Schools across the country aren’t even done with this school year yet, but they are already preparing for the next one.
Changes are coming specifically to the school lunch program. Earlier this year, Congress failed to pass an extension of the COVID waivers for the next school year, which could mean many different things for your and your child.
“As we transition to regular price meals during the school year, I would imagine our numbers will significantly decrease as well because we are capturing a whole demographic of students that don’t normally eat at school because it’s no charge this year, now they are eating,” said Anji Branch, with the Gooding School District.
For the past two school years, every child has been able to eat breakfast and lunch for free at school. Next year, however, parents will have to apply for free or reduced lunch.
Another change is with the meal pattern waiver, which holds schools accountable for what each meal is required to have: a meat, meat substitute, grain, fruit, vegetable, and milk.
“If we couldn’t get a product that was ok for K-12 menus, because we have very specific menu guidelines that we have to follow, we could use a product that wasn’t necessarily whole grain rich, or maybe it’s a little too high in sodium than we would normally allow, that we wouldn’t get penalized, and we won’t have that next year and that’s going to be a big problem,” said Becky Elmore, with the Post Falls School District.
Minnesota lawmakers approved changes to school meal programs that stops what many advocates call “lunch shaming.” And there’s hope more steps will be taken to make free school lunches permanent.
Colleen Moriarty said she’s been working for the last decade to make sure public school students are no longer embarrassed because they can’t afford their lunch bill.
“Ten years ago we heard about snapping rubber bands on kids’ wrists, collection agencies going after families…lunches being dumped in front of kids,” Moriarty said. “Or, you get to enter your code for lunch and they say ‘oh no, I’ll take that lunch from you…you can just have this cheese sandwich …or you can have this cheese sandwich and eat it in the principal’s office.’”
But a new education finance bill passed by state lawmakers changes how schools deal with students with lunch debts.
The move from state lawmakers comes after the Biden administration gave school districts nationwide the greenlight to continue offering free lunches for students until the end of the 2022 school year.
For Teacher Appreciation week, President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden made their way to Yorktown (Va.) Elementary School and visited with some fifth graders. The school visit was part of the White House’s Getting America Back on Track: American Family Plan Tour, a push for returning to in-person learning for all kids.
Prior to the visit, Yorktown’s Sodexo foodservice team didn’t have a lot of advanced notice but were tasked with setting up a hospitality tent with water and grab-and-go snacks for the media who would be attending and keeping lunch that day on track as well, a duty Sodexo GM Michelle Lee Knotts considers her top priority, no matter how exciting the special guests.
“It was pure excitement,” Knotts says of the moment she heard about the President’s visit, “and then, of course, my mind changes to food: He’s coming to an elementary school where I need to make sure the kids are fed at the same time…what in the world was that going to look like?”
After spending a busy weekend getting logistics set up, portions of the building were identified and some of the production was done off site. “We had to be very tight-lipped” about the planning, “as we were putting things into place, I wasn’t telling the staff about the visit. We had to keep it as quiet as possible,” Knotts says. “I couldn’t believe how much goes into planning when the President is coming!”
On the day of the visit, Air Force One arrived in Newport News, where the Bidens met Virginia Governor Ralph Northam and Virginia First Lady Pamela Northam then headed to the school, where the principal and other school leaders were waiting, along with Congresswoman Elaine Luria and her daughter, Violette.
The Bidens got to hang out on a fifth-grade class, where the First Lady asked a few students, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” (One of the answers was chef!)
The lunch service for the day went off without a hitch, and some of the foodservice staff stood outside and waved to the Bidens—who shouted hellos and thank yous—as they left the school parking lot in “the Beast,” a special armored car.
After the visit, Biden tweeted: “Jill and I visited a classroom today where students are back together with their classmates and teachers. We know what being in school together means for those kids—it’s why we worked so hard to safely reopen the majority of K-8 schools in our first 100 days.”
For her part, Knotts says, “We were truly happy to be a small part of this event; while I was not expecting to meet the President, I was there to take care of our children, because that’s what I’m here to do.”
Republished with permission from Food Management magazine
National School Lunch week shines the spotlight on the programs and nutritious food that’s served up every day all year long at schools across the country.
“We have the opportunity in the state of Alabama to reach approximately three quarters of a million children on a daily basis for meals,” said June Barrett, Alabama Child Nutrition Program Coordinator for the state Department of Education. Nationally, the School Lunch Program serves nearly 30 million students every school day.
“If a child is hungry, they cannot learn. And I think that that’s probably the biggest message that we need to provide to parents and to the community in general,” Barrett explains about the importance of the School Lunch Program. “Because if a child did not come to school, having eaten breakfast, did not have an opportunity to eat lunch, then they would not be able to sit in the chairs and learn from the teachers or listen to what the teachers are trying to present to them.”
The coronavirus pandemic has added some major challenges to the mission of making sure every child is fed.
“Some of the challenges our local Child Nutrition directors face were actually making contact with the children once the schools were released in March,” Barrett said. “We did provide meals, we had curbside pickup. We thought out of the box as much as you could possibly think out of the box and provide meals to children. And it’s been very, very valuable. We’ve partnered also with our Department of Transportation, and meals were actually delivered by bus drivers through certain communities. We’ve had all sorts of opportunities to encourage children to dine with us. We have the fresh fruits and vegetable program and USDA allowed us to extend that to the to the children who were at home learning during virtual learning processes. So we’ve really tried as diligently and served as many children as we could serve meals and food while they were away from the school grounds.”
The theme for this year’s National School Lunch week is “Now Playing” and it’s “centered around Hollywood themed processes,” Barrett explained. “So anything that could be done on a movie theater basis, fun and having tickets to go through lunch line, you know, go through the meal process or special things that could connect. Now Playing in the theater role with the National School Lunch Program would just be something that would add to the perspective of receiving a meal and having fun, and that’s what National School Lunch week is, just really all centered around having fun with children.”
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
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.
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.
An Indiana school district is taking steps to make sure kids have enough to eat.
Elkhart Community Schools students usually get breakfast and lunch at school lunch food, but on the weekends at home, they may be without food.
That’s where the South Bend-based non-profit Cultivate Culinary comes in: it provides weekend meals to a small group of students in the elementary school pilot program.
“Mostly, we rescue food that’s been made but never served by catering companies, large food service businesses, like the school system,” said Jim Conklin of Cultivate Culinary. “You don’t always think of a school.”
It rescues the unused food.
“Over-preparing is just part of what happens,” said Conklin. “We take well-prepared food, combine it with other food and make individual frozen meals out if it.”
Twenty students will receive a backpack with eight individual frozen meals every Friday until the end of school.
“At Elkhart Community Schools, we were wasting a lot of food,” said Natalie Bickel, student services. “There wasn’t anything to do with the food. So they came to the school three times a week and rescued the food.”
The Chamber of Commerce’s Leadership Academy Commerce helped get the pilot program going.
“It’s making a big impact,” said Melissa Ramey, Chamber Leadership Academy. “I am proud of that. It was heartbreaking to hear that children go home on the weekends and that they don’t have anything to eat.”
It’s making a big difference in the lives of the students receiving the meals. The Elkhart school system wants to expand the food program to other schools.
The social media sensations, Rhett and Link of Good Mythical Morning, ask the question. Were schools serving up lettuce sandwiches in the 1940’s or 1920’s? watch as they try to slide their way through school lunch history while sampling 100 years of school lunches.
Contact 
