Healthy Schools Campaign

Good Luck to the Cooking up Change Student Chefs: A Message From White House Assistant Chef Sam Kass

Cooking up Change is only a few days away and we're getting excited. Our high school student chefs are finalizing their healthy school lunch menus as they prepare for the competition. We can't say enough about how thrilled we are for their participation in HSC's healthy culinary contest. The meals that the students create will be part of a national dialogue on the future of school food, highlighting the power of student engagement in healthy change.

But we also think that Assistant White House Chef Sam Kass says it better than even we could. Sam got to know Cooking up Change when he prepared the winning meal from Cooking up Change 2008 alongside the student chefs who designed it at a briefing on the future of school food.

Check out his message to the young chefs:

Here's a transcript of Sam's remarks:

How's it going, my name is Sam Kass, I'm an assistant chef at the White House. I'd like to welcome you to Cooking up Change, it's an exciting night. I know all of you guys are a little bit nervous and excited for this big event. But stay calm and relax. I'm really excited to see all of the amazing dishes you guys are going to create.

We all know how important it is to feed our kids healthy, delicious meals every day when they go to school for lunch. This is something that is a top priority for us here at the White House. And we are excited and thrilled by the new energy that you are going to bring to this, all of the creativity that you have, and the fact that you are the future of chefs in America.

So I really look forward to hearing and seeing and maybe tasting what you guys come up with, and see the winning team in Washington.

Good luck!

We couldn't have said it better! So good luck. We can't wait to see you there!

For more details, visit www.cookingupchange.org.

Lining Up for School Lunch -- Before 9 a.m.

By Mark Bishop, Deputy Director

Sometimes the obstacles to a healthy school lunch have nothing to do with the food served on the plate. Instead it's a number of factors, including the environment in which students eat.  Nutrition advocates have been bringing important attention to the Child Nutrition Act reauthorization, which Congress will consider later next year. However, we don't want to lose sight of the broad challenges that schools face and opportunities that we have to make changes in how students eat and how that supports quality education.

This recent article in The New York Times highlights once such factor -- overcrowding in schools and inadequate cafeteria space:

At Francis Lewis in Fresh Meadows, Queens, which has nearly twice as many students as the 2,400 it was designed for, administrators have been forced to look for every possible nook of space and cranny of time to cram in more bodies. The first lunch period starts at 8:57 a.m.; the last one ends at 2:46 p.m... 

Lunch is served for seven periods, with up to 600 students sitting on the benches at any time. The cafeteria workers put out a few breakfast choices during the first lunch shift, like croissants and bagels, and occasionally bacon and eggs, which disappear fast. Still, on most days, nearly two-thirds of the early eaters opt for the lunch fare...

“If you’re really hungry, you can eat anything at any time,” said Jasmine Cepeda, 15, who is one of the roughly 380 students who eat in the first lunch period, about three hours after she wakes up at home in East New York. “Sometimes you just eat it because it’s there and because you know by eighth period you’ll be starving.”

The early eaters have spent part of the first three weeks of school perfecting their grazing habits. Some have only coffee before they leave home. Several hang out at Arby’s after their 3 p.m. class gets out, snacking on barbecue sandwiches or more fries.

And in our Through Your Lens campaign, we saw this entry that highlighted the same issue. Too many students, too little space, lunch when most people are putting down their coffee. How could any student learn when her stomach is grumbling in the afternoon?

For a school that has double the number of students that it was designed for, there are few good short-term answers. And a properly funded Child Nutrition Act sure won't do much to fix this problem. But this does highlight the complex challenges schools face -- challenges that sit at the intersection of education, nutrition, environmental health and student development.

Of course the long term answer is finding adequate funding for our schools -- including school facilities. 

Check out the Take Action section in our Through Your Lens campaign. Getting more funds to improve school facilities is hugely important, and Congress is debating this issue now. Hearing from all of us about these challenges can ensure that we can better fund our school buildings. 

USDA Shifting Toward Healthier Commodities Program for School Meals

By Mark Bishop, HSC Deputy Director

Earlier this month, I participated in a U.S. Senate briefing on improving the nutritional quality of school commodity foods. Ensuring healthy commodities is an important component of a healthy and properly funded school meal program.

First a bit of a background on commodity foods. . .

The USDA runs the Commodity Foods Program, which essentially provides schools agricultural products -- both whole and processed foods. The availability of this food can often make the difference between a program that loses or makes money by providing about 15 to 20 percent of the food items for a lunch menu. At the same time, this program has also been criticized for distributing unhealthful processed foods and low-quality proteins.

However, things have changed at the USDA, and their commodity food offerings are getting better. Currently the program is offering low-fat cheeses, lean meats and bread products that are whole grain. And they are committed to bringing more and healthier options to their listing of available food items.

One day prior to this briefing, Senator Blanche Lincoln, chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee, introduced S1650, a bill to improve the purchase and processing of healthful commodities for use in school meal programs. This bill would essentially put into law the healthful improvements that the USDA has been making. We believe that this should and will become an important part of the discussion around the Child Nutrition Act.

The briefing was sponsored by Senator Lincoln and organized by the National Alliance for Nutrition and Activity (NANA) and the Center for Science in the Public Interest. As a NANA partner, we were excited about the well-attended briefing and the changes this means for school food.

Thank you to NANA and Senator Lincoln for their leadership on this issue.

And if you're interested in improving school food, support HSC's efforts to bring healthier options to the table. Our annual Cooking Up Change healthy cooking contest puts the task of creating a healthy menu in the hands of student chefs, who always cook up healthy, tasty options while exceeding USDA guidelines on a very, very tight budget. Imagine what they -- and our school food service providers across the nation -- could do with more money for better food.

Frozen Fruits & Veggies Provide Healthy Options for School Meals

By Rochelle Davis, HSC Founding Executive Director

New research reported in the International Supermarket News says that frozen food can be nutritionally equal – or even superior – to fresh produce:

The search for new and improved school meals has revealed that a mix of fresh and frozen foods creates the optimum result in terms of healthy eating and production.

Fresh produce can deteriorate along the supply chain, as the journey from the field to the shelf can seriously compromise the nutritional value and quality of fresh produce due to exposure. But frozen food's freshness is maintained by the temperature at which it is kept. There are also benefits in that frozen products are cheaper, create less waste and are more accessible to institutions such as schools.

Our experience in Chicago certainly confirms that. Last year the Chicago Public Schools and its partner Chartwells-Thompson Hospitality launched a frozen local program to take regionally produced fruits and vegetables and, within 24 hours of harvest, flash freeze them for serving all year in CPS school meals.

In an article at FamilyFarmed.org, Chartwells Thompson Regional Vice President Bob Bloomer says: "This is a great way to lock in the nutrients of these fruits and vegetables... We will be purchasing thousands of pounds of these products this school year. The kids love it."

Reason #157 to Better Fund School Lunches: We Shouldn't Have to Chose Between Health and Education

By Mark Bishop, Deputy Director

Recently in The New York Times, there was a sobering article about the current state of school funding. It was a story of school cutbacks, increasing classroom sizes, job losses, people being thankful for taking pay cuts. It didn't paint a good picture for the health of our school system, let alone the state of school health. And the punchline was that without the stimulus funding, it would have been significantly worse.

But the line that caught my interest was a small point near the bottom of the article...

About half of the 160 school superintendents from 37 states surveyed [pdf] by the American Association of School Administrators said that despite receiving stimulus money, they were forced to cut teachers in core subjects. Eight out of 10 said they had cut librarians, nurses, cooks and bus drivers.

My observation -- assuming that this survey is representative of schools in general -- is that it's the non-core staff who often bear the brunt of an economic downturn. While many schools are indeed eliminating teaching jobs, even more schools are eliminating even more jobs in other areas. When schools are losing money, it's health, nutrition and maintenance that lose out the most.

Health and nutrition services (beyond federal reimbursements) are being funded through the same dollars that provide education to our students. So particularly in a large urban district that has higher levels of poverty, a loss of money in a school food program has to be covered from a school's general revenue.

And if health has to compete with education, no one wins.

How can any administrator decide between cutting healthy food for kids and laying off teachers? There is no correct answer. The setup is just not right. It's not a question any school leader should have to ask.

I don't know what the answer is for health services, or bus drivers or facility maintenance, but I do know that properly funding the Child Nutrition Act at a level that enables schools to provide healthy meals will help schools that rely heavily on federal reimbursements avoid asking these impossible questions and watching children suffer no matter which answer they chose.

Imagine a school principal who doesn't have to worry about the school food service program losing money and draining their education dollars. This takes the pressure off of food programs and allows them to innovate and create healthy meals that don't rely on junk food to make up for lost revenue. 

While fully funding the school lunch program won't fix the school funding problem, it will go a long way toward ensuring that our kids have healthy meals -- even in times of financial stress and without draining dollars away from education. So with this year's reauthorization coming up, we have an opportunity to make real, lasting change.

Vilsack Connects Healthy Eating and Reduced Health Care Costs

By Rochelle Davis, Founding Executive Director

Good news for fruits and veggies!

The day after President Obama’s message to Congress and the nation, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, in a speech to United Fresh Produce Association, made the connection between health care reform and healthy eating. Vilsack talked about the administration’s recognition that eating more fruits and vegetables will dramatically cut America’s health care costs and that health care reform will include encouraging Americans to eat healthier -- in particular, by eating more fruits and vegetables.

As part of this effort, Vilsack said the USDA is focused on improving USDA-subsidized school meals, which he said, “for far too many of our children,” may provide “the only complete meal that they have during the day.”

We are very excited to see that the Obama administration understands the connection between health and proper eating and is looking at reforming the health care system more broadly than insurance reform alone.  (You might never know that from listening to the public debate about health care reform, but there is a whole section of the bill devoted to health promotion. More here and here.)

But in order to truly improve student access to healthier school meals (and make the ideals that Vilsack describes into a reality) schools need more money for better food. The Child Nutrition Act offers an opportunity to ensure that schools receive the funding they need for this purpose. Take action now by joining us to call for a strong, well-funded Child Nutrition Act. 

HSC Helps Kick Off Green Schools Coalition

By Mark Bishop, Deputy Director

On September 8, I attended the inaugural meeting for the U.S. Green Building Council's Green Schools Coalition. I'll give three reasons why it was a great meeting:

1. The participants were great;
2. The main speaker was great;
3. The office building was the coolest build-out I've ever been in.

1) The Participants

The Green Schools Coalition is an early effort to bring together education advocates around issues of greening our schools. It brought together leaders from groups representing school  administrators, unions, health advocates and environmentalists. It was such a diverse group -- and a group that can really make a statement. And even more exciting is that the individuals there were committed to moving a national agenda forward for healthier, more sustainable schools throughout the US.

2) The Speaker

Under Secretary of Education, Martha Kanter, spoke to introduce the group, and it seems to me that she said all the right things for school health. She spoke of the need for proper nutrition, healthy indoor environments and, of course, sustainable construction and maintenance.

But my favorite quote of hers was that we need to move "beyond the balance sheet of energy savings" in building green schools. We need to remember that building schools shouldn't only be measured by years for a payback in energy savings. Some things don't have measurable monetary benefits. Schools need to inspire creativity, facilitate learning and support health. None of which has a specific dollar amount attached to it, but all of which could spell financial disaster if we fail. 

It's nice to hear when our leaders seem to get it.

3) The Space

You'd expect the USGBC to have the mack-daddy green space -- and they didn't disappoint in their newly renovated office space. Occupancy sensors for individual cubicles, eco zones with curtains of air to reduce the need for heating and cooling, reclaimed wood paneling, use of colors to reflect light, waterless urinals... It was a building geek's dream to see all of this technology. But one of the things that struck me is that the use of the term "green" is expanding to mean ergonomics, mood, health, healthy food prep, comfort and building community -- all things that we hope to see in schools. Maybe we all need to expand the definition of "green," or we need to come up with a new word that is more encompassing. Either way, the space was awesome.

So thank you to the USGBC for starting the Green Schools Coalition. We're proud to be members and excited to get to work!

How The White House Garden Grows

By Rochelle Davis, Founding Executive Director

We at HSC have been very excited to have First Lady Michelle Obama make the food we eat, and how it is grown, part of the national dialogue. Much has been said about the new White House garden. Now, the White House has released a video about the garden. 

As Michelle says at the end of the video, “I hope the garden will be an introduction to a new way for our country to think about food.”   We look forward to her leadership as Congress begins to consider the reauthorization of the Child Nutrition Act, the bill that determine the funding and other guidelines for the federal school food programs.

Fit Kids Scoring on Academics

By Mark Bishop, Deputy Director

In a study that alters my perception of my childhood, researchers say it seems that physically fit students students post higher academic scores than less-fit peers. Put another way, it's no longer the geek who shall inherit the earth. According to the study:

To examine the correlation between physical fitness and academic performance, researchers reviewed the academic and fitness records of students attending kindergarten through eighth grade in New York City public school who participated in the New York City FITNESSGRAM, a standards-based fitness curriculum and assessment. The researchers found that scores on standardized English language arts and math tests increased accordingly with higher FITNESSGRAM assessment scores for all racial and ethnic groups.

One of the problems that we see in schools is that the current focus on testing has reduced time and resources devoted to non-core school programming. So many important elements of a healthful school environment are cut -- including PE, nutrition programs, maintenance -- and the list goes on.

While it's helpful to have more and more research showing that better health means better education, what would be even more helpful is to start directing resources to expand health promotion programs.We know that healthy kids are better learners. Now it's time to start putting that knowledge into practice.

Maybe what we need is a new learning index that goes beyond just math and English and also includes physical education, nutrition, even the quality of the school building. By looking at developing the whole child, maybe we can then take steps to really improve our academic outcomes.

Competing to Design Classrooms for the Future

By Mark Bishop, Deputy Director

Here in the US, school buildings play a critical role in the lives of children, teachers and communities. The physical learning environment impacts student achievement, teaching quality and occupant health. Schools are important parts of their neighborhoods and often serve as an important public commons where shared public use can take place. And school buildings represent a significant investment of any community resources – we should be careful stewards of these resources by ensuring that schools are designed, built, renovated and maintained in the most cost-effective manner.

But the importance of a healthful classroom is not limited to the US. According to the World Bank, millions of existing classrooms worldwide are in serious need of repair and refurbishment. And the educational needs of children worldwide will require the construction of 10 million new classrooms by 2015!

So while we work to support the construction and maintenance of schools in the US, we're excited to see the Open Architecture Network create a contest to spur the classroom of the future with no limits on geographical boundaries.

The entries have been culled to a final eight and the winner receives up to $50,000 towards building the design. And these designs are exciting. They take into account the local community, sustainability, educational priorities and more - all elements that any school design would benefit from.

My favorite is the Adaptable Hillside Classroom, a design for a classroom in the Ugandan hillsides. This design is for a multi-use space so community members can use the building as a community resource, it takes into account local topography, climate, and uses plenty of daylighting and locally derived materials.

The need to invest in quality educational facilities is universal and the Open Architecture Network has created a forum to remind us all of this.