CDC’s “Considerations for Schools” document outlines how to help protect students, teachers, administrators and staff while slowing the spread of COVID-19. School nutrition technology companies are simultaneously focused on meeting school’s emergency needs, as well as shifting development priorities to providing solutions for opening this Fall.
The normally bustling cafeteria line and lunch room may become COVID quite.
Converting lunchrooms into classrooms is being discussed along with staggered and split schedules or alternating days for school site and remote learning. These are just a few of the challenges facing school nutrition operators. Limits on congregation of all types will limit cafeteria feeding and expand prepackaged or plated meals, already being provided for emergency feeding, to the classroom and alternate serving areas.
At risk students and staff may be urged to bring their own meals, unless extra precautions can be taken. Software that tracks allergies and food sensitivities may need to add new categories for at risk patrons.
Classroom meal service may resemble breakfast in the classroom, but with the need to provide more choices.
As many operators rely on ala carte to balance their budgets, a way to provide ala carte options and possibly entree choices is needed. The sheer volume of individual meals and complications of split schedules and alternate day feeding will require new meal ordering technology for teachers or other staff and possibly pre-ordering of meals by parents.
“Touchless” solutions are an important part of nutrition technology’s future.
Cafeteria line service will have to be modified for small groups with social distancing, and preferably touchless meal account activation and no cash transactions. Keypads, finger image, and palm scanning may be come things of the past. Alternate serving areas will require additional portable technology for meal accountability and ala carte sales.
More schools will likely qualify for the Community Eligibility Program, given the record breaking increase in unemployment. Schools that already qualify and haven’t switched may move to CEP. The possibility of a waivers being extended through the 20/21 school year could change the operations and business model completely.
Some thoughts about technology changes you may need to consider
Presently waivers are providing for emergency meals and food distribution and delivery through August 31. Alternate means of counting meals and tracking reimbursements are many. Some technology companies are providing free online applications during the COVID-19 crisis.
Touchless POS peripherals for student identification and automated meal transactions
Keypads utilized for student account identification are problematical. It is not feasible to keep up with the spraying, wiping and sanitizing of Keypads, even with smaller groups of students passing through. Solutions included “always on” scanners, that don’t require a cashier to shoot the barcode, or rosters with pictures, maybe even automated digital facial recognition technology could become available.
Paperless options
Paper rosters and paper in general will be a problem because of the number of times it changes hands. Meal ordering systems for the teachers or other staff on a classroom computer or mobile tablet are needed. The ability to process whole classrooms in seconds, with an onscreen picture roster, would help. Allergy alerts and special dietary restriction messages should be supported. Processing paper F&R applications requiring manual entry or scanning will need shift completely over to web F&R applications, allowing parents to apply and receive their student’s meal status online is the solution.
Meal Ordering systems
Ordering systems are relatively new. There are two main types, ones that order from the classroom and ones that are accessed through a parent portal for ordering by parents at home or on their phones. Check with you technology provider to see what they have or look for other providers. These systems don’t necessarily have to be integrated with existing POS or back office systems.
Meal payments
Forms of payment and prepayment such as cash and checks, like paper rosters, fall into the category of things to be avoided. Prepayment for meals and ala-carte online, already provided by most technology companies is the obvious solution.
The challenges are many and nutrition technology companies are racing to provide affordable solutions in time for schools starting in late Summer and Fall.
North Andover Sustainability Committee member and mom Joanna O’Connell set out on a mission to cut down on food waste in North Andover schools, and with the help of eco-conscious students and lunchroom and custodial staff, that mission is being accomplished.
“We were already recycling really well as a school district,” O’Connell said as she sipped coffee at Good Day Café on High Street waiting for school lunch periods to begin so she could check out their progress. “We were able to move past that and focus on food waste, which is good.”
Kids separate their lunch waste by recyclables and food and put the food waste into green bins at the end of lunch, with student helpers guiding them.
The custodians (O’Connell got them wheels for the trash barrels) then bring the waste outside to a specified composting bin.
Merrimack Valley-based OffBeet Compost comes and picks up the bins twice a week.
OffBeet turns that waste into soil at sites in Haverhill and Lowell, which is then sold to local farms, and the company’s owner also ships some to people who are in an OffBeet program. O’Connell, for example, pays $5 a week and leaves her compost outside for them to pick up, and twice a year she gets soil back.
The program, funded by the state this year, so far involves the Thomson and Kittredge elementary schools as well as North Andover Middle School and seeks to cut 30 percent of the town’s trash truck waste by removing compostable stuff from the trash stream.
Teachers helped get the kids excited with training videos about composting and the importance of cutting down on food waste.
“I kind of said to them, ‘We’re going to take out this 30 percent, we’re going to get it to a local farm, and they’re going to move it around, care for it, and in nine months or so, it’s going to turn back into soil, and that soil is then going to be used to plant your crops that you’re then eating,’” O’Connell said.
Benefits of school composting programs include:
Cutting down on food waste
Allowing kids who hear scary environmental news on a daily basis to get involved in fixing the problems
Teaching kids about nature and science with hands-on experience
Less work for the custodial staff who have to lug around trash bags after lunch
Giving kids a purpose they can carry with them into adulthood and maybe save the world’s environmental issues
A newly introduced federal bill seeks to heighten security at American schools by encouraging districts to adopt social media monitoring programs.
The controversial practice, which uses algorithms to crawl and index public profiles of popular sites like Twitter and Facebook, has grown in popularity over the last several years, as administrators look to new and emergent technologies to heighten school safety — and potentially head off the next mass shooting.
Now the Restoring, Enhancing, Securing, and Promoting Our Nation’s Safety Efforts Act or RESPONSE Act, introduced by Texas Sen. John Cornyn, advocates for numerous policies aimed at increasing school security, including a “Children’s Internet Protection” amendment that encourages districts to invest in programs that detect “online activities of minors who are at risk of committing self-harm or extreme violence against others.” Under the bill, almost all federally funded schools would be required to install software of this kind.
The bill comes at a time when schools are already investing more heavily in this technology. Earlier this year, a review by the Brennan Center for Justice of self-reported procurement orders from schools across the country showed that the number of school districts purchasing such software rose from just 6 in 2013 to 63 in 2018…
While there is a growing demand for these services, researchers are largely split on whether these programs actually prevent violence.
“Aside from anecdotes promoted by the companies that sell this software, there is no proof that these surveillance tools work,” the Brennan Center report concludes, also critiquing the software’s propensity for error, and the kinds of misinterpretation that can take place when machines sift through the slang-saturated conversations of teenagers.
When paired with other forms of surveillance, the software has concerned critics for its broad reach and lack of public oversight.
The Aspen Institute, for instance, recently released a brief report on data collection at school systems in Florida, where the state’s Department of Education recently launched a controversial Schools Safety Portal (FSSP). The portal mandates that state schools collect large amounts of student data — a process that is augmented by the deployment of social media monitoring programs.
The report argues that “preventing school shootings through data is fraught with ethical and technical risks, including a lack of data quality and the potential for biases across multiple levels of predictive algorithms.” The report doesn’t outright indict the practice itself, arguing instead that policies should be developed to increase process transparency and accountability, while deploying experts to ensure data quality.
The RESPONSE Act has seen significant support among a constellation of mental health and law enforcement organizations. In October, the bill was referred to the Senate Committee on the Judiciary where it is awaiting further review.
After a public health crisis in Flint, Michigan, triggered by high levels of lead in the drinking water, a number of programs are working to encourage good nutrition for children in order to prevent recurring effects of the neurotoxin on growing bodies. John Yang reports.
There’s a scene in the movie Mean Girls where new student Cady Heron gets a lesson from her friend, Janice Ian, about the social hierarchy of the high school cafeteria.
“Where you sit in the cafeteria is crucial,” Janice says. She then maps out the cliques, including preps, jocks and, of course, the “plastics.
The scene is an exaggeration of a common experience: the stress of finding your place in a school cafeteria. But Wisconsin resident Smitha Chintamaneni can’t relate.
“I’ve never had that experience,” she said. “I’ve never been at the cool kids’ table or the nerd table. We never had that at my school.”
Chintamaneni is an alum of the University School of Milwaukee, a private K-12 school in the suburb of River Hills. One of the most unusual things about the University School is its long-standing tradition of assigned lunch seating.
For new students, the seating rules can be a welcome relief. Sophomore Kylie Burger went to public elementary and middle schools before coming to the University School her freshman year of high school.
“At first I was really hyped,” said Kylie, 15. “I moved a lot with middle school, and usually I would sit alone. So I was excited to not sit alone at a table all year.”
The students are randomly assigned to eight-person circular tables, which rotate depending on that day’s schedule. Each has a mix of kids from different grades, with one teacher whose job is to get the table talking. Kylie says it doesn’t always go as planned.
“Sometimes it gets super awkward at tables,” she explained. “Like the conversation goes, ‘OK, what did you just come out of?’ ‘Math.’ ‘OK.’ And that was really kind of where it ends.”
Read more about School Lunch Assigned Seating at HERE
(CNN) California just took a step toward making its school environments a little more inclusive and eliminating school lunch shaming.
Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law a new piece of legislation that guarantees all students will receive lunch even if their parents or guardians have not paid their meal fees.
The bill, authored by state Sen. Robert Hertzberg, says students shouldn’t be denied a meal of their choice because of unpaid fees. It also ensures “that the pupil is not shamed or treated differently from other pupils.”
The legislation also addresses ways to more effectively notify parents and guardians of a negative balance.
Newsom’s support for the bill was in part inspiredby a young boy, the California governor said. “Earlier this year, Napa County elementary school student Ryan Kyote called national attention to how kids at his school were shamed and singled out because of inadequate funds in heir school lunch accounts,” Newsom said in a statement.
The 9-year-old boy gathered his allowance — all $74.80 of it — and used it to pay off his third grade class’s lunch debt. “He showed how at many schools across the country, students whose parents are not able to pay for their lunch are given a cheaper, ‘alternative’ lunch that causes them to stick out from their peers,” the governor said in his statement.
The two met earlier this year, the governor said. “I want to thank Ryan for his empathy and his courage in bringing awareness to this important issue,” Newsom said in a statement. Kyote isn’t the only young student to bring attention to the issue of student meal debt.
School lunch debt in the US has frequently made headlines in the past few months.
A survey by the School Nutrition Association found that three-fourths of school districts reported having unpaid student meal debt at the end of the 2016-2017 school year.
The facial recognition market is a fast-growing industry expected to generate a value of almost $9B annually by 2022. Part of that market includes the education sector.
Currently, governments are the biggest consumers of this technology because of its ability to deter crime. The “eye in the sky” watching over everyone is able to detect facial features, allow expedient access or deny it, and identify persons of interest. Large cities like Chicago and Detroit have already opted into using biometric recognition.
Some people find Big Brother technology comforting, and others find it invasive. What if this same software is used in the schools your children attend or where you teach?
Uses for facial recognition software in education
There’s no doubt that technology has made it possible to get more done in a day. Where we once had to perform many tasks in education by hand, we now use technology as an assistant.
Software helps teachers provide customized lessons, analyze data, and even keep track of behavior. Technology saves teachers time, which something they don’t have a lot of. Think about all the clerical tasks a teacher performs each day, like taking attendance or recording which students eat lunch in the cafeteria, and which foods they select.
Facial recognition software can significantly reduce the time teachers spend performing clerical duties like these. Students actions and behaviors can be matched to a face, and then the information is either shared (with the registrar/attendance clerk and the food services department) or stored for later access.
The teacher is free to spend more time preparing or delivering instruction.
Facial recognition software can also shorten the time students take to log in to learning programs. Within a second, the software maps facial features and approves access, saving students from having to log and type a password each time they want to use a computer.
“Your child has been sent to school every day without money and without a breakfast and/or lunch,” read the letter, which was signed by Joseph Muth, director of federal programs for the Wyoming Valley West School District. “This is a failure to provide your child with proper nutrition and you can be sent to Dependency Court for neglecting your child’s right to food. If you are taken to Dependency court, the result may be your child being removed from your home and placed in foster care.”
This letter is just one of many recent examples across the country of students and families being penalized for failing to pay their debt from school meals.
In Rhode Island, two school districts began using collection agencies to recover school lunch debt. In one district, the debt had reached $90,000.
What does this issue reveal about American families? And what impact does it have on students?
Some states are seeing school lunch debt soar into the millions of dollars, but the exact amount of lunch debt schools nationwide have accumulated collectively isn’t known because the U.S. Department of Agriculture doesn’t collect or provide that data. As an issue that disproportionately involves marginalized families — those in poverty, living paycheck to paycheck, or even undocumented immigrants afraid to participate in the federal free lunch program — lunch debt magnifies the widespread economic and structural inequities that have historically existed in the U.S. It also has a very real effect on children — whether causing them [to] go hungry (since school meals are the only meals some children eat in a day), hurting their self-esteem, or both.
Nutritionists and dietitians from around the country are working to made kids’ school lunches healthier and more delicious.
The School Nutrition Association hosted its 73rd annual National Conference this week at the America’s Center Convention Complex in downtown St. Louis. The two-day convention allowed school nutrition professionals from around the country to sample food and recipes, test equipment and software, and share the best practices for meeting federal nutrition requirements.
More than 350 companies set up booths and handed out samples on Monday and Tuesday. Chef and Registered Dietitian Brenda Wattles writes recipes for school lunches nationwide. She stresses the importance of creating meals catered to kids and teens with changing palates.
“We see kids’ pallets increasing. We see a trend in the rise of ethnic foods, they want to try a lot of different flavors,” she said.
During the convention, experts sampled meals like ramen bowls and Korean barbecue. They’ll then decide whether school children in their area would benefit from offering it on the school’s lunch menu.
Wattles said the focus is on incorporating fresh fruits and vegetables into each meal. She hopes healthy meals like kale salad with chicken and black bean burgers will inspire children and teens to make nutritious meals a priority.
“Sometimes it takes them 10 times to try something before they eat it.” Said Wattles.
Experts said many of these options could come to school lunch menus across the country in the next year.
A 9-year-old boy is reaching into his piggy bank to help his classmates in Napa, California. Ryan Kirkpatrick used his allowance to pay off the lunch debt for his entire third-grade class.
KGO reported that Ryan became inspired to take action after talking to his mom, Kylie Kirkpatrick, about kids who couldn’t afford school lunches.
Ryan then asked his mom to find out how much was owed by his fellow third-grade classmates at West Park Elementary School. That amount came out to be $74.50.
Kylie Kirkpatrick told KGO, “It was, I think, $74.50. So I took that email and came to Ryan and said, ‘What do you want to do,’ and he said, ‘I guess I can pay for it.’ And I said, ‘Are you sure?’ And he said, ‘Yes.'”
Ryan said that he would typically use his allowance to purchase sports gear.
This time, he gave it all to the school.
The school district policy says that students who have a negative lunch account will still receive a hot meal.
Depending on income levels, elementary school meals range in price from .30 cents to $3.25, KGO reports.
“I want them to realize people actually think about them because you’re just bragging about stuff. I want them to feel happy someone cares about them,” Ryan said to KGO.
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