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Poland schools work to promote meal program
POLAND
The Poland School District is trying to promote the school breakfast and lunch program in light of some challenges it faces.
Increasingly stringent federal guidelines about what the district can serve for meals has made it difficult to sustain participation in a program that already wasn’t thriving, district officials say.
“Ideally, [the program] would be self-sustaining,” Superintendent David Janofa said.
Instead, the school district is spending money on the program. The issue was a topic of discussion at a recent board of education meeting after the board approved the transfer of $69,500 from the general fund to a lunchroom/cafeteria fund.
District leaders want to see that figure reduced, a goal that district food-service Director Barbara Walko is working to achieve by boosting participation and keeping food costs low.
About one-third of Poland students buy lunch at school; only about 4 percent buy breakfast.
“Our participation is not where it should be,” Walko said. “At this point, I would take any amount of increase.”
The challenge, she says, is to strike a balance between serving healthful foods the district is required to provide, and serving foods students will want to buy.
Walko first noticed a drop in participation a few years ago.
In addition to declining enrollment in recent years, another factor could be that the district has had to adopt new nutrition standards for school lunch and breakfast programs outlined by the Food and Nutrition Service, a division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, in 2012.
“Pretty much once those changes started ... the participation started to drop off,” Walko said.
“The federal government has really placed some significant barriers on our ability to serve lunches – from quantity, the type of food to the color of food,” Janofa said.
The government now requires schools to “increase the availability of fruits, vegetables, whole grains and fat-free and low-fat fluid milk in school meals; reduce the levels of sodium, saturated fat and trans fat in meals; and meet the nutrition needs of schoolchildren within their calorie requirements,” according to a USDA document.
“In many cases, kids aren’t used to this,” Walko said. “It’s kind of tough to say, ‘Oh let’s eat an apple,’ when someone [else] is advertising french fries and bacon.”
As a district with few students from low-income households, Poland is not eligible for much federal money for free and reduced-price meals.
“Those districts that have high free and reduced meal [eligibility] tend to get much better participation,” Walko said.
Last year, the school district got a reimbursement of about $145,000 from the state and federal governments. Students pay between $2.75 and $2.25 for lunch.
That leaves the school district to pay $50,000 to $60,000 per year for the program, Walko said.
She encourages parents to allow their children to buy meals at school, saying the meals can end up being cheaper and more nutritious than what parents are sending to school.
“They’re going to get a nice balanced meal,” she said.