News from Ferndale School District

Mountain View to offer Ferndale Fries as pilot farm-to-school program (Bellingham Herald Article)– “Students at Ferndale's Mountain View Elementary School will soon be treated to freshly baked potatoes from northwest Washington as part of their school lunch. On Jan. 27, the french fries and tater tots at the school are being exchanged for locally grown potato wedges, as part of a pilot farm-to-school project. ‘This is something that's good for the students and it's good for the local farmers,’ said Alex Singer, Ferndale School District's Food Program director. ‘We have students who may not have ever had french fries that weren't frozen before.’”

Calling all Spielbergs!

Here’s a chance to have fun, be creative, learn about good food for your school cafeteria and win some money. The Real Food Video Contest (details here) could earn you $1.000 for your school project. Not to mention an all expenses paid trip to the 5th National Farm to Cafeteria Conference in Detroit, Michigan, May 17-19, 2010. Make a video that tells what real food means to you and your community and submit it before March 29th. Then visit the site to vote for the best one and wait for the announcement of the lucky winner on April 13th.

A reason to celebrate - over and over again

Orcas Island has hit on a great idea: the Celebratory Lunch for the Farm to Cafeteria Program. Different island gourmands prepare a special lunch once a month featuring wholesome local food, mostly made from scratch. Professional and amateur local chefs sign up for the month they want and it's practically become a regular feature at the school cafeteria. The students love it! Who wouldn't? It's a great idea that could be adapted by other communities. Read about it in Bullwings

Something to crow about

13-year-old student Jordan Lederman from Pine Lake Middle School in Sammamish entered a video contest sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) on the importance of getting a good education. Of the 600 entries received, staffers at DOE picked 10 finalists, including Jordan. Her video, that explains how different subjects have helped her learn about chickens, is a how-to for the cross curriculum connotations of Farm-to-School programs. She is also quite sweet and a little silly in a very charming way. Click on Lederman’s video (lower right hand corner) and watch her chicken story. If you get there by December 4th you can vote for the contest winner.

Gardens are great

We always say that school gardens can be used to teach anything across the curriculum, and here is a very poignant case in point. At North Adams School in Massachusetts students have donated 232 pounds of produce to the Berkshire Food Project. This is the product of their school gardens and of their study of local social issues relating to hunger and access to healthy food. They also learn and write about growing their crops. Read about it in this article from The Berkshire Eagle.

It's magic!

There's a School Garden Wizard! This supports your vision of a school garden with the necessary tools to make it a success. There are steps for building a team, designing, getting funds and supplies, learning the basics, planting, activities, resources, teaching and sustaining your garden. Plus lots of photos and wonderful ideas.

The history of a school garden

At Lewis Elementary School in Portland, OR the school garden includes greenhouses, composting bins, raised beds, barrels for rainwater harvesting and an outdoor classroom. This garden is used for all sorts of education and it is a peaceful relaxing spot as well. This garden was started small and has progressed following the ideas and needs of the school itself. There are teachers, parents, students and community volunteers hard at work, building a successful garden that can meet the very specific needs of the school. Read about the Lewis garden at Edutopia.

An alternate type of garden

Container gardening allows you to grow plants in difficult situations, using different gardening types, many of them very suitable to schools. The blog Container Gardening is completely dedicated to making your growing experience a successful one.

One of the ideas that they explore in great detail is how to grow a vegetable garden in plastic bottles. They have some clever ideas and good advice. There are exhaustive details about containers, soil, drainage, seeds, etc.

This might make a good school project that could then be taken home.

We're in fashion!

An article in the Washington Post, Thinking outside the school lunchbox, highlights how schools are adopting the goal of eating healthy by using fresh, local products in their school meals. This article has examples from schools in and around the captial while estimating that there are "more than 2,000 farm-to-school programs...in about 40 states."

What do we teach in the school cafeteria?

At School Lunch Talk there is an interesting article about how school lunch is approached in France. There, food is part of a larger picture that includes making good choices, proper eating habits and good manners. The author, Deborah Lahmann, suggests that this is a way to use lunch time as an educational tool for nutrition, preparation techniques and cultural heritage whereas the typical American approach is only to use school lunch as a re-fueling time before getting back to class. She advocates making food a higher priority, and taking advantage of the cafeteria as another classroom.
A later entry deals with Italy where there is a law that mandates schools and other institutions to use local organic products where possible and to comply with the National Institute of Nutrition. Instead of parents advocating, the state is mandating. An important part of this is that the government is willing to pay, like they are in France, and the price of lunches is subsidized by the city. In fact they pay at least half the cost of every lunch, and even more if the students come from poorer economic backgrounds. Compare that to the US where the government pays much less and the total spent on lunches is significantly less.

A garden grows

'Classroom in Bloom' is a half acre garden shared by two schools in Winthrop. The garden lets the students (K-12) experience growing their own food and the cycles of food production hands on. The teachers have incorporated the whole gardening experience into the curriculum which increases the learning and gardening aspects for everyone.
Anaka Mines and Lexi Koch are the founders and co-coordinators of the program, which has been supported by the schools since the spring of 2004. Participation in the garden means young people can experience the satisfaction of working with the soil, understand the pleasure and disappointment of caring for a garden that produces food - from preparing and enriching the soil to planting and nurturing the plant to harvesting and consuming to converting the waste back into the soil.
There is a wonderful video on their web page that recounts a lot of their philosopies and experiences.

The enormous impact of buying local

What are the benefits of using local food sources for schools?
We may just be scratching the surface of understanding the potential advantages according to a study being conducted by Ecotrust and Oregon State University. Preliminary results show that money spent on such programs has great implications in the community. In fact, they estimate that every dollar spent in a grant from Kaiser Permanente to two local school districts resulted in $1.87 of economic activity that reverberated throughout most sectors of the economy, not just in the agricultural industries.
That’s because a multiplier effect includes the impact of buying local food as well as the impact of those food suppliers spending the cash on materials and services in turn. When Portland and Gervais school districts were given funds through a grant from Kaiser they were motivated to reallocate those funds to the local economy. Whereas previously they may have been able to buy food a bit more cheaply, they hadn’t always been able to buy local. With the grant they bought local, sometimes paying slightly more, but the result was a huge boost to the local economy. According to the article in Capital Press Agricultural News, the $66,200 grant generated a total of $225,900.

Learning to live healthy

Are the kids in your school talking about salad and raspberry dressing before lunch? That’s what’s happening at Veterans Memorial Elementary in North Naples. This school decided to plant a school garden so the students could plant and grow their own food. The goals, to save money and educate children about healthy food, have been met with enthusiasm on the part of all.
The program was suggested by a mother and seconded by the whole community. The children are proud to raise their own food and are learning good nutrition by living the experience. They get fresh, wholesome food in their cafeteria. The hands-on experience of working in their own garden builds self confidence from achieving through hard work and an understanding of delayed gratification. It is also a godsend economically in times when all school budgets are tight.
According to an article about the school and its program in the Macro Eagle, about 60% of the students chose salad for lunch on the day the reporter visited the school. The school sought advice and partnership in the endeavor from their school district, master gardeners and a local foundation. The children benefit by an increased desire to learn about the science related to growing food, time spent outside working in the garden and healthy food.

Five winners announced in "Kids are Growing"

This year’s winning schools for the “Kids are Growing” contest sponsored by the International Greenhouse Co, Washington State Potato Commission, PCC Natural Markets and King 5 were Concordia Lutheran in Tacoma, Graham Hill Elementary in Seattle, Cedarhurst Elementary in Burien, Rainier Elementary in Rainier and Explorer Community School in Redmond.
Each school had to complete an entry binder that detailed what a greenhouse would do for them: how they would use it and what they could learn from it. They also had to submit an original, healthy potato recipe.
The prizes for each school were an 8’x 8’ EasyGrow greenhouse kit, a $1000 grant from the Washington State Potato Commission, and a $500 grant and garden supplies from PCC Natural Markets.
The winning schools will use these prizes to grow food for school lunches and community food banks and to learn about healthy food choices and how food grows.

Make the connection with Farmers Markets

An article in the Bend Weekly demonstrates how local schools have been able to take advantage of the farmer's market to find new opportunities to establish relationships with local producers. This may be a fantastic way to connect with local farmers and to learn about what products they will have available shortly. (Bend Weekly)

Breakfast and summer meal grants announced; First recipient to connect kids with local, fresh-cooked meals

Okay, so I'm a bit out of practice. My summers are spent focusing on coordinating our county-wide Harvest Celebration Farm Tour, and the Farm-to-School blog has been neglected. I apologize.

But here's a little positive news to kick-start it again!

Here's the basic info:

"East Side Entrees, the Woodbury supplier of school meals, yesterday
announced a $9-million, three-year initiative to help school districts around the country boost student participation in breakfast and summer meal programs."

"These programs would target districts and areas where high portions of the student population are eligible for free or reduced-price meals and provide free breakfast to all students, in the classroom, to remove any negative stigma associated with subsidized meals."

Sounds great, but how will it be used, and how does this relate to farm-to-school specifically?
Turns out the first recipient school district, Baltimore Public Schools, "plans to revamp the schools' food services system by building kitchens so that the department can begin cooking its own food instead of reheating processed food, purchasing local food that's fresh and cheaper and turning a 33-acre farm into a classroom to teach children about nutrition and connect them with their foods' origins."

I'll admit I'm a little confused here. The grantor is East Side Entrees, a company who sell pre-packaged, shelf-stable breakfast boxes using branded food items. I'm a bit surprised that they're funding grants that can be used to revive kitchens to cook more fresh, local food. I also can't find info about how to apply for the grants, and their offices are closed for the day. I guess we'll have to wait and see how these grants will be distributed, and how to apply. It's worth checking into if you are connected to a school with a high percentage of students eligible for free and reduced priced meals.

All quotes from: Giving kids a $9M breakfast boost, by Newsday's Keiko Morris. Here's a lengthier article about the program from the Baltimore Sun: "Food for thought: In-class breakfast for city schools"

Study finds that school-based nutrition programs reduce numbers of students who become overweight

There's an encouraging study in the April 2008 issue of Pediatrics about the role of schools in overweight and obesity prevention.

For the study, The Food Trust in Philadelphia created a school nutrition policy initiative that was tested in 10 public schools to see how effective school-based nutrition programs (including nutrition policy changes, social marketing and family outreach) can be at influencing overweight and obesity in students in grades 4-6.

Here's the key finding:

The intervention resulted in a 50% reduction in the incidence of overweight. Significantly fewer children in the intervention schools (7.5%) than in the control schools (14.9%) became overweight after 2 years.

The entire study report is available on the Pediatrics website.

Forgive the lengthy post, but I wanted to include the basic information on what school interventions were used. Here's an excerpt from the report:

"The SNPI included the following components: (1) school self-assessment; (2) nutrition education; (3) nutrition policy; (4) social marketing; and (5) parent outreach. Each component is described briefly below. A more detailed description of the intervention is available at http://www.thefoodtrust.org/.

Self-Assessment. Schools assessed their environments by using the CDC School Health Index.13 Each school formed a Nutrition Advisory Group to guide the assessment. Teams included administrators, teachers, nurses, coaches, and parents. After completing ratings on healthy eating and physical activity, schools developed an action plan for change. Schools proposed various strategies, such as limiting the use of food as reward, punishment, or for fundraising; promoting active recess; and serving breakfast in classrooms to increase the number of students eating a healthy breakfast.

Staff Training. All of the school staff in the intervention schools were offered 10 hours per year of training in nutrition education. At these trainings, staff received curricula and supporting materials such as Planet Health4 and Know Your Body,14 as well as nutrition and physical activity theme packets designed to integrate classroom lessons, cafeteria promotions, and parent outreach. Staff attended trainings both across and in intervention schools, giving them a chance to work together as a team and to share ideas with their counterparts in other intervention schools.

Nutrition Education. The goal was to provide 50 hours of food and nutrition education per student per school year, which was based on the National Center for Education Statistics guidelines.15 The educational component was designed to be integrative and interdisciplinary. Its purpose was to show how food choices and physical activity are tied to personal behavior, individual health, and the environment. Nutrition was integrated into various classroom subjects. For example, students used food labels to practice fractions and nutrition topics for writing assignments.

Nutrition Policy. In each of the intervention schools, all of the foods sold and served were changed to meet the following nutritional standards, which were based on the Dietary Guidelines for Americans and converted from the percentage of calories to grams per serving,16 which is in alignment with information shown on nutrition labels: all of the beverages were limited to 100% juice (recommended 6-oz serving size), water (no portion limits), and low-fat milk (recommended 8-oz serving size). Snack standards allowed 7 g of total fat, 2 g of saturated fat, 360 mg of sodium, and 15 g of sugar per serving. Before these changes, soda, chips, and other drinks and snacks had been sold in vending machines and a la carte in the cafeteria of schools with full-service kitchens. Schools without full-service kitchens did not sell a la carte food items or have vending machines. Schools were matched by type of food service to control for differences in the sales of vending and a la carte items.

Social Marketing. The SNPI used several social marketing techniques. To increase meal participation and consumption of healthy snack and beverage items, students who purchased healthy snacks and beverages or who brought in snack items that met the nutritional standards from home or local stores received raffle tickets. Raffle winners received prizes for healthy eating, such as bicycles, indoor basketball hoops, jump ropes, and calculators. The message "Want Strength?...Eat Healthy Foods," paired with an easily recognizable character, reinforced healthy messages through incentives and frequent exposure. Both the slogan and the character were developed through focus groups with students who were not in the study schools but were of similar age, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status.

Family Outreach. Nutrition educators reached family members through home and school association meetings, report card nights, parent education meetings, and weekly nutrition workshops. They encouraged parents and students, on the way to and from school, to purchase healthy snacks. Students participated in the 2-1-5 challenge to be less sedentary (2 hours per day of television and video games), to be more physically active (1 hour per day), and to eat more fruits and vegetables (5 per day). Intervention schools reduced the amount of unhealthy foods sold at parent fundraisers and discouraged parents from sending sweets to teachers at holiday time. One school chose to have a weekly breakfast club with female athletes from a local university."

via Foodlinks America newletter published by California Emergency Foodlink in Sacramento, CA. For archived issues of Foodlinks America, go to: www.tefapalliance.org. To request a free subscription to the newsletter or to submit story ideas, contact Barbara Vauthier at: bvauthier@tefapalliance.org.

Auburn School District Gardens In the News Again

Here's more about Auburn School District Nutrition Director Eric Boutin and his garden and orchard program. As far as we know, it's the first school district in the state to grow food to be served in cafeterias. The garden is also an educational tool--students plant and work in the garden.

Auburn High School Program hopes garden is step in healthier direction.

As for the oft-asked question, "Who will care for the garden in summer?"--it will be tended by students enrolled in summer programs at the school district and served in their summer food program.

Auburn School District's Fabulous Garden Project

Auburn High School has a great fruit tree and greenhouse garden project and it's in the news!

The garden project is the brainchild of Eric Boutin, School Nutrition Services Director at Auburn School District (and regular attendee of the Farm to School Connections Team meetings). Inspired by the Edible School Yard project in Berkeley, he's working with community partners like Bastyr University and Cascadian Ediuble Landscapes to make it happen. With greenhouses and a dwarf fruit tree orchard, the garden inhabits a one acre lot between Auburn High School and an elementary school. Food from the gardens will be included in school lunches. I hope this project can serve as a model for other schools--we'll watch the progress and hopefully create a more detailed case study soon!

Student-Grown Produce in Connecticut Schools

Students in Bloomfield, Connecticut and the surrounding area are coming together to grow produce, raise chickens for eggs, and even raise tilapia fish for the school district's cafeterias. Tim Cipriano, the District's recently hired food services manager, worked with Joe Rodrigues at the Donald F. Harris Sr. Agri-Science & Technology Center to create an agriculture program that feeds students educationally and nutritionally. For more info, read Steven Goode's article Food For Students From Students in the online Hartford Courant.