ?:

Abandoned lime wedges near the parking lot of John O’Connell High School show that the popular El Tonayense taco truck can still be found operating behind the school.

But the owner of the truck, Benjamin Santana told Mission Loc@l that by next week his taco patrons will have to walk north a block to place their orders of tacos de carne asada. “We are still negotiating the details but it looks like we will have to move the truck between 20 - 40 feet towards the 2300 block of Harrison,” he said.

Sounds like a good compromise. The truck will not be on the school boundary, visible from the yard. Its new location is visible from the old one, so few are likely to be confused by the move. Cool. Hopefully.

Burrito Justice surveys the taco truck ban

We interrupt this Spring Break with an update on the taco truck wars...

The recent hearing about the El Tonayese taco truck's unfortunate encounter with the SFUSD's Welness Policy garnerd this report on the Mission Loc@l blog: It’s a Draw: The Board of Appeals Opts for a Compromise. The bottom line for now is that the city punted. They'll hold their breath until June and hope the problem resolves itself. Who can blame them.

Meanwhile, blogger Burrito Justice contributes this interesting perspective on the taco truck controversy:

Behold, a map of the Mission. But what could the red circles represent? Outbreak of a horrible disease? Soviet Air Force bomber targets? Girafa sightings?

Alas, no. The red circles show a 1500′ radius around public junior high and high schools — the land where food trucks are forbidden.

I'm with the Burrito guy. And I helped him get his map right, because I think it makes a valid point well. The ordinance needs to be amended, and some compromise needs to be met that allows this business to carry on in its current location, without causing any harm to any students.

Fruitify yourself!

Filed under, it-takes-a-village:

School food news – the good, the bad, and the disgusting

posted by KC for Dana

---

Last summer, much to my surprise, top SFUSD administrators including Carlos Garcia agreed to a plan which further improved the food served in our school meal programs, even knowing that the improvements were likely to drive a higher deficit for the Student Nutrition Services department. In that pre-October 2008 world, before the US economy went into freefall, it did not seem unreasonable to try to offer even better food this year, in the hopes that “if we serve it, they will come.” And, in fact, more students have been eating the cafeteria food this year, whether in response to new initiatives like hot breakfast at elementary schools and salad bars at nearly every middle and high school, or just because things are tough all over and more kids need a subsidized meal.

In addition to the hot breakfast and the opening of more salad bars, this year saw whole wheat pasta and brown rice popping up on the menu, along with the whole wheat bread and buns and whole wheat pizza crust already in place. Students at non salad bar elementary schools were offered a variety of raw veggies with their lunch instead of just the constant baby carrots. The salad bars featured some more exotic vegetables, like jicama, and the occasional organic. Added to the improvements of prior years, when carnival foods like corn dogs and French fries were banished in favor of healthier options like sliced turkey and mashed potatoes, and fresh fruit replaced canned fruit swimming in heavy syrup, our school meals were starting to resemble something which, if not exactly three star gourmet fare, was at least a meal which we did not have to be ashamed of. High school students, who for years have been telling us that the meal is not enough food to fill them up, got a daily choice of 3 entrees (plus a vegetarian option) and one of those three was always a 50% larger portion, to help fill the stomach of a growing teenager, while middle school students got 2 choices (plus veggie option.) By November, all of these improvements were in place and, as I said, meal participation was increasing. That’s the good news.

And then the stock market plummeted, we all learned who Bernard Madoff was, the words “bailout” and “stimulus” entered the daily dialogue, and week after week California had no budget. The state announced that, as had happened in 2007-08, they would run out of money for the school meal program before the end of the year, so school districts shouldn’t count on that extra 22 cents per lunch which the state pitches in, and by the way, education funding in general for next year is probably going to leave you all a little short…meanwhile our own Mayor has already announced that he is going to “save” the schools by “shorting” the schools more than half the money that the creator of the Rainy Day fund feels they are entitled to. Can you see where all this is going?

The bad news is that SNS is on track to run a record deficit of almost $4 million this year – exactly the amount which had been projected back when the new improved school food was presented as one of three options for the 08-09 school year last summer. The other two options were keeping the food exactly the same (at a projected deficit of $2 million), or jettisoning ALL improvements from the past 5 years and going back to all corn dogs and French fries all the time (at a deficit of almost $1 million – because even the cost of really crappy food has gone up in the past several years.) Like everyone else these days, SNS must tighten its belt, and that means rolling back some of the improvements.

Beginning March 2, the raw vegetables at non salad bar elementaries will go back to being just baby carrots. Fancier veggies like jicama, or the occasional organics, will vanish from salad bars. Brown rice and whole wheat pasta – gone. Whole wheat bread and buns – gone. The larger entrée portion at the high schools – gone. And some of the leaner entrees like sliced turkey will be replaced by the more popular, and cheaper (and certainly less healthy) popcorn chicken, accompanied by something called “potato stars” (don’t you just know that is going to be a tater tot in drag?)

But I guess we should be concentrating on the good parts – we do still have a choice of entrees for middle and high school, even if we lost the larger entrée; we still have whole wheat crust pizza with lowfat cheese, even if we lost the whole wheat bread, buns, and pasta; all meals are still trans fat free; we still have the salad bars, albeit with less variety of raw veggies; we still have the fresh fruit, and the hot breakfast, and the Point of Sale system is being installed in every school, which will help speed up the lunch line and eliminate the dreaded meal cards. I know I should be happy that we have not gone back to corn dogs and apple turnovers, but somehow it is just really hard to focus on what we have gained when it is so apparent what we have lost.

Galileo needs to stop defying the Wellness Policy

An involved school community member wrote the complaint below about ongoing daily sales of food at Galileo High School in violation of the district's Wellness Policy. My own comment is that I've devoted many unpaid volunteer hours to helping update the Wellness Policy, as a parent volunteer member of the district's Student Nutrition and Physical Activity Committee (though other volunteers have devoted far more). It's really annoying that school district officials blow off their responsibility to ensure that schools adhere to the policy — is that too much to ask? Why have a policy if administrators don't have the spine to decree that it be followed? Are school admins allowed to defy all district policies without repercussion?

Here is the community member's commentary:

In January 2007, I visited Galileo High School and discovered that their student store (pictured) was selling all kinds of food in violation of the district’s Wellness Policy, which bans food sales during the school day. I sent the photographs to various district officials and received a promise from Associate Superintendent Jeannie Pon that she would send Margaret Chiu, Assistant Superintendent for High Schools, out to Galileo immediately to deal with the store (see below). I also wrote this describing the state of unauthorized food sales in the district at that time.

That was two years ago. I am sorry to report that two years later, Student Nutrition Services director Ed Wilkins visited Galileo and found the exact same situation that I had complained about, and Ms Pon had promised to correct, in 2007 — a student store selling pizza and snacks all during the meal period, in violation of the district’s Wellness Policy. The fact that the snacks and drinks the students are selling are not on the district approved list (usually because of containing too many calories and too few nutrients) is beside the point — students should not be selling food at all during the school day! These constant sales compete with the school meal program and undermine the financial stability of the Student Nutrition department. Those who suffer for it are the poorest students — those who can’t afford to buy a snack lunch at the student store; who rely on the free meals served at school for their nourishment; and whose only choice is to eat in the cafeteria or go hungry. When students selling pizza and sweetened ice tea drinks drain revenue away from the cafeteria, it means there is less money coming into the school meal program, revenue which could be used to improve the quality of the food for the poorest students.

It doesn’t matter that these student groups “really need the money,” which is always the excuse cited when groups feel that they should be allowed to ignore the Wellness Policy. Student Nutrition Services also “really needs the money,” and as they serve the poorest and most at risk students, shouldn’t their “need” for the money come first? How long is Galileo High School going to be allowed to operate their daily student store? No other school in the district is violating the Wellness Policy in such an egregious manner. I respectfully request that the district put a stop to these food sales immediately, and instruct all school Principals that they are not to authorize any food sales during the day which violate the Wellness Policy.

Please visit

http://www.flickr.com/photos/20674560@N07/

to see photos of the Galileo student store in 2007, and in 2009.

No peanut butter in SFUSD lunches

From the sfschools list comes this reassuring update:

Given the very disturbing article in today's paper about tainted peanut butter turning up in school lunches in California, I have been asked to remind parents that SFUSD has not served any peanut butter or peanut products in the school lunch program for many years. Please feel free to share this with your individual school groups if there is any concern about it.

Two Battles joined in the School Food Wars

The Chron gives us two notable op-ed pieces about school lunch programs that take on different fronts in the battle for student health. First up we hear from state Superintended Jack O'Connell about increased demand and dwindling state money for subsidized school lunches:

$19.5 million needed for school lunch program

Even in our nation's darkest hours, we have worked to make sure every child has enough to eat. That's why during the Great Depression visionaries instituted the school meal program that has helped to feed our neediest children, generation after generation.

But today, as more and more hungry children turn to the school lunch program for their only meal of the day, California's program is in danger of collapse. We must act quickly.

Where O'Connell is on the front line of the battle, fighting for money now, Kathleen Rodgers, president of Earth Day Network, writes a call to arms for the coming battle to reform the school lunch program:

Better nutrition for better learning

Next year, the Child Nutrition and WIC Reauthorization Act of 2004, which includes school lunches, will expire and the renewal battle will begin. We must dramatically improve the federal nutrition requirements that guide this program, weaken the ties between the school lunch program and the commodities markets, revolutionize the quality of food in our schools, label the salt, fat and sugar content of each meal served, and educate school officials, regulators and the American public about the program and its potentially disastrous implications for our children's health.

Significant progress can and must be made in overhauling school lunches. It will take millions of voices to bring about this change. The cost to the next generation is too high for this battle to be lost.

SFUSD has done groundbreaking work to improve school nutrition in spite of the obstacles built into the school lunch subsidies. But there is no doubt that real improvements are desperately needed when this program is reauthorized.

There IS Such a Thing As a Free Lunch!

It is never too late in the school year for a student to fill out a meal application and get qualified to receive free school meals. With the economy nosediving and people losing their jobs left and right, some families whose income has dropped (or is about to drop) should consider filling out a new meal application to see if they might now be eligible for free meals. Families are welcome to fill out a new form whenever there is a change to their income. Meal applications should be available at all times in the office of every school. If your school has run out of forms, ask them to call Student Nutrition Services and ask request additional forms; the forms come in English, Spanish, and Chinese.

Although students can turn in a form and start receiving free meals at any time, each school’s “official” percentage of “low income”students is set based on the number of students qualified by the end of December. Any forms turned in by this coming Friday, December 19th, can be added to the school’s “official” total if the students qualify for free meals; forms turned in after December 19th can still entitle a student for free meals, but will not add to the school’s “official” total. This total is important to the school because many grants are available only to schools with certain minimum numbers of free lunch qualified students (typically at least 50%). The percentage of free lunch students is also used as a factor when comparing schools’ academic performance to other schools within California on the “similar schools” ranking of the API.

It is important for EVERY student who is entitled to free meals to have a properly filled out meal application on file. The federal government covers most of the cost of meals served to these students if the form has been filled out. Without a form on file, students can still receive a free meal, but it gets paid for by our school district out of funds which should be going to classrooms. While it is important that every hungry child be fed, at this time of budget crunch it is also important that the Federal government carry as much of that cost as possible, leaving the maximum amount of school district funds to be spent in the classrooms.

Every school in the SFUSD still has some students who have not yet turned in a meal application. Congratulations to Marshall Elementary, which conducted the most effective meal application return, and which has just one student currently with no meal app on file. Thanks, Marshall! Other schools with single digit numbers of students with no meal app on file include Mission Ed Center (3), Chinese Ed Center (4), John Yehall Chin Elementary (6) and Harvey Milk Civil Rights Academy (9). All other schools in the district follow, in descending order.

Lowell High School	1204
Lincoln High Sch.	852
Galileo High Sch.	479
Washington High Sch.	326
Burton High Sch.	297
Alamo Elem. Sch.	284
Mission High Sch.	259
Indpendence High Sch.	227
I S A High Sch.	207
T. Marshall High Sch.	206
O'connell High Sch.	189
School Of The Arts	174
Gateway High School	169
Aptos Middle School	157
Academy Of Arts And Sciences	135
Balboa High School	134
Hoover Middle Sch.	130
Lafayette Elem.	109
Giannini Middle Sch.	109
Downtown High Sch.	107
Presidio Middle Sch.	103
Jefferson Elem.	100
Sloat Elementary	99
Lick Middle Sch.	94
Wallenberg High Sch.	92
Civic Center Secondary(Phoenix	83
Denman Middle Sch.	80
Lakeshore Elem.	79
Chavez Elementary	79
Rooftop Elem.- (A) Burnett	77
Hillcrest Elem.	76
M.L. King Middle Sch.	71
Feinstein	67
Fairmount Elementary	67
Lawton Alt.	66
Longfellow Elem.	64
June Jordan School For Equity	64
El Dorado Elem.	63
Creative Arts	62
Everett Middle Sch.	59
Starr King Elem.	57
Wells High School	55
Mann Middle Sch.	54
Alice Fong Yu	52
Lilienthal 3-8th- (B)	50
Flynn Elementary	50
Mckinley Elem.	48
Cleveland Elementary	48
Revere Elem.	46
Alvarado Elementary	46
Rosa Parks	45
Clarendon Elementary	45
Visitation Valley Middle	43
Taylor Elementary	43
Monroe Elem.	41
Sunnyside Elem.	40
Grattan Elementary	40
Hilltop	38
West Portal Elem.	37
Drew Elementary	35
Francisco Middle Sch.	34
Buena Vista Elem.	31
Ortega Elem.	30
Marina Middle Sch.	29
Sutro Elementary	28
Leadership Charter High Sch.	28
Brown, Jr. Willie	28
Sheridan Elem.	27
Yick Wo Elem.	26
Sanchez Elem.	26
Muir Elementary	26
Guadalupe Elem.	26
Tenderloin Comm.Sch.	25
Sherman Elem.	25
Argonne Elementary	25
Miraloma Elem.	24
Key Elementary	22
Roosevelt Middle Sch.	21
Redding Elem.	21
Glen Park Elem.	21
Sunset Elem.	20
Serra Elementary	20
Carver Elementary	19
Lau Elem.	18
Harte Elementary	18
Garfield Elementary	18
Cobb Elementary	18
Carmichael Elementary K5	18
New Traditions	16
Webster Elementary	15
Moscone Elementary	15
Bryant Elementary	15
Ulloa Elementary	14
S.F. Community School	14
V. Valley Elem.	13
Stevenson Elem.	13
Malcolm X Academy	13
Spring Valley Elem.	12
Parker Elementary	12
Mccoppin Elem.	12
Newcomer High Sch.	11
Peabody Elementary	10
Lilienthal - Divisadero (A)	10
Milk Elem.	9
Chin Elementary	6
Mission Ed Center	4
Chinese Edu.Center	3
Erikson Special Ed.	2
Principal Center	1
Marshall Elem.	1

Lunch money blues

Not only are food costs going up, but more kids are qualifying for Free and Reduced Lunch just when the state funds for it are drying up.

$700B for the likes of AIG, but hungry kids get none of that...

More funds urged for California's school meal program:

The poor economy is hitting the bellies of 3.1 million California school children.

State Superintendent of Public Schools Jack O'Connell warned Tuesday that, because of increased demand, state funding for the Free and Reduced-Price Meal program could run dry before the end of the school year. He urged lawmakers to increase state funding for the hot meal service by $31 million.

Schools statewide served 28 million more meals in 2007-08 than the year before, a record 770.6 million, and a 4.5 percent increase.

Nearly 51 percent of California's public school children are enrolled in the free or reduced-price program – some 3.1 million students.

The program, which provides breakfast, lunch and afternoon snacks to low-income children, is primarily funded with federal dollars; however, the state kicks in a significant portion as well.

Now is time to fight for better school food

Dana Woldow teams up with Berkeley's Ann Cooper to continue their battle for better school food for our kids in this Chronicle opinion piece

Now is time to fight for better school food

This has been a summer of headlines about soaring prices for food and fuel. With students returning to school, those cost increases threaten to force school cafeterias to rely more on cheap processed food and cut back on pricier fresh food. With obesity, diabetes and heart disease on the increase among children, "fast, cheap and easy" is the last thing we want our kids to be.

[...]It's great that Berkeley and San Francisco have helped subsidize better cafeteria food, but all over the country, cash-strapped schools struggle with having to take money away from students' academic needs to help meet their nutritional needs. School meal programs are overseen by the USDA and funded by Congress, and that is where the money should come from to pay for them - from Congress, not from our classrooms.

The article is a call to arms to mobilize everyone—meaning you—to get involved, contact your Congressional reps and help in the fight to reform the Child Nutrition Act that governs the federal subsidies that every district relies upon. You can make your voice heard by the USDA regulators here, and read more about the program here (PDF).

Update: For more information on the issue, visit the PASA information page or jump directly to this page with sample letters that you can use for inspiration.

Are they listening?

Dana Woldow reports from the trenches on the Sisyphusian efforts to improve school nutrition in this School Beat report:

City May Discontinue Kids’ Free Summer Lunch Program

For generations, students have complained about school food, calling it “mystery meat.” More recently, their elders have begun complaining too, as rates of childhood obesity and Type 2 diabetes reach new highs, and unhealthy school lunches are targeted as one cause. As Congress gets ready to debate possible changes to federal child nutrition programs, criticism of the byzantine structure of children’s meal program regulations is starting to be heard as well. But is anyone listening? On August 6th, they were listening in San Francisco.[...]

Sisyphus is probably the wrong allusion since our crusaders are making progress in their struggle. Maybe the Augean Stables would be more apt? Whatever... we owe Dana and her fellow travellers for their tireless efforts.

Latest school food news

The best source for all the latest information on school food in the SFUSD (and beyond) is at www.sfusdfood.org . Two of the most popular documents at that website, "Why can’t we have better food in our schools?" and "A Short History of Food in the SFUSD" (PDF) have both been updated to reflect the most current information. Both documents are also being translated into Spanish and Chinese so that soon they will be available to more people.

For those who don’t have the time or patience to read through these documents just to learn what’s new, here are the latest updates. First, the good news:

• Student Nutrition Services (SNS) piloted a hot breakfast in 10 elementary schools in the spring of 2008, with a goal of getting more students to eat breakfast; schools selected for the pilot had some of the lowest breakfast participation rates in the district, often serving as few as 6 students a day (SNS does not recoup the costs of providing breakfast at a school unless at least 60 students participate.) Overall, nearly three times as many students ate the hot breakfast, as compared with the previous number eating cold cereal, and some schools increased their participation by 400-500%. As a result, the hot breakfast will be expanded to all of the elementary breakfast programs this year; cold cereal will still be available for those students who prefer it.
• Salad bars operated in 25 schools in 08-09 and nearly all resulted in significant increases in the numbers of students choosing to eat the cafeteria lunch. For example, at Lowell High School, 10% more students chose the cafeteria lunch once the salad bar opened during the second semester, as compared to the number eating in the cafeteria earlier in the school year. At the same time, the number of Lowell students choosing to buy the a la carte lunch (which does not include the salad bar, but offers large and small salads among the choices) also increased. The other middle and high schools with salad bars also showed double digit increases in participation. Clearly salads are popular, especially with middle and high school student. More middle and high schools will open salad bars in 08-09. The salad bars will offer increased choices of produce, including corn and beans, allowing vegetarian students a non cheese protein option to supplement the vegetarian hot lunch offered daily.
• Elementary schools which do not have salad bars will begin offering a wider variety of raw vegetables served with lunch, not just the baby carrots of previous years.
• Brown rice and whole wheat pasta will be appearing on the menu monthly.
• All cafeteria meals are now have 0 grams of trans fat.
• More students ate school lunch last year than in 2006-07, despite the fact that district enrollment declined. Participation increased 2.1% even as enrollment drop by .7%

Now, sadly, the bad news:

• The cost of providing school meals is increasing at a rate which is devastating to the meal program. The price SNS will pay for a meal at an elementary school without a salad bar in 08-09 has increased 30% just since last year – and that does not include increases for the price of the milk which must be served with every meal. At the middle and high school level, between 2004-05 and 2007-08, the prices of the 60 most commonly used items in the preparation of food for the a la carte lines increased between 40-101%. Delivery costs are up 42% from last year due to rising fuel costs.
• Meanwhile, the federal reimbursement for meals served to students qualified for free lunches has increased only 4% since 07-08, and the state reimbursement has dropped 13.6% since last year. The amount of the contribution the City makes to support the salad bars has also dropped 54.5% from 2007-08 to 2008-09.
• Due to the skyrocketing costs of food, fuel, and labor, meal prices for those students who don’t qualify for free or reduced price meals will be increasing to $1.50 for breakfast at all schools (previously this was $1), while lunch prices will be $2.50 at middle school and $3 at high school (both previously $2). Elementary school lunch price remains unchanged at $2.
• These price increases are not unique to San Francisco.
  
  Visit www.pasasf.org/cna/prices.html to see how districts all around the country are raising meal prices, and Rising Cost of Food - Child Nutrition Programs | Hearing to hear what witnesses recently told the US House of Representatives’ Committee on Labor and Education about the impact of rising prices on federal child nutrition programs (especially recommended is the testimony of Katie Wilson of the School Nutrition Association.)

If you think it is time the federal government started funding our school meal programs at a higher level so that our kids can be served the kind of high quality food they deserve, please visit PASA: Speak Up for Better School Food to see a quick and easy way to help.

--- Dana Woldow

More on school meals

There was some discussion at last night's BOE meeting (during public comment) about school lunches, largely centering on the packaging, but also touching on the quality of the food. I don't know how many other ways there are for me to say this, but I will keep on saying it until every well-meaning person who is serious about improving the school meal programs gets it: whatever it is you are asking for, be it easier-to-handle packaging, additional cutlery, higher quality food, more organics, or more salad bars - whatever - IT WILL COST MORE MONEY!

Our school district is already directing about $1.5 million of general fund money to Student Nutrition Services to cover the shortfall between the revenue the program brings in, and the cost to provide school meals. That is $1.5 million of money which would otherwise be available for classroom needs, like paying for more paraprofessionals. So, for those of you who want to see improvements, are you saying that you believe that the district should direct even more general fund money to SNS to pay for (as an example) plastic knives to accompany the "sporkette"? This would indeed make it easier for students to handle the entrees which require cutting, but would cost in the vicinity of $200,000 extra per year (at current meal participation levels). Please tell me where that $200,000 should come from. I believe that sum is enough to pay for at least three paraprofessionals; shall we ask that there be more staff layoffs so that the students can have more cutlery? Or should $200,000 in cuts to the cost of food be found to cover the cost of the cutlery. Let's see – we could switch back from the fresh fruit currently served (at a cost of about 18 cents apiece) to the cheap, sugar and fat-laden commodity apple turnovers served in the bad old days (a bargain at less than 10 cents apiece). That would save some money – would that be a net improvement, trading fresh fruit for more cutlery?

To repeat – there is NOTHING that SNS can do to improve school meals that won't involve taking money from something else. It is time for everyone who wants to see improvements in the school meal program to take their anger and their rhetoric to the people who CAN do something about it. As Commissioner Wynns so eloquently put it last night, "It is time to make the people who are supposed to be paying for school meals, really pay for them!"

Funding for school meals is covered by the federal Child Nutrition Act, which is up for reauthorization in 2009. The USDA is taking public comment right now and continuing through October 15th. All public comment will become part of the public record and will be provided to Congress to inform their discussions around the reauthorization of the Act.

Congress allocates the money for the school meal programs, and they need to hear two things. First, the school meal funding level for high cost of living areas like San Francisco needs to be increased. At present, the federal government provides $2.49 per free lunch served in all of the 48 contiguous states, but Alaska and Hawaii get more – schools in Hawaii get $2.91, while those in Alaska get a whopping $4.03. This is because of the higher cost of bringing food and supplies into these two remote states, but costs are higher than average here in San Francisco too. As I write this, gasoline prices in 38 states are averaging below $4 per gallon, while California averages $4.24 (only 3 states are higher – Connecticut at $4.25 and yes, Alaska and Hawaii.) The federal government is aware that the cost of living is higher here, and they pay federal employees here a differential to make up for their higher living expenses. If SFUSD received $4.03 per free lunch served, as schools in Alaska do, there would be no SNS deficit, $1.5 million would be returned to the classrooms to provide for students' academic needs, and there would be even better food served in the lunch program too.

The second thing Congress needs to hear is that the income ceiling for eligibility for free meals needs to be raised in high cost of living areas like SF. Presently, a family of 4 with two adults each working 40 hours per week at minimum wage jobs, earn too much to qualify for free meals for their children. The cutoff for eligibility for this family is $38,203, but their 40 hour work weeks at SF's minimum wage of $9.36 an hour earn them $38,937. Impossible to imagine parents raising two kids without assistance on under $39,000 a year in SF, where the rent on even a one bedroom apartment (for 4 people!) would cost about half of their annual income, but the children of this imaginary family would not qualify for subsidized school meals. According to The Insight Center for Community Economic Development, the self sufficiency standard (amount of income necessary to live without government assistance) for this family of four in SF is about $52,500. This is probably why so many students come to school each day ineligible for free lunch, but with no money to pay for their meal. SNS feeds these students anyway, but can collect only about 25 cents of government money for the meal. Raising the limit on how much a family can earn and still qualify for free lunch to a more realistic level here in SF, like $50,000 instead of $38,000, could enable thousands of low income children to qualify, and bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars of additional government funds to help pay for higher quality food.

Over 60 years ago, the federal government recognized its responsibility to ensure that a nutritious hot lunch would be available to every school aged child. It's asking too much to expect schools to fashion tasty and appealing meals out of government surplus commodities. The government must spend enough on school meal programs to provide high quality fresh food, grown and prepared close to home, to allow our children to thrive and achieve.

To let Congress know how you feel about these issues, and why we need both a higher reimbursement rate for free meals and a higher income eligibility ceiling to qualify for free meals, please go to Request for Public Comments for Use in Preparing for 2009 Reauthorization of the Child Nutrition Programs and WIC

Or send comments directly to CNDProposal@fns.usda.gov

--- Dana Woldow

SNS budget outlook worsens

Before this year's California budget crisis, efforts to reform SFUSD's food service were limited by low federal reimbursement rates and inadequate budgets. Now the SNS faces a double whammy with the overall district budget deficit forcing belt tightening everywhere coupled with dramatic increases in food prices. Expect to hear a lot more about this issue. This could be painful. From CNN:

School kids feel the bite of high food prices
Administrators are cutting corners and considering lay-offs to make up for the price spike in milk, eggs and flour.
By Aaron Smith, CNNMoney.com staff writer

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Rising food prices are making it harder for schools to cook up ways to give kids the nutrition they need.

Right now, they're taking shortcuts and shuffling ingredients to make up the difference, but that's only a short-term solution with long-term consequences on the horizon.[...]

Food-price pain is especially sharp in California, which has some of the nation's strictest nutrition rules. "With all the food requirements we have [here], it's doubly difficult this year. There isn't enough money to go around," said Lynnelle Grumbles, food service director at Visalia Unified School District in central California.

Balancing school lunch with possible lay-offs
"The parents expect more fresh vegetables, but we're having to make a choice not to," Grumbles said. The only other solutions would be to lay off workers, charge parents more per plate, or convince Congress to increase its annual reimbursement rate, she said.

"If the general public expects school programs to provide quality food for their kids, then the reimbursement rates need to increase," she said. "The increase over the next two years needs to double, in order to survive."

Federal reimbursement programs cover all or part of school districts' lunch tabs. Congress lifts reimbursement rates every year, but Gasiorowski said it hasn't been enough: "We need to be looking at an increase of 12% to 15%, instead of our usual annual increase of 2 or 3%."

7 Habits of Highly Effective SNS Departments

by Dana Woldow

As school districts scramble to address what is projected to be the most painful budget cuts in memory, Student Nutrition departments are coming in for increased scrutiny, because unlike most other departments, they do have the potential to bring in more money than they spend. Some school districts, such as Hayward Unified and Oakland, operate their Student Nutrition Services (SNS) department in the black, although many others, like San Francisco, lose money. A combination of factors including low reimbursement for subsidized meals; a cutoff for qualification for reimbursable meals which excludes many SF children whose families are nonetheless very low income, given our high cost of living; higher labor costs than anywhere else in California; and aging infrastructure are just some of the factors which drive our SNS into the red. In San Francisco, SNS staff have been studying how other districts run their food service operations, especially nearby districts which break even or run at a profit. Some factors profitable districts have in common:

1. No a la carte lunch lines

Long ago, school cafeterias offered only a hot lunch choice (called the mainline), take it or leave it. Students who didn’t want the mainline meal brought a bag lunch from home. Over time, junk food and snacks proliferated in the marketplace, and the lobbying power of the food companies which produced them targeted the federal government. Pressure was put on the USDA to encourage schools to provide a second kind of meal service, the a la carte option, which tempted students to spend their lunch money on soda, candy, French fries, or chips.

Eventually, the rising obesity crisis resulted in a backlash against this kind of food being sold in schools; the movement reached critical mass in San Francisco in January 2003 when the Board of Education passed a resolution to remove soda and junk food from schools and replace it with healthier choices. A la carte operations in SFUSD now offer soups, salads, deli sandwiches, lowfat-cheese pizza, and other popular student-requested choices, not junky snacks.

The belief has been that these additional sales would help boost revenues for SNS, and underwrite the cost of the woefully under funded mainline. However, the flip side is that students who might otherwise choose to eat the mainline hot lunch are instead lured to the a la carte to spend their money.

Does the a la carte line still underwrite the cost of the mainline? As it turns out, not so much. As labor and benefit costs have gone through the roof, the extra labor required to run two competing food operations eats up an increasing share of the a la carte dollar. Combined with food prices which have spiraled out of control in the past 2 years, and the reluctance of students to support price increases for a la carte choices, the result is a la carte has become more expensive to operate than is justified by the revenue it brings in.

Financially stable SNS departments have eliminated a la carte sales. Students are offered several choices within the mainline menu, but all of the choices are the same for all students, whether they are qualified for free meals or paying cash. Nearly all SFUSD middle and high schools still offer a la carte sales in addition to mainline.

2. All closed campuses

The necessary corollary to eliminating a la carte sales is closing campuses so that students do not have the option of leaving to buy lunch elsewhere. Financially successful districts like Hayward Unified have closed campus at all middle and high schools. In San Francisco, four high schools including 3 of the largest (Lowell, Lincoln, Washington, and the smaller SOTA/The Academy) have completely open campus for all students at lunchtime. Several other schools including Balboa and Galileo, have partially open campus which allows certain students (for example, seniors with a designated GPA) to leave campus for lunch a few days a week.

3. Only qualified students eat free

At the start of the school year, all families are asked to fill out a meal application form to qualify their children to receive free breakfast and lunch; families on government assistance qualify even without the form. Although 53% of SFUSD students qualified for free meals this year, many more are believed to be low income, just not low enough to make the cutoff for qualification (about $38,200 a year for a family of 2 adults and 2 children.) Because many studies show that hungry students cannot learn the way their well-fed classmates can, students coming through the lunch line with no money to pay for their meal, and unqualified for free meals, are fed and SNS absorbs the loss. Over time, some families have stopped filling out the form because their child will be fed anyway. Other families dutifully give their child $2 for lunch, but the students themselves figure out that they can pocket the money, get a free lunch, and have $2 to spend after school. Losses from feeding students with no money have mushroomed from about $350,000 per year in 2003-04, to an estimated $800,000 or more for the current school year.

In districts with solvent SNS departments, students with no money are fed only three times at district expense; after that, they are turned away and allowed to go hungry. Occasionally a district will provide a package of saltines or small bowl of cold cereal, but rising food costs have led most to abandon even the “meal of shame” (cheese sandwich and milk) which many used to offer to penniless students. Most commonly, nothing at all is provided after the initial three free meals; this is policy in Oakland and Hayward. This has the effect of weeding out those “freeloading” students who are trying to hoard their lunch money, and also those who might otherwise not bother to fill out the meal form. Schools with Principals who insist that students be fed even without money are billed for the cost of those meals.

4. School staff are held responsible

Most school districts use lunch cards, often in combination with a computerized Point of Sale (POS) system, to record the number of meals eligible for government reimbursement. Effective school districts ensure that cards are distributed at the start of school and are used consistently, so that every eligible meal will be paid for by the government. Schools are billed for cash shortages which occur when meal cards are not used properly. In San Francisco, some Principals think meal cards stigmatize students and refuse to distribute them. Others, trying to rush students through the lunch line, set up cafeteria procedures which preclude the use of cards. Even Principals who are otherwise supportive often mistakenly believe that “everyone eats free” for the first 6 weeks of school. Without proper use of meal cards, thousands of meals are served without the possibility of collecting even a penny.

Effective school districts enforce strict policies requiring teachers to notify the cafeteria in advance if their class will be off campus at lunchtime, so that the cafeteria staff can adjust the number of meals they expect to serve. This reduces waste and saves money; teachers can also request bag lunches for their students qualified for free meals, which benefits the student by providing a field trip lunch, and benefits SNS by allowing reimbursement to be collected. Schools are billed for the cost of wasted school meals. SFUSD teachers are supposed to notify their cafeteria in advance of a field trip, but many say they have never been informed of this rule by their Principal, or of the availability of bag lunches for qualified students.

Federally subsidized meal programs are intended to benefit students, not adults. Adults are never allowed to eat free in the solvent cafeterias. In the SFUSD, adults are supposed to pay, but there is a widespread (and incorrect) belief, especially at the elementary level, that teachers and school staff get a free lunch. The school district cannot receive any government reimbursement for meals served to adults; when school staff insist on being fed for free, the full cost comes out of the SNS department budget.

5. No competitive sales

The SFUSD Wellness Policy sets limits on when parent or student groups can sell food at school; the main rule is that competitive sales are never allowed at lunchtime (the only exception being high schools which have in the past been allowed a few days to sell at lunch during school festivals.) Prior to the Wellness Policy, there were high schools which ran student-operated competitive sales of pizza, or Chinese food, or chips and soda, every single day at lunchtime. Needless to say, such sales, while lucrative for student groups, wreaked havoc with the cafeteria’s lunchtime business.

In school districts with solvent student nutrition departments, these sales are absolutely prohibited. In San Francisco, unauthorized sales continue to pop up at middle and high schools, and often it is left to SNS to initiate action to end them.

6. Administration supports SNS department

The natural corollary to having rules prohibiting competitive sales is that the district administration must enforce the rules. Districts like Oakland and Hayward support their nutrition departments in enforcing ‘no competitive sales’ policies; Oakland’s acting assistant director has said that if she hears of a school doing a competitive sale, she makes one phone call and the sale is stopped. While no district is ever likely to be able to completely eliminate competitive sales, support from central district administration is key to getting this under control. Within the SFUSD, enforcement has been sporadic at best; some Principals do a good job of monitoring their schools to eliminate competitive sales, while others encourage such sales.

7. Low labor costs

Districts with Student Nutrition Departments running in the black all have lower labor costs than SFUSD. This is not to say that SFUSD should pay their workers less, as it is expensive to live here, but rather to point out that lower wages are a contributing factor to fiscal solvency. The acting assistant director of Oakland’s department indicated that beginning workers in Oakland earn $8-$9 per hour; in SF, beginning caf workers make $16.28 per hour.

Moving San Francisco’s school food operation from its current deficit (expected to be about $1.5 million in 07-08) to a break even status will require some very hard choices, which historically SFUSD has been unwilling to make. Eliminating a la carte sales is likely to be unpopular with students, and will not be successful unless accompanied by a closure of all school campuses. Campus closure may require a second lunch period for larger high schools. While unpopular, it was demonstrated that this is not impossible when Lincoln principal Ron Pang ordered his campus closed for a period of several weeks in spring 2007, in reaction to complaints from neighbors that Lincoln students were leaving garbage from their off campuses lunches throughout the neighborhood. During the several weeks that Lincoln operated a closed campus, a second lunch period was in operation and cafeteria revenues soared.

It seems unlikely that SF’s progressive majority on the Board of Education would support turning away hungry students from the lunch line, but an increased effort to get families to fill out the meal application form at the start of the year could qualify more of these students for free meals. Mandatory use of lunch cards for all students, as required by federal meal program policy, should also be enforced at all schools at all times, so that reimbursement for every qualified meal can be claimed. These two steps, which cost nothing, could help reduce the amount of money lost to meals served to unqualified students. It is unrealistic to hold up the example of other solvent districts without acknowledging their draconian policy of allowing students to go hungry at school, and the financial toll the “No Child Left Hungry” policy exacts in SF.

Labor costs are the elephant in the room – everyone knows they are there, no one wants to talk about it. While it is not realistic to expect that SF could slash the amount it pays its workers, it must be acknowledged that this amount is far higher than what neighboring districts pay. Again, it is unreasonable to hold up the example of Hayward or Oakland as “solvent” operations that SFUSD should be emulating without mentioning their vastly lower labor costs.

Finally, it is time for district administrators to get serious about enforcing the SFUSD’s Wellness Policy ban on competitive sales, which drain money away from cafeterias, and insist that federal regulations around meal cards be followed to the letter. At a time when every dollar is precious to our students’ educational needs, there is just no excuse for lax administrators to turn a blind eye to catering trucks, or student (or teacher) run sales, or to expect that adults will be fed at the expense of our students. If SFUSD is ever to operate a school food service with minimal losses, someone will have to make the hard choices.

High food costs undermine healthy school meals

The Washington Post takes a perceptive look at how soaring costs are harming efforts to serve healthier school meals. And this focuses on states that are NOT subject to California's appalling threatened budget cuts.

Schools Get a Lesson in Lunch Line Economics
Food Costs Unravel Nutrition Initiatives
By Maria Glod, Washington Post Staff Writer, Monday, April 14, 2008

New York students will have to settle for pizza without tasty turkey pepperoni topping. In Montgomery County schools, tomato slices were pulled for a few weeks from cafeteria salads in favor of less-expensive carrots or celery.

And in Davie County, N.C., Yoo-hoo drinks, which had been taken off the shelf in favor of healthier options, are back. Sure, officials would rather the kids chugged milk. But each Yoo-hoo sale brings in 36 cents of profit.

Sharp rises in the cost of milk, grain and fresh fruits and vegetables are hitting cafeterias across the country, forcing cash-strapped schools to raise prices or pinch pennies by serving more economical dishes. Some school officials on a mission to help fight childhood obesity say it's becoming harder to fill students' plates with healthy, low-fat foods.

Several Washington area school systems -- including those in Prince George's, Fairfax, and Prince William counties and Alexandria -- are proposing to increase lunch prices next school year. For Prince George's schools, it would be the first increase in a decade.

For Montgomery schools, this year's dairy bill is expected to be about $600,000 more than last year. Officials expect to decide in June whether to seek an increase in meal prices.

Becky Domokos-Bays, director of food and nutrition for Alexandria schools, said schools need to raise prices to cover rising food and labor costs but worries that even small increases will strain middle-class families who don't qualify for a price break. The School Board approved a 10-cent increase for students who pay full price, raising the lunch price in elementary school to $2.15 and in middle and high schools to $2.45.

"There's a tipping point somewhere, and I think we're there," Domokos-Bays said. "I don't know how much more families can afford to pay."

School meal programs across the country are run somewhat like restaurants, relying on federal and state subsidies and profits from meal and snack sales and catering services to buy food and pay workers. Rising labor costs, coupled with the recent push for healthier meals, which has meant serving higher-priced foods such as whole grain breads and fresh vegetables, has squeezed budgets. Soaring food prices make it even harder to break even.

Miami-Dade County schools are on track to pay $4.5 million more for milk this year than last year, about a 47 percent increase. Penny Parham, administrative director of the schools' department of food and nutrition, came to Washington last month to urge federal lawmakers to raise subsidies.

"We do not want to serve our students highly refined sugar and flour products, which are more affordable," Parham told the House Education and Labor Committee, "but we are continually being pushed down this path."

Each year Uncle Sam, in an effort to ensure the neediest children get healthy meals, gives schools a little more cash to help feed students. But school officials nationwide say the federal share hasn't kept pace with rising costs. This year, the U.S. Agriculture Department is giving schools $2.47 per lunch to serve free meals to children from the poorest families, up from $2.40 last year, a 3 percent increase. In the same time, milk prices rose about 17 percent and bread nearly 12 percent.
Click to read the rest of the story.

New York Times out to lunch on cafeteria story

It's time to take a look at a March 1 Page 1 New York Times story, "Free Lunch Isn't Cool, So Some Students Go Hungry," spotlighting SFUSD's cafeteria practices and making some misstatements in the process.

Special "huh?" awards go to two sources mentioned in the article: Dr. Rajiv Bhatia, an official with the San Francisco Department of Public Health who claims — despite the fact that SFUSD officials and we SFUSD advocates have been addressing this very issue for years now — to be the one who discovered that low-income students may be stigmatized by having to eat school meals; and Colleen Kavanagh of the Campaign for Better Nutrition, who has been contacting regulators and the press with hot tips that turn out to be inaccurate.

The point of the article is that when there's a school cafeteria "mainline" serving the meals that officially qualify for federal reimbursement for low-income students, plus a separate line selling a la carte items that are available only to students with money to buy them, that humiliates the students who can't afford the a la carte items. Then some low-income students go without lunch out of embarrassment. (These are middle-schoolers and especially high-schoolers, the article notes; younger students don't sense the stigma yet.)

"Overt identification" of low-income students is illegal, but the USDA (which regulates school meal programs) has long ruled that this setup isn't overt identification.That's because non-low-income students may buy the mainline meals too; the mainline isn't specifically for low-income students. The USDA ruled that standing in one line or the other doesn't inherently identify a student's income status.

The fact that SFUSD doesn't use a cashless debit-card system, aka point of sale (POS) system, is a key problem in that it can be apparent which students are paying cash. The SFUSD Student Nutrition department and school food advocates have been calling for such a system — which is standard in up-to-date school meal programs — for years. It would require about a $1 million investment, which SFUSD has not been able to come up with, even though the system would rapidly pay for itself because of the many efficiencies it brings with it. Such a system is being piloted in a few SFUSD schools (currently five, I believe).

SFUSD has applied for grants for a districtwide POS system. One application was made in early 2006 for funding from a source called the Vitamin Cases Consumer Settlement Fund — unsuccessfully, despite high hopes. The proposal cited the stigmatization of low-income students. (In fact, Colleen Kavanagh, a member of SFUSD's Student Nutrition and Physical Activity Committee, co-wrote the grant proposal along with then-SFUSD administrator Matt Kelemen.) Then a request for city Prop. H funds for the system — written in fall 2007 by Dana Woldow and me and also emphasizing the issue of stigmatizing low-income students — appeared to be on the verge of approval when the state budget disaster hit and Superintendent Garcia ordered available Prop. H funds frozen for use in a crisis.

It also seemed odd that the NYT article focused on SFUSD when it included the information that New York City's school meal program has the same problem — this is the New York Times. While it mentioned that NYC is using some innovative strategies to try to get more low-income kids to eat lunch, the article still said that 37% of SFUSD's eligible high schoolers eat lunch, compared with 40% of NYC's — those are both estimates, so presuming a significant margin of error, both school districts are feeding about the same percentage of low-income high-schoolers.

To those of us who are longtime SFUSD school food advocates, the strangest thing about the article was its entirely inaccurate portrayal of this issue as one that had been overlooked and ignored until Dr. Bhatia stepped up to expose it.

In reality, co-blogger Dana Woldow, who is parent volunteer co-chair of the Student Nutrition and Physical Activity Committee (SNPAC), had at the time the article ran made 14 formal speeches over about four years requesting the POS system — either to the Board of Education, the Board of Supervisors or their joint committee. All of those requests emphasized concerns about stigmatizing low-income students. Since the article ran, Dana has made yet another speech to the Board of Ed about it. Many other advocates have also contacted the Board of Ed about the issue and discussed it in online parent forums.

Meanwhile, SFUSD Student Nutrition has been researching feasible ways to eliminate the two separate lines. Some students will be troubled if the solution requires eliminating the a la carte sales, but changes seem to be in the works.

So it was just plain weird that the NYT article claimed that everyone who was actually involved in this work was "blind" to the problem and portrayed Dr. Bhatia as the one who stepped forward to expose it. I've never met or seen Dr. Bhatia, despite attending many, many meetings addressing these very issues over the past five years.

From the article:

"Here in San Francisco, which has such a commitment to equality, this kind of segregation is occurring very blatantly,” Dr. Bhatia said. “Good and committed people trying to improve student food were blind to it.”

Dr. Bhatia said he decided that “somebody has to speak up,” and began pressing the school district to make changes.

The article also described (this time accurately) an unproductive campaign by Ms. Kavanagh — who has launched an organization called the Campaign for Better Nutrition — to try to bring legal and regulatory sanctions down upon SFUSD. She contacted the organization Public Advocates with an inaccurate tip that SFUSD provided meal cards only to low-income students that would identify them to observers. That's incorrect — actually, every student gets a meal card. Public Advocates and the USDA devoted some effort to investigating, based on Ms. Kavanagh's bad information, which has also led to media tips that didn't pan out, leaving at least one reporter staking out district headquarters for an explosive story that never happened.

But it's the part of the article giving Dr. Bhatia credit for exposing a problem — one that in reality many of us had been addressing for years — that was truly inaccurate and misleading. So I was pretty shocked when I got in touch with the New York Times, contacting both respected reporter Carol Pogash and her editor, Joan Nassivera, and no correction was forthcoming. I sent my complaint on to the Times' public editor, but enough time has elapsed that I'm assuming he's not looking into it.

The Times has a reputation for scrupulously correcting teeny-tiny, meaningless errors and refusing to address substantial ones. Apparently, it's well-deserved. In fact, on the day I sent my complaint to the public editor, I checked the Times' corrections column, which included a correction on the fact that the name of the cosmetics line Helena Rubinstein had been misspelled in an article. Glad they struck a courageous blow for journalistic standards and ethics by clearing that up.

In the meantime, here in SFUSD, the true need is for adequate funding to provide higher-quality meals for all students. And work continues on getting the POS and finding ways to eliminate the separate a la carte line in student cafeterias. I still haven't seen Dr. Bhatia around doing any of it, strangely.

KGO: Healthy food at FS Key ES

Check out this ABC news clip about a healthy food program at FS Key. The video features some cute interviews with the kids.

ABC News: Lunch time deficits

Interesting ABC news story about the district food policy and the potential to capture more federal money for lunch subsidies: Lunch time deficits. Check out the video in particular. Catch it while you can, this link will eventually stop working.

17 dumbest ways SFUSD sabotages the meal program

Last week, many of you read my list of the "10 dumbest USDA policies" as reflected in the National School Lunch Program. It was suggested that I also print a companion "10 dumbest ways SFUSD sabotages the meal program", but really, there are so many, how to choose just 10? In the end, I decided to go with the full list of 17. This list was developed and distributed by the SFUSD student nutrition and physical activity committee in 2007, and shared with Superintendent Garcia during a meeting we had with him in August. He was particularly interested in the part about putting all vending machines under one central contract, said he had done that as Superintendent in Clark County, that it was not something which would require reinvention of the wheel, and that he thought it would be a good thing to go ahead and do. We're still waiting for that to happen.

Now, with the budget disaster looming, Student Nutrition Services is being asked to look at every possible program cut to help save money. But before we go back to serving only carnival food, or denying a student with no money a meal, or axing the afterschool snack program, or eliminating meals in summer school, wouldn't it make sense to work on some of these strategies?

Well-nourished students are higher achievers: How administrators can help support quality meals for students

School food in San Francisco is much better than it used to be, thanks to the district Wellness Policy and strong new leadership in Student Nutrition Services (SNS).

But SNS has other problems. It hasn't been able to balance its budget. That's largely due to factors beyond the district's control – primarily the impossibly low reimbursement rate for low-income students' meals, which are subsidized by the federal and state government, and a threshold for qualifying that's cruelly unrealistic in high-cost San Francisco.

When the SNS budget doesn't balance, the deficit comes out of schools', classrooms' and students' resources. So everyone has an interest in helping ensure that Student Nutrition is as fiscally strong as possible.

School and district administrators should be aware that there are many things they can do to ensure SNS' improved financial health. In fact, most are things they are already supposed to be doing, and could be done at no cost to the district.

Administrators need to understand that competitive food sales drain money away from Student Nutrition. That means the quality of the food suffers and fewer students are likely to eat it, creating a downward spiral – poorer-quality food and less money available for classroom needs.

Here are 17 specific ways administrators can make a difference:

Help Support The Cafeteria

1. Administrators should encourage students to eat the school meals and generally support the cafeteria operations. The more students who eat the meals, the stronger revenues become.
2. School staffs need to remember that all adults must pay the adult price if they eat in the cafeteria; this includes teachers and families of students.
3. Many students have indicated that they choose not to eat in the cafeteria because the lines are too long, and some students push and shove, or cut the line. When SNS is able to implement a Point of Sale swipe card system at every school, the lines will move much faster, but meanwhile it is the schools' responsibility to provide staff to monitor the line and deal with unruly students. SNS does not have the manpower to provide this service.
4. High schools with closed campuses should adhere to this policy and keep their students on campus at lunchtime.
5. Teachers need to let the cafeteria know when students on field trips will miss lunch – giving at least two weeks' notice. Teachers should also be aware that with two weeks' notice, they can request free bag lunches for those days for students who qualify for free/reduced-price meals, and that higher-income students can order paid bag lunches for just $2 each. Principals must make sure their teachers are aware of this.
   
   Enforce The Wellness Policy (Competitive Sales)
   
6. Principals must enforce the longstanding Wellness Policy prohibition on competitive food sales at lunchtime, whether it's teachers selling Cup o Noodles out of their classrooms, Brown Bag Theater lunchtime events selling hot dogs, or classrooms, clubs, Peer Resources or JROTC running fundraising food sales. And they need to halt all sales of non-compliant foods at any time of day. Food sold for fundraising competes with school meals and is often unhealthy.
7. A city ordinance now prohibits catering trucks from vending near schools. Principals need to support that by reporting violators to the School Operations and Instructional Support Office, which then needs to contact the police (both actions required under the Wellness Policy). Vending trucks sell unhealthy items and compete with the school meals.
   
   Enforce The Wellness Policy (Vending)
   
8. Administrators need to enforce the Wellness Policy at all school sites, from Pre-K to 12th grade, including ensuring that all products in school vending machines meet the Wellness Policy's nutrition standards. For a list of approved items, a survey assessing schools' compliance, a sample letter which can be sent to vendors if machines are out of compliance, and more information, go to www.sfusdfood.org . Parents and educators can report non-compliance, with confidentiality guaranteed, through the website.
9. Principals would be relieved of the responsibility for ensuring that items stocked in machines comply with the Wellness Policy if district administrators would follow up on the Policy's longstanding recommendation that all school vending machines be put under one districtwide contract, rather than the wild patchwork of unaccountable arrangements that currently exists. This would almost certainly guarantee a better financial arrangement for schools and would allow accounting for revenues, which are currently entirely unmonitored.
   
   Enforce The Wellness Policy (Parties And Celebrations)
   
10. The newest section of the SFUSD Wellness Policy calls for foods handed out to students, including at class and schoolwide parties, and parent-donated snacks, to meet the SFUSD healthy food standards. Administrators need to enforce this section, which applies to all district sites Pre-K-12th grade. Food provided at parties competes with the school meals and is often unhealthy. A suggested list of healthy school snacks and party food is available at www.sfusdfood.org .
    
    Follow The USDA Regulations
11. Principals must understand that SNS employees report to SNS and are following a stringent set of federal laws. SNS income and federal reimbursements can be jeopardized if Principals try to make their own rules for the meal program. Likewise, although many of the regulations may seem arbitrary (such as requiring each student to hold his own meal card in his hand in the lunch line), SNS does not make these rules (the USDA does) and SNS cannot change them.
12. It's essential that all students who qualify for subsidized meals fill out the meal application forms so Student Nutrition can be reimbursed. Achieving this requires every student to turn in a form (non-low-income families may write "not interested.") This task is the job of Principals, and it should be made mandatory. Currently, Principals vary widely in their effectiveness in – and concern about – collecting the meal applications.
13. Under the current system, SNS relies on meal cards for students' proof of eligibility for reimbursable meals. In some cases, schools delay distributing the cards, which means SNS loses money. Principals should be required not just to distribute the cards (some never do) but to do it within 48 hours after the cards are received at the school. And principals must not forbid cafeteria workers to check students' eligibility. That can mean SNS doesn't get the reimbursements to which it is entitled. That money is the sole source of revenue to pay for the costs of food and labor to run the meal program.
14. Principals at schools with snack programs need to make sure that their after school program coordinator is complying with record- keeping requirements, including daily snack counts, and submitting monthly counts in a timely manner. A delay at even one school holds up reimbursement for all meals – breakfast, lunch, and snack – for the entire district, and each day of delay costs SNS money (about $109,000 in 06-07.)
15. If a Principal has knowledge that a specific student's family would qualify for free meals, USDA regulations allow the Principal to fill out and sign a free meal application for that student if the family does not do so. So long as the Principal is not filling out forms to cover large groups of students, this is a perfectly acceptable procedure. A student who qualifies for free meals, and who eats breakfast and lunch at school every day, brings in about $815 a year in revenue; the same student with no meal application on file brings in only $98 a year to cover the cost of the meals he eats.
    
    Work Cooperatively With SNS
    
16. Principals need to help school communities understand the realities about school meals. Occasionally, Principals encourage parents to demand the impossible – such as scratch cooking at school sites that would require millions of dollars to install kitchens, or meal programs that would violate federal law. Parent involvement and activism is vital in our schools – but crusades demanding changes that are far outside the realm of reality can be counterproductive.
17. The Human Resources Department needs to make every effort to fill job vacancies within SNS in a timely manner. When temporary clerks are needed to process meal application forms at the start of school, and those positions are not filled despite a timely request by SNS, then regular workers must be paid expensive overtime to get the job done by the deadline set by the government. In addition, reimbursement for students who are qualifying for the first time for free meals cannot be collected until after the students' meal applications are processed and meal cards printed and distributed to the students. Every day of delay due to understaffing of SNS costs the department money.

posted by KC for Nestwife

10 dumbest things about the Nat'l School Lunch Program

This commentary was written by Dana Woldow, San Francisco public school parent/activist and co-chair of the San Francisco Unified School District Student Nutrition and Physical Activity Committee.

10 DUMBEST THINGS ABOUT THE NATIONAL SCHOOL LUNCH PROGRAM

The National School Lunch Program (NSLP) has provided meals to students since 1946; currently over 30 million children participate in the program. It is overseen by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA).

If you thought the recent news about tainted beef possibly reaching school cafeterias in some communities indicated some problems with the NSLP and its overseer, the USDA, you'd be right. Failure to ensure the safety of food served to school children is merely the latest problem to surface. Here are some others:

10. Requiring each child to hold their own lunch card results in spread of germs.

This NSLP regulation really drives the teachers of younger kids crazy. It says that each student must hold their own lunch card, which is embedded with a code specifying the student's eligibility for lunch – free, reduced, or paid. Each child's eligibility must be recorded by a caf worker in order to collect government reimbursement, but why is it necessary for each child to physically hold the card in their hand? Some teachers feel that students handling the cards, which are then bundled together and returned to the teacher at the end of the line, spreads germs from one card to the next, and from the cards to the students, increasing pupil absenteeism due to illness. Is there really any reason why the teacher could not keep custody of the cards, hand them to the caf worker as the students pass through the line, and then retrieve them, so that the children don't have to touch them at all?

9. Offer vs. serve means adults cannot hand students fruit, milk,whole wheat bread, or any other meal component.

In order for a school lunch to qualify for government reimbursement, the cafeteria "offers" 5 meal components (protein, grain, fruit, veg, and milk) and the student must choose at least 3 of the 5; however, the operant word is "choose." That is, the student must reach out and select the items he wishes to eat himself – an adult may not give him milk, or an apple, or anything else (that would be "serving" rather than "offering."). Some teachers, aware that their students will not get much at home for dinner, try to get their kids to fill up at lunch, but if they hand the food to the students, or even put a plate of bread to share on a table where students are eating, that is a violation of USDA policy.

8. The list of "foods of minimal nutritional value", which are disallowed in school cafeterias, is a very short list.

It is comprised only of soda, water ices, chewing gum, sugar coated popcorn, and a few specific types of candies made almost entirely of sugar or other sweetener, such as hard candy, licorice, cotton candy, marshmallow, and jelly candy. Flaming Hot Cheetos (or other snacks of the chips variety), Kit Kat bars (or any other popular candy bars), Capri Sun (or other mostly water/sweetener) "juice" drinks, fried pork rinds, Slim Jims (not to be confused with real beef jerky), chocolate covered double stuffed Oreo cookies (as well as any other type of cookie) – none of these are considered to be "foods of minimal nutritional" value and therefore all are permitted to be sold in the cafeteria under current USDA regulations. A food need only contain 5% of the recommended daily allowance of one nutrient (like, say, Vitamin C, or thiamine) to avoid the FMNV list, yet surely no one really believes that fried pork rinds contribute to proper nutrition for a child.

7. Overt identification – now you see it, now you don't.

The USDA doesn't seem to know what they mean by this one. In theory, "overt identification" is anything that makes it clear to an onlooker that a student is receiving free or reduced price meal. So, any system used in the cafeteria which involves the use of cash by students paying for their meals is "overt identification" because it makes clear that those not paying cash are getting free meals. Likewise, the use of colored tickets or any other system which has one group of students handing over, in exchange for the meal, something different than another group of students, is overt identification.

But, the USDA has no problem with schools operating a la carte food sales; such sales do not have to be of complete meals, like the free lunch, but can instead be just snacks like Gatorade and potato chips. These a la carte items are sold separately and are not available as part of the free lunch, Clearly students purchasing them are paying customers, while those choosing the school lunch are likely to be getting free meals, yet cafeterias selling a la carte is not considered "overt identification."

In fact, it was the USDA which, in the 1980s, began encouraging schools to sell these very popular and profitable snacks, as a way of generating more money to support the free lunch program. This was at the same time that the federal government was doing away with the funds previously available for schools to replace aging or broken cafeteria equipment (no such fund has existed now for over 20 years.) The USDA did specify that foods of minimal nutritional value (see #8) could not be sold in the cafeteria or anywhere that NSLP meals were served or eaten, which led some schools to open separate a la carte facilities, so that they could sell soda and still comply with USDA regulations. This does not seem to be a violation of "overt identification" – indeed, how could it be, when the USDA both encouraged the sale of soda and also prohibited it from being sold in the caf – but surely an impartial observer would conclude that the students lining up to buy the USDA-approved a la carte snacks were not free lunch students.

6. USDA meal regulations limiting sugar and fat apply to weekly averages, not individual components.

This means that high fat fried chicken nuggets (over 60% of calories come from fat in some nuggets) can be averaged with green beans, fruit, bread, and low fat or fat free milk, to produce a meal which has less than 30% calories from fat, as the USDA requires. However, as students can take as few as 3 of the 5 meal components, there is no way to prevent the child from leaving the fruit and the vegetable, taking only the nuggets, bread, and milk, and consuming only the nuggets and milk, thereby ingesting far more than 30% calories from fat. Likewise, the USDA allows the totals to be averaged out over the whole week's worth of meals, so that a higher fat entree like chicken nuggets can be offset by a lower fat meal served later in the week. But there is no way to guarantee that students who ate the nuggets meal also compensated later in the week by eating the lower fat meal. So even offering school meals which meet all USDA regulations for fat and sugar content still doesn't necessarily result in students who are well nourished.

This is why the SFUSD has stricter standards, designed to ensure that each entrée alone (not averaged with all meal components, and over the course of a week) meets the USDA limit for fat; snacks and side dishes must meet USDA limits for fat and sugar, and also are required to contain at least 5% of 8 essential nutrients.

5. Tofu is not allowed as the required protein component of a meal, limiting vegetarian options and making a variety of vegan reimbursable meals almost impossible to provide.

Both peanuts and peanut butter are allowed; I guess the USDA is unaware that some children have such severe peanut allergies that if the cafeteria were to serve peanut butter sandwiches for lunch, they wouldn't be able to come to school at all that day (SFUSD does not serve peanuts or peanut butter in school meals.) Beans are allowed, but most students don't want to eat beans for lunch, not even in combination with hot dogs, so that leaves cheese as the most common vegetarian option. Students who don't or can't eat cheese, either because of lactose intolerance or vegan preference, are simply out of luck.

4. Commodities on which districts must depend are often of low quality or high in fat.

This is because the commodity program doesn't really exist to help support better nutrition for children, but rather to provide price supports for agriculture. After all, that's what the A in USDA stands for (and there is nothing in that name that refers to kids.) Want to make sure the price of milk stays high? Just buy up the excess milk (in years when there is an excess) and turn it into the famous "government cheese", which can then be distributed as a commodity to schools. Not enough milk one year? Well, then there may not be any commodity cheese the next year. Same thing with beef, poultry, pork, and a slew of other commodities. They are dumped into the lunch program in bountiful years, and disappear when supplies get scarce. A lunch program designed with the kids' nutrition in mind would provide a wider selection of reduced fat cheeses, and higher quality meat, as well as fresh locally grown produce, instead of canned fruits and vegetables. It would protect against the use (even by mistake) of tainted beef in school lunches.

3. Food not sold or served by the end of the meal period must, in most cases, be thrown away.

It cannot be given away to children who are still hungry at the end of the day (and who might welcome a heartier snack at their after school daycare program), nor taken home to feed their hungry families.

2. The government reimbursement for free and reduced price meals is woefully inadequate in high cost of living areas.

The federal reimbursement for a meal served to a student qualified for free lunch in the 48 contiguous states is $2.49 (Alaska and Hawaii get more), which, along with about 22 cents more coming from the state, must pay for every single cost of running the school meals program, not just the food. Maybe that is enough in a lower cost of living state like Kentucky, but here in San Francisco, after labor, garbage collection, pest control, utilities, supplies like tin foil and paper towels, napkins, straws, cardboard trays, sporks, and the costs of running the Student Nutrition Services office are all figured in, only about $1 is left for food. Try serving any kind of complete meal for $1, let alone a nutritious tasty one made from the fresh, locally grown food students and parents prefer. School districts located in higher cost of living areas should get high reimbursement, just as Alaska and Hawaii do.

1. The cutoff for eligibility for reimbursable meals is unrealistically low for high cost of living areas.

Imagine a family of 4 in San Francisco - two children, and two parents working 40 hours per week at minimum wage jobs. Believe it or not, these parents will exceed the amount of income they can earn and still qualify for reimbursable meals for their children! The cutoff for eligibility for this hypothetical family is $38,203, but their 40 hour work week at SF's minimum wage of $9.36 an hour would earn them $38,937. Impossible to imagine parents raising two kids in SF on under $39,000 a year, but the federal government thinks that if a 4 person family earns that much, the kids clearly don't need a free breakfast or lunch.

The USDA devotes an enormous amount of effort to trying to make sure that families don't "cheat" – as if anyone could get rich scamming free school meals for their kids! Meal applications must be filled out each year; districts are required to randomly pull 3% of all applications and verify that the information provided is accurate. Every day, cafeteria workers must check the eligibility of every student receiving a meal, to make sure that the government is only billed for those who are qualified. Inspectors from the USDA visit every NSLP school district every four years to monitor compliance with USDA policies, and the quality and safety of the food is not their only concern; they are looking for violations of all of the regulations cited here, and particularly they are looking to see if accurate "counting and claiming" is going on – in other words, they are looking for the "cheaters" who might be scamming a free lunch. Wouldn't it make more sense to forget the meal applications, forget verifying the accuracy of the income information on them, forget the lunch cards and the counting and claiming and the inspections, and just feed the kids?

Tomatoes & Romaine & Carrots - Oh My!

School foodie extraordinaire Nestwife has posted a fabulous 11-minute video about the SFUSD salad bar pilot program on YouTube. The veggies are fresh, crisp and mouthwatering, and it's pretty great to watch the kids scarf them up. Check it out!

Alas, this year might be it for the salad bars, unless we can figure out a way to keep funding the ones we have, let alone an expansion to other schools. On sfschools today, Nestwife writes:

It pains me to have to let people know that [due to the district/state budget crisis], instead of looking at better food,
right now Student Nutrition Services is being asked to put on the
table every possible program cut which could be implemented while
still meeting compliance regulations for a USDA child nutrition
program. Possible cuts could include:
- A return to the old carnival style menu of corn dogs,
quesadilla, bean burrito, cheeseburger, etc. – the 10 cheapest
entrees – served in an endless two week rotation
- No more whole wheat bread or fresh fruit; brown rice and
whole grain pasta scheduled to be introduced next month would be
discontinued
- Closure of all a la carte lines at middle and high schools
- Closure of all salad bars
- Elimination of SNS-provided after school snack program
- Application for exemption for summer meal service (ie – no
meals at summer school)
- And, in case you are not already wailing, an end to the district's longstanding policy of feeding every child who comes through the lunch line, regardless of whether they qualify for free meals; those students who haven't qualified and bring no money to pay for their food would be turned away to go hungry.

The salad bar project represents a big step forward in our student nutrition programs, and it's quite dispiriting to worry if financial pressures will force us to take two steps back to the bad old days of taco pockets.

Revolution Foods: Sounds good, but costs too much

A new enterprise called Revolution Foods is providing lunches to some schools around the Bay Area and getting good reviews (their lunches are partly organic). SFUSD parents keep asking about it. Revolution Foods has had discussions with SFUSD Student Nutrition (SNS).

Bottom line: Revolution Foods is too expensive.

SFUSD spends $1.36 per meal on lunch — and at that, SNS struggles and runs a deficit. (The heavy-duty line item that stresses the budget is labor.)

Revolution Foods has been very clear that it can't provide lunch for less than $3 per meal.

SFUSD serves 21,700 meals a day (Revolution Foods currently serves 7,000, by the way). So Revolution would cost $35,588.00 per day above what SNS currently spends. Would be wonderful; isn't financially feasible.

All salad bars, all the time

Not that we're obsessed with this issue. No! Not us! We have petitions, we have videos, we have polls. Here's a simple picture. Feast on this. Then go send emails to the BOE, vote on the poll...

Cast your vote for Prop H spending priorities

Over on the sfschools group I've opened a poll that lets you vote your favorite proposals for new spending under Prop H. This year the amount of money available under Prop H is increasing, as it has every year since Prop H was approved. Under the rules of Prop H most of the new money is allocated to specific areas. But the so call "third third" is less encumbered and has been allocated to a variety of programs such as Peer Resources, Translation services, Academic coaches, Wellness centers, Violence prevention, Learning support professionals, etc.

The Prop H CAC has sent their recommendations for new spending to the BOE for a vote at the next BOE meeting on January 17th. In the poll I've listed many of the proposals that came before the committee, along with estimates of their cost. Unfortunately you'll have to be a member of the SfSchools list with a valid Yahoo! ID in order to vote. (And the blogger.com tool I use to publish this blog does not, as far as I know, support polls!)

Here are the choices in my poll:

• Green schoolyards (non-bond schools) $250,000
• Grants writer $90,000
• MS Bike Racks $15,000
• MUNI passes for homeless youth $120,000
• Teacher technology program $2,600,000
• School fiber connectivity $750,000
• Point-of-sale system for cafeterias $250,000
• Salad bar expansion $130,000 (not $262,500 shown in the poll)
• Teacher support and recruitment $546,000
• Program development project $250,000
• MUNI passes for MS and HS students $2,000,000
• Innovation seed funding $500,000
• Sustainability / Green schools initiative $100,000
• LEP Parent outreach coordinator $100,000
• PSAT / SAT preparation $174,000
• Whiteboards $500,000
• GATE $88,100
• Pre-K-3 literacy initiative $450,000
• Equitable Education for MS $640,000
• Culturally responsive initiative $250,000

While the poll is a fun way to express your priorities, I put it together to put the issue of the salad bar expansion in context. There is roughly $5M in new "third third" funds available this year. The pressure to commandeer this money to help defray the looming budget will be enormous. Yet the salad bar expansion and the POS system for the cafeteria are modest sums. They are not ongoing expenses, and they figure to increase revenues from the cafeterias and pay for themselves.

Yet the Prop H CAC did not include the salad bar expansion in its recommendations to the BOE.

Let's hope the BOE corrects this mistake.

Meanwhile, go vote now!