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STUDENT NUTRITION AMBASSADORS IN CAMDEN CITY PUBLIC SCHOOLS WATCH CHEF SHANTAE WISE CAREFULLY CUT A SWEET POTATO TO BE USED IN A FRESH VEGETABLE SAMPLING.

PHOTO COURTESY OF CAMDEN CITY PUBLIC SCHOOLS

 

Arlethia Brown has a standing Saturday morning brunch date with her mother at New Jersey’s Camden High School. The made-to-order omelets and waffles, fresh fruit, and yogurt parfaits featuring homemade granola rival anything available in one of the state’s famous diners, says Brown, senior director of school nutrition for Camden City Public Schools. “My mom wouldn’t miss it,” she adds.

The Saturday brunch — offered at two district high schools open for weekend academic programs — is free to all students; adult guests pay $5. It is just one of the initiatives the 7,000-student school system has undertaken to elevate and expand its food service program.

Consider, for example, the addition of hydration stations filled with fruit-infused water at each of the district’s 30 sites. “We want to make sure that students have beverages that are not full of sugars and processed ingredients,” Brown says.

Other efforts include ensuring that fresh fruits and vegetables, often grown in district gardens or sourced from nearby farmers, are consistently added to school meals; increasing the number of made-from-scratch items; incorporating more recipes that reflect the cultural diversity of the school community; hiring students as cafeteria ambassadors; and expanding nutrition and health and wellness education to help build a healthier community.

“We’re talking about a community where the majority of our students are under the poverty line,” Brown says. “That means there’s going to be students that may not have meals to come home to. So, we have to bring in meals and programs and initiatives that are going to serve our students.”

Nutrition standards

Over 13 million children — 1 in 5 — lack consistent access to enough food for every family member to be healthy, according to a 2023 report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Children in such households are more likely to miss school, struggle academically, and repeat grade levels, researchers find.

“You can’t learn if you’re hungry,” says Shannon Gleave, president of the School Nutrition Association and director of food and nutrition for Arizona’s Glendale Elementary School District. “It’s important that our students are as prepared as possible to learn and to be successful in whatever their future holds for them. That begins with having a full belly and not worrying about where their meals are coming from.”

The National School Lunch Program (NSLP), the federally assisted meal program operating in public and nonprofit private schools and residential childcare institutions, provides nutritionally balanced, low-cost, or no-cost, lunches to some 30 million children each school day, according to the USDA. The School Breakfast Program (SBP) serves meals to 14.4 million children daily.

A study from the University of Georgia published earlier this year is the latest to show that students are benefiting from USDA-mandated nutrition standards in school meals. (Updates, which further cut sugar and salt in school lunches, were announced in April.) The University of Georgia study found that children from all walks of life improved their diet quality when they ate school-prepared lunches following the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 nutritional guidelines instead of home-prepared lunches. Lower-income and non-Hispanic Black students saw the most significant improvement.

‘Anti-hunger safety net’

The Camden school district is not alone in rethinking its school meals programs to boost student well-being. In Texas, the 57,000-student Garland Independent School District expanded its congregant (all meals are consumed on-site) free summer meals program this year to several off-site locations, including apartment complexes and a local church. It also will deliver multiday grab-and-go meals that families can pick up for children living in a USDA-designated rural location.

“We just wanted to get out into the community where our students are,” says Jennifer Miller, director of student nutrition services for the district located 20 miles northeast of Dallas. “Students don’t always have transportation to the schools where we serve during the summer.”

Expanding the summer meals programs also allows the school district to help support its community partners working to keep children healthy. “We saw that there was a need and wanted to help fill it,” Miller says.

In Virginia’s Norfolk Public Schools, the school nutrition department implemented a food pantry out of its central kitchen to provide additional support to food-insecure families and homeless youths beyond what is provided by federal nutrition programs.

Using grant funds and donations, the 27,000-student school division is “working in partnership with our Title 1 department and our McKinney-Vento Act families,” says Lisa Winter, senior director of school nutrition. “We also have a referral process where if an employee at the school notices that a child is food insecure at home, they have a means to requisition food for the household.”

Along with supporting local farmers’ markets, food drives, and summer cooking camps, the food pantry is the latest example of the district’s commitment to community organizations “that have missions that are in line with ours so that we can really weave that anti-hunger safety net as tight as we can, so that no one falls through,” Winter says. The district’s brightly colored food truck (a fully functioning mobile kitchen) helps support that commitment, delivering summer meals, assisting families in food deserts, and distributing healthy foods and snacks at camps, festivals, and community events throughout the city.

THE NORFOLK PUBLIC SHOOLS FOOD TRUCK DELIVERS A MEAL DURING A SPRING BREAK CAMP.

PHOTO COURTESY OF NORFOLK PUBLIC SCHOOLS

 

A key feature of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act was the authorization of the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP). This federal reimbursement for schools participating in the NSLP and SBP enables them to provide no-cost meals to all students.

According to the Food Research & Action Center (FRAC), a Washington-based advocacy group, CEP frees schools from collecting and processing school meal applications, which reduces administrative costs and paperwork, allowing school nutrition staff to focus more on offering healthy, appealing meals. All Camden City and Norfolk Public Schools participate in CEP; most schools in Garland ISD participate.

Universal school meals proved to be a lifeline for many families during the COVID-19 pandemic when federal waivers allowed schools across the country to serve free meals to all students, no matter their household income. The waivers expired in June 2022. Since then, a growing number of schools have signed up for CEP, according to FRAC, and eight states — California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, and Vermont — have passed universal free meal legislation.

“I’ve said this in some of my school board presentations, that for our district, one of the benefits of COVID and feeding the entire district for free was that everybody really ate, and they were eating with us every day,” says Garland’s Miller. That not only helped relieve some of the lingering stigma associated with free school meals, she says, “but parents realized how easy it was to not have to pack a lunch every day, and that their students were happy and receiving good meals.”

Menu planning

Increasing access and boosting nutrition is critical to successful school nutrition programs, but so is serving students appealing, tasty food options, Gleave says. “You can have this great nutritious meal, but if the students don’t touch it, then you’re not reaching them.”

In her predominately Hispanic and Latino district in Arizona, reaching students has included offering such popular Central and South American staples as pupusas (tortillas stuffed with beans, cheese, or meat). This coming school year, food services plans to offer birria tacos (known for their flavorful, tender meat).

NOT ALL HEROES WEAR CAPES; A GARLAND ISD ‘LUNCH HERO’ SERVES A MEAL.

PHOTO COURTESY OF GARLAND INDEPENDENT SCHOOL DISTRICT

 

While working to include more foods that students are familiar with, “we also want to give them an opportunity to learn about some food options they’re not getting at home or may not be familiar with,” says Brown, who presented on Camden City Schools’ multifaceted nutrition program during a 2022 CUBE Annual Conference education session.

“When you talk about educational equity, issues such as access to nutritious foods, the challenges presented by food insecurity, climate change, and environmental health, they’re all connected,” Brown says. “They’re all rooted in community.”

In a partnership with The Common Market, a nonprofit distributor that unites schools with local farmers, the district has added collard greens, kale, Swiss chard, mushrooms, and asparagus to school menus, emphasizing minimally processed fresh items grown in New Jersey. The response has been “incredible,” Brown says. “We did a lo mein with mushrooms at one of our schools, and everyone was going crazy for it.”

A Japanese-inspired pear-glazed beef and noodle dish was popular last spring in Garland ISD cafeterias, as was a lemon garlic baby bok choy side dish, both created by Executive Chef Kevin Jenkins. The district, a member of the Culinary Institute of America’s Healthy Kids Collaborative, is “constantly trying to increase more produce, increase more local foods, really do some of our own signature recipes,” Miller says.

The school gardening program at Norfolk Public Schools has proven valuable for the hands-on learning experiences that grow students’ awareness of where their food comes from and for the district’s food services department. Along with several outdoor school gardens, the district has installed hydroponic gardens in one-third of its schools primarily for experiential learning, Winter says.

“Our central kitchen also has three gardens, so we grow microgreens that become part of the entree salads that we make for every school,” she says. “We’ve got two small hydroponic towers that grow lettuce and tomatoes that can supplement the ingredients we make salads with.”

TWO SCHOOL 'LUNCH HEROES' IN NORFOLK PUBLIC SCHOOLS PREP SALADS.

PHOTO COURTESY OF NORFOLK PUBLIC SCHOOLS

 

In a new project with No Kid Hungry Virginia and the Youth Earn and Learn Jobs-for-Kids initiative, paid student ambassadors were trained in “School Nutrition 101” by a school district nutrition specialist and then received training in human-centered design processes. With that foundation, they conducted surveys and focus groups to gather student input on cafeteria food and the cafeteria environment. “It’s a way for us to get feedback from students and to make some changes that they will be able to see during their school career. It also helps show that we are listening and that we care,” Winter says.

A paid ambassador program in Camden Public Schools has produced job opportunities for several students as well as the district’s first junior chef. After earning a ServSafe certification and working under the tutelage of Shantae Wise, the district’s catering chef, rising high school junior Cherron Reynolds has mastered, among other things, the perfect Everything Omelet. Reynolds has been busy whipping up the dish for customers before school and during the district’s popular Saturday morning brunch program.

Watch a video of Camden City Public School’s first junior chef.

Watch a video of Garland ISD students reviewing Chef Kevin Jenkins’s Pear-Glazed Beef Yakisoba.

Read more from our interview with School Nutrition Association President Shannon Gleave in the August Q&A.