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!

Save our salad bars!

Nestwife, a tireless advocate for better food in our schools, has posted a video of students at Balboa High School enjoying their salad bar on YouTube. On the sfschools list she's asking everyone interested in better food for our schools to contact the BOE and Superintendent to request that both Student Nutrition Services (SNS) proposals for Prop H money (otherwise known as the Public Education Enrichment Fund) be funded – Point of Sale (POS) swipe card system and expansion of salad bars. Both proposals can be found here. The SNS proposals are #9 and #10. Nestwife goes on to say:

I have written in the past about the fact that 26% more students per day are eating the cafeteria lunch at Balboa now that it has a salad bar. Now we are seeing that this is not a unique situation, and schools all across the district are seeing similar or even greater increases in the number of students eating the cafeteria lunches with the opening of the salad bar. If we had a POS system, all of this data would be current as of yesterday. Unfortunately, we don’t have a POS, and so all data must be entered into the system manually; thus the most recent month for which this manual data has been completed is November. The average increase is 16%, but some schools have seen huge jumps in the numbers of students eating lunch in the cafeteria, for example:

John Yehall Chin ES – up 29.4%
Francisco MS – up 30.3%
Horace Mann MS – up 59%
Presidio MS – up 22.7%
Excelsior MS/June Jordan HS (shared cafeteria) – up 29.3%
Thurgood Marshall HS – up 58.6%

More students eating in the cafeteria means more revenue for SNS, resulting in lowered deficit and less encroachment on the general fund. This in turn frees up more general fund money to pay for other school expenses which may be taking hits from the Governor’s proposed education budget cuts. As students love the salad bar and are turning out in record numbers to eat there, opening more salad bars not only addresses the most common demands from students for more fresh, nutritious food in their school lunch but also helps drive down the department deficit – a win-win!

Please write to the Board of Education and the Superintendent before January 17^th and ask them to provide funding for the salad bar proposal as part of Prop H spending. Email addresses are here. Thanks on behalf of all of our students!

School Beat: The Power of One Voice

BeyondChron's School Beat features Dana Woldow's account of one school's successful transition from a sugar saturated, junk food Halloween to a more healthy alternative:

School Beat: The Power of One Voice

On Halloween, with the City focused on whether the Castro would explode, a minor miracle was unfolding across town in the Presidio, where a preschool was planning its first ever Halloween celebration - without candy! Almost as noteworthy as the absence of Snickers bars was the fact that this healthy holiday celebration came about entirely because of the unwavering commitment of one parent.

Let them eat organic local artisan-baked cake

A bit off topic:

Today's NY Times Magazine has a pretty riveting account of Alice Waters' teaching a busy working mom of teenage boys to adopt a Slow Food lifestyle.

I know I sound like a major crank, but this story actually ticked me off, though. I love good food and Waters' cuisine, and pluots and the other esoteric delicious items she promotes. But I don't see how it's not sexist and oppressive to guilt-trip a busy working mom (Dad works somewhere afar and isn't around) about owning a microwave.

It's pretty clear that even though the family liked the Waters-approved cuisine, the changes weren't going to stick. But you have to read that between the lines, because the writer gets mealy-mouthed about it, obviously not wanting to bite the celebrated hand that visited her home in person to feed her.

“You don’t tell children what to do and what not to do. Instead, you invite them into an experience in which they find themselves.” ...
And then Waters was in our kitchen. She inventoried the pantry: it wasn’t pretty. “These scare me,” she said, pointing to hot-dog buns riddled with preservatives and the triplicate shakers of Jamaica Me Crazy seasoned salt. She suggested I date the spices and replace them every three months. “The microwave?” she said. “I’d get rid of it.” Microwaves are her spiritual opposite, symbols of speed and soullessness. She insisted that all we needed were a few simple tools: a large metal spatula; a cast-iron skillet; a toaster oven, her favorite appliance because it fosters small-scale cooking; and a Japanese suribachi, a ceramic mortar that is the perfect size for making vinaigrette.

Maybe if I gave up blogging and reading the Sunday New York Times Magazine I could fit in some slow food, and even learn why you need a mortar to make vinaigrette.
Not likely to happen, though.

Why Berkeley students eat better

BeyondChron's School Beat: A Tale of Two Cities--Why School Food is Better in Berkeley

by Dana Woldow‚ Oct. 11‚ 2007

Berkeley students have enjoyed fresher, healthier school lunches in the past couple of years, since celebrity chef Ann Cooper took over their meal program.

San Francisco’s school food has improved in recent years too, but our schools can’t feed kids as well as Berkeley does. The reason is simple: Berkeley has much more money to spend on school food.

The two districts’ lunch menus look similar — pizza, pasta, hot dog, burrito and chicken in various guises, plus whole-grain bread, fresh fruit and milk. Both districts have banished soda, chips and other junk food.

But in Berkeley, every school has a salad bar (organic in high school), hot dogs are grass-fed beef, and meals are freshly cooked in the district’s central kitchens. In San Francisco, only a few schools have salad bars, although 25 will open this year, thanks to a grant from Mayor Gavin Newsom. Hot dogs are USDA commodity turkey, and the food, while healthy, is mostly brought in precooked and frozen, then reheated.

How can one school district afford to feed needy students organic food and freshly cooked meals, while another just across the bay cannot?

The answer lies in an obscure funding stream from a property tax override that some communities approved in the late ’70s, called Meals for Needy Pupils. Only about a third of California school districts get this money; Berkeley’s share this year is $1.27 for every meal served to a low-income student. The San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) receives nothing, because San Francisco did not pass Meals for Needy Pupils when it had the chance. In mid-1978, Prop 13 curtailed the ability of school districts to raise funds in this way.

While this money originally went only for student nutrition, eventually the law was changed, allowing districts to use the funds for any purpose. Most started diverting the money to pay for other educational needs, Berkeley included. Then in 2004, the School Lunch Initiative, a public/private partnership between Berkeley Unified, Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse Foundation and the Center for Ecoliteracy, began an ambitious program committed to “provid(ing) all students with delicious, healthy, seasonal meals made from local, sustainably grown ingredients” (according to their website.) When Cooper was hired to run Berkeley’s nutrition department in 2005, she made her acceptance of the job contingent on Berkeley Unified’s restoring the Meals for Needy Pupils funding to her department.

Today, while SFUSD receives government reimbursement of $2.71 per lunch served to a needy student, Berkeley’s Nutrition Services department gets $2.71, plus an extra $1.27 from Meals for Needy Pupils – nearly 50 percent more than SFUSD. And at breakfast, San Francisco receives $1.83 for each free meal served, while Berkeley gets $1.83 plus the extra $1.27 – almost 70 percent more. Even though only about 40 percent of Berkeley pupils are needy, “Chef Ann” can provide a free breakfast to every child at most schools, with the revenue generated by the needier students covering the more affluent students’ meals. At lunch, Meals for Needy Pupils money helps pay for the salad bars, the organic ingredients, the grass-fed beef and the scratch-cooked meals.

It seems unfair that some children receive better school food than others because of decisions made before some of their parents were even born.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. San Francisco could provide more money for higher-quality student meals. One place to start is with the Public Enrichment Education Fund (commonly known as Prop. H), which authorized the use of city money to help improve the schools. Section 16-123 (e) of the City Charter specifies that money from the third of Prop. H funds allocated for “other support” can be used for students’ nutritional needs. With funding from Prop.H, salad bars could be opened in every SFUSD school, offering all students this healthier fare.

Students shouldn’t have to live in Chez Panisse’s back yard to get a top-quality school meal.

Dana Woldow is the co-chair of the SFUSD Student Nutrition and Physical Activity Committee, and the parent of two recent SFUSD graduates and one current SFUSD student. Contact her at Nestwife@owlbaby.com

Grab-and-go, Epicurious style

Speaking of healthy choices for school kids, this week Epicurious features a slew of articles on healthy snacks and lunches for school kids: School Days. Here's a list of recipes you'll find if you visit this article: Snack Attack

Energy Boosters

• Whole Wheat Pita Chips with Garbanzo Bean-Cumin Dip
• Deviled Eggs with Smoked Salmon and Green Onions
• Red Pepper Hummus
• Creamy Tofu Salad

Wholesome Sweets

• Cranberry-Almond Granola
• Pear and Granola Whole Wheat Muffins
• Sports Bars with Dried Fruit and Peanut Butter
• Orange and Kiwi Compote with Toasted Almonds

From the Thermos

• Low-Fat Vegetable Soup
• Mom's Hearty Chicken and Rice Soup
• Fresh Fruit Smoothie
• Super Energy Smoothie

Among the articles is one by Fast Food Nation's Eric Schlosser that is a good read. But like many articles about the pitiful state of school lunches nationwide, his article covers issues that SFUSD has been addressing for years now. Still, Schlosser provides a powerful presentation of the overall nutrition problems faced by the coming generation.

School Beat: Salad Days

Dana Woldow, a distinguished crusader for healthy food for kids, writes about the expanded salad bar offerings in this week's School Beat column.

School Beat: Salad Days

Soon, students choosing the hot lunch will also be able to visit a salad bar offering a mix of fresh greens, a variety of raw vegetable such as baby carrots, broccoli, and cherry tomatoes, plus fresh fruit and whole grain breads and muffins, all at no extra cost to students. The salad bar was piloted at 3 schools last year; at Balboa High School, 26% more students ate the school lunch once the salad bar was implemented, and virtually all of them were also students who qualified for free or reduced price meals.

Some on the list have questioned how the pilot schools were chosen. In this article, Dana provides answers. Check it out.

Annual meal application drive begins

Every year the effort to get all SFUSD families to complete the meal application kicks into overdrive. The application is used to enroll qualifying students in the federal free and reduced lunch program. The goal is to enroll every qualifying student by getting every family to complete the form regardless of need. DCYF is training volunteers to conduct outreach at school sites to help with this effort. The first training date is on September 12th with outreach work happening many schools sites on the 19th. See the SF Schools calendar for details.

Here is the copy of a flier about the campaign:

We Need Every Family to Fill out a Meal Application By October 9th!

Why is this so important?

We Get More Money for More Eligible Forms! Our school’s federal (Title 1), local (Weighted Student Formula), and private grant funding is based on the total number of eligible Meal Application Forms collected.

Better Quality Meals! The more eligible forms collected, the more money Student Nutrition Services (SNS) receives to spend for better food.

What if I know I do not qualify for free or reduced price meals? You can still help our school by filling in your child’s First and Last Name, School, and writing, "Not Interested", anywhere on the Meal Application.

What if my child doesn’t want school breakfast or lunch? If there is a chance that you qualify for free or reduced price meals, please fill out the form, including income level, to help our school receive more funding.

But I filled out a form last year! Federal Law requires schools to recertify all students for the School Meals Program each year. Even if you qualified last year, SNS will only receive reimbursements for your child if you fill out a new application this year. Our school’s funding is also determined each year based on current forms.

What if we are not citizens or legal U.S. residents? Free and reduced price meals are available for all children regardless of their citizenship status. All information on the Meal Application Form is confidential - it is not shared with INS / ICE or any outside agency. If you do not have a social security number, simply write "none" in that space.

Do I have to fill out an application if we already qualify for food stamps or other public assistance? Yes! Although your child is automatically eligible for the School Meals Program, we still need you to fill in your child's FIRST and LAST NAME, SCHOOL, and CalWORKS CASE NUMBER under Student/Child Information in Section III.

What if I don’t want others to know my child receives a free lunch? We are requesting applications from ALL students, qualifying or not, so returning the application won’t identify your child as receiving a free lunch. Neither our school nor the School District singles out or publicly identifies children who qualify for School Meal Programs.

Questions? Call Student Nutrition Services at 749-3604

Here come salad bars!

From Dana Woldow, parent volunteer/
SFUSD Student Nutrition & Physical Activity Committee Chair:

Thanks to a half million dollar grant from the Mayor's office and
Department of Children Youth and their Families, sixteen SFUSD middle
and high school will be opening salad bars this fall, and ten
elementary schools will be getting salad bars before the end of the
school year. The salad bars offer a mix of fresh greens and several
different fresh raw vegetables, in addition to a variety of fresh
fruit and whole grain breads and muffins; all of this is offered in
addition to the regular hot lunch at no additional charge. Students
who qualify for free or reduced price meals will get both hot entr�e
and salad bar for free, while all other students may purchase the
complete meal including salad bar for $2. Schools with salad bars
will also begin in October to feature a choice of hot entrees each
day, rather than just one choice, and high school students will be
served a larger portion size of the hot entree than previously.

The schools which will open salad bars are International Studies
Academy (ISA), Excelsior/June Jordan, Thurgood Marshall, Mission,
Newcomer, O'Connell, School of the Arts/the Academy, Raoul
Wallenberg, Everett, Francisco, Martin Luther King, James Lick,
Horace Mann, Visitation Valley Middle School, and Ulloa Elementary.
In addition, Balboa High School, Miraloma Elementary, and Harvey Milk
Civil Rights Academy, all of which hosted pilot salad bars in the
past, will continue to have salad bars this year, and additional
elementary schools will also be getting salad bars later in the
school year.

Many schools are currently torn up with construction projects related
to the Lopez settlement (disability access), but assuming all work is
completed on schedule, Harvey Milk, Mission, Everett, Newcomer,
Ulloa, and ISA will all see their salad bars commence during
September, with T. Marshall, Francisco, Lick, ML King, Mann, and
O'Connell scheduled for October. Miraloma and Balboa are expected to
have their salad bars open from the start of school.

Reminder: Kids' health takes priority in SFUSD

This message is from Dana Woldow,
chair of the SFUSD Student Nutrition and Physical Activity Committee.

A reminder to school staffs and parent groups:

As school begins again, please remember that the SFUSD’s federally mandated Wellness Policy prohibits the sale of food at school (beyond the cafeteria) during the school day; this includes all sales by parents, school staff, or students, including student or parent run school stores, bake sales, or classroom food sales. Please do not plan fundraising events around the sale of any kind of food, especially any kind of candy, during the school day. The only exception is the 4 days a year when high school students are allowed to sell food for fundraising for their clubs.

In June 2007, the Board of Education amended the Wellness Policy to include all food sent to school for sharing, such as food for parties, celebrations, or classroom snacks. The Child Development Program is included in the Wellness Policy. For more on food sent to school for sharing, click here.

For a quick and easy guide to finding healthy snacks for sharing at school, click here.

Or choose from this list.

Teachers are reminded that they may not sell food from their classrooms during school hours, including lunchtime, nor may they sell food during lunchtime performances, Brown Bag Theaters, etc.

For more on why such food sales are prohibited, click here.

To read the SFUSD’s Wellness Policy, click here.

For more information on student nutrition or the Wellness policy, click here.

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

Please, sir, I want some more

Some piece of information that floated past me piqued my curiosity about the SEED school, an "it's a miracle!" charter boarding school in D.C., leading me to its website. I couldn't help noting that the school meals appear a bit lacking in fresh seasonal produce (OK, maybe the kids ate that all up first).

School Board Notes 6.12.07: District Names New Superintendent

School Board Notes 6.12.07
By Nicole Achs Freeling
GreatSchools.net Correspondent

• District Names New Superintendent
• Guadalupe School Still Fighting for Computer Lab
• Proposed Budget Shows District Revenues Holding Steady

District Names New Superintendent

The board voted in former Las Vegas superintendent Carlos Garcia to be the new superintendent of SFUSD, starting July 16. Garcia, currently serving as vice president of National Urban Markets for McGraw-Hill Education Company, was superintendent of the Clark County School District in Las Vegas from 2000 to 2005. He also served as superintendent of the Fresno and Sanger, Calif., school districts, as a principal of San Francisco's Horace Mann Middle School, and as a school board member for the San Mateo County Board of Education. He grew up in Los Angeles, a student of Los Angeles public schools.

The board voted 6-1 in favor of Garcia. Kim-Shree Maufus cast the dissenting vote. She said she did so out of concern that the process had moved too fast, rather than because she had a problem with the candidate. "I felt we did not take the time to look right and look left, and make sure we were doing the most we could for the students of San Francisco." She went on to say, "My colleagues have heard my concerns and I know will continue to work to address them."

The district says the compensation package it is offering Garcia — including an annual salary of $255,000 — is less than that received by former Superintendent Arlene Ackerman in her last year of service. Ackerman was making a similar salary but had higher retirement contributions than Garcia will. The differential is due to fiscal constraints faced by the district, according to a press release. Garcia will also receive an $8,000 automobile allowance, a one-time $30,000 signing bonus, a $2,500 monthly housing allowance, and health and retirement benefits similar to those of other full-time district employees.

Board members, along with members of the public who spoke, generally applauded the superintendent search process, which they said had been conducted respectfully and amicably even when disagreements arose. Board members described Garcia as the best fit from among six highly qualified finalists, "all of whom were great people, all of whom I could've seen as superintendent," said Commissioner Mark Sanchez. The commissioners cited as attributes Garcia's experience working with a highly diverse student population and a high percentage of English language learners, his California-centered background, and his experience managing one of the largest school districts in the country. Several went on to qualify, however, that he was "not perfect." "We heard from detractors as well as supporters," said Commissioner Eric Mar. "It'll be up to us to work with him, but also to hold him accountable when necessary."

The Clark County School District and SFUSD share many problems, such as high dropout rates and achievement gaps, that bedevil many urban school districts. But Garcia's former district is also different in a key respect: the 5th-largest school district in the nation, it is also the single fastest growing. During Garcia's tenure, enrollment grew about 12,000 a year, with a new school opening about once a month.

The board voted to extend Gwen Chan's tenure as interim superintendent until Garcia takes over in July; she will stay on in an advisory capacity until the end of August.

Members of the board and the public voiced their appreciation for Chan, who has worked in the district for 40 years. Commissioner Norman Yee was so overcome with emotion he could not finish his speech. Others thanked Chan for her openness and genuineness, and for ushering in an era of cooperation with the board and labor groups.

Guadalupe School Still Fighting to Save Computer Lab

Teachers and students from Guadalupe Elementary School in the Crocker-Amazon neighborhood entreated the district again not to close its computer lab. Many of the students are from low-income families without other access to computers. The lab is closing to make room for additional classrooms due to overenrollment. Teachers and parents complained the move is jeopardizing the very students for whom the district has vowed to increase resources. The district has said it cannot get a bungalow set up at the school by the time school starts again in August.

Yee asked the staff to come back with a report as to how quickly they could get a new bungalow put on site. Commissioner Jill Wynns stated