The newly formed Farm-to-School Advisory Group for the Bellingham School District will meet for the first time Thursday, June 10 to discuss plans for the upcoming school year. The meeting will be held at Central Services, 1306 Dupont Street at 5:30p.m.
Starting next fall the group will meet monthly, working to develop a feasible, structured, district-wide Farm-to-School plan. The group is aiming for a 5 percent increase of local fresh food in school lunches next year and an additional 5 percent increase in subsequent years.
At the forefront of the Advisory Group, as initiators and serving as members, are Columbia Elementary School Parents Rachel Akins, Jessica Sankey and Mardi Solomon. With enthusiasm for Farm-to-School, Columbia Elementary School parents met to come up with a way to get the district moving toward change. In February, they submitted a proposal for the Advisory Group, to establish the communication of Farm-to-School ideas between schools and individuals interested in the program.
“We live in a community that is rich with agriculture and it’s silly to not be buying locally and feeding our kids local, more fresh food,” Sankey said.
The idea of Farm-to-School is to improve student health, the income of local farmers, and in a broader sense the state of the environment. With an emphasis on nutritional, economic, and environmental benefits, Farm-to-School efforts have gained local, regional, and national recognition, including legislative attention on state and federal levels.
“It’s a win-win; it helps our local farmers and helps our kids and there is a dramatic reduction in the amount of fuel and energy put into transporting food,” Columbia Parents Association President Erin McEachern said, “so to me that just makes perfect sense.”
However, there are challenges on the local level such as cost, building working business relationships with local farmers, and finding enough local resources to provide for the 5,000 school lunches served in the district per day. It’s complicated to feed all these kids with the strict rules and tight budget the Food Service works under, Sankey said.
The Advisory Group hopes to aid the district in overcoming these various challenges. Working closely with Food Service Manager Mark Dalton, the group will research, promote, and facilitate local Farm-to-School options.
Evaluating the success of past projects will be a key factor in the planning process. We don’t want to reinvent the wheel, we want to look at what has and hasn’t worked so far, Sankey said, to learn about what’s happening nationally and locally, learn how the Food Service works, and work with the Food Service Manager to come up with a plan.
“The district doesn’t have a lot of staff in place to do this kind of ground work,” Dalton said, “it’s a worthy cause and people are willing to contribute their time towards it.”
Evaluating past projects,
present challenges,
and future benefits
With the mission of funding innovative ideas to move the local Farm-to-School Program forward, the Whatcom Community Foundation’s Sustainable Whatcom Fund provided $66,490 of start-up support for15 pilot projects throughout the county this school year.
Four of these pilot projects were run in the Bellingham School District at Parkview Elementary School, Wade King Elementary School, Fairhaven Middle School and Sehome High School. However, a total of five schools in the district have participated in Farm-to-School efforts, Columbia Elementary School being the fifth with its unique support of the program.
On a school-by-school basis, the pilot projects have varied significantly. At Sehome for example, local salads were offered for $1, whereas at Fairhaven free locally produced snacks were offered on Wednesdays. In comparison, the purpose of the Advisory Group is to organize a plan that will make program changes equal throughout the district.
“The goal is that somebody in the district gets what everybody in the district gets,” Sankey said.
This district-wide consistency is modeled by the district’s successfully developed business relationship with BelleWood Acres. With BelleWood Acres, each school in the district receives fresh, local apples September through January.
“We pay a little more of a price-point for them, but the fact that they are local and organic and fresh is worth the price,” Dalton said.
The additional cost of fresh food like BelleWood Acres apples is an expense managed by the Food Service. Unlike the operations of a grocery store, where fluctuations in the cost of a product result in fluctuations of the price offered to customers, the amount of money spent on school lunches is set for the year and the price offered to families cannot change.
“It’s a balancing act,” Dalton said, “you have to make sure you still run a break-even program by making offsets with savings in other areas.”
However, the price of school lunches can and does change every few years.
“It continues to go up, but it’s less than $3 a meal, which I think is less than a happy meal,” McEachern said, “as far as our children’s health and well being I don’t think that you can put a price tag on that.”
It’s anticipated that Farm-to-School changes will make school lunches more valuable and preferable to parents and students alike. Yet both cost and nutrition play roles in whether or not kids are sent to school with packed lunches.
For McEachern, it’s a 40 percent cost and 60 percent nutrition consideration. Currently, I can pack lunches for cheaper, but I would probably be more likely to pay for school lunches if they consisted of healthy, local organic food, McEachern said.
With access in Whatcom County to produce such as apples, broccoli, carrots, cucumbers and potatoes the first initiative for local is the fruits and veggies portion of school lunches. In addition to fruits and veggies each school lunch is required to provide milk, meat, and bread. The Food Service plans to eventually localize all of these components.
“Ideally kids will have these beautiful, fresh, local lunches and parents will value them so much that they will not pack lunch for their kids but will send them to school to eat these healthy lunches,” Sankey said.
Although the current focus of the district is on the food side of the movement, educating kids about the value of eating locally and healthfully and instilling positive life-long eating habits is also an important component of the Farm-to-School program. To raise awareness of the program, the district will host an Eat Local Day in September, bringing in as much local food as possible for that school lunch.
“I expect to see a lot of things happen, we’re just trying to move everything ahead,” Solomon said.
Additional Blurbs
•You can get involved
The Advisory Group is intended to be representative of a variety of stakeholders as well as the variety of school zones in the county. Parents, school staff, community members involved in agriculture, and high school students were encouraged to apply. Although 15 members were selected from 43 applicants, the group is not intended to be exclusive, the planning is a collaborative process and if non-members would like to get involved they can contact the group, Dalton said.
•Farm Challenges
The four major challenges of the Farm-to-School program are quality, quantity, convenience and cost, Dalton said, and the Advisory Group will tackle all four of these challenges. Locally and organically grown produce does not look like grocery store produce and the district serves 5,000 meals per day, which is a lot of food to provide using local sources.
Convenience and cost are the most difficult challenges, however, because they strain the ability to build business relationships between farms and schools.
Food received by schools is required to be covered by insurance and be in a ready-to-serve form. These requirements complicate the ability of some farmers to sell their products to schools. With BelleWood Acres, the farm was able to get insurance and a production facility in order to build a direct relationship with the schools.
However this is not feasible for all farms. Fortunately there are organizations such as the local non-profit, Growing Washington who serves as a middle man to farms that need it, alleviating some of these challenging responsibilities.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment