Choice 1 or Choice 2. Hot or Cold. Eat at school or go out. What are our students eating? Is it healthy? Do they have enough time? I wonder this as I helped serve lunch for All Star Lunch Week. The students thought it was great to have a new teacher serving them their meal for the day. But as I watched closely as each student went through the line and then began to eat, they barely had anything on their trays and the last student to go through the line only had 7 minutes to eat. How can we expect children to perform after having a snack when it should have been one of the more important and filling meals of their day?
According to CHOICE, Citizens for Healthy Options In Children’s Education, children who intake a healthy lunch are more peaceful in their studies and in social environments. The School Lunch Program was founded in 1946 to ensure all students were provided a health meal. Students can receive meals at cost, reduced cost, or free according to their family income. Students gain almost ½ or their nutritional intake from their school lunch and depend on the nutrients. School lunch maybe the only hot meal of the day, or even worse, could be the only meal the child is getting. So why is their not more focus put on school lunches?
The School Nutrition Association is coming up with a plan to make school lunches healthier and more appealing to students. They believe if students develop healthy habits at a young age it will carry over into upper grades and also into adult life, hoping to lead to a healthy, active lifestyle. They are bringing in Chef Ann Cooper, the “Renegade Lunch Lady”, to speak during their next conference about the “Lunch Box: Healthy Tools to Help all Students” initiative in hopes of bringing stakeholders together to provide healthier school lunches.
Kids Health online offers great ideas to encourage your child to make healthy choices while at school and offers some ideas of packing healthy lunches from home. They also provide comparisons of foods once or still served in school lunches and offer alternatives to replace these foods. For example, replacing bologna with turkey ham and mayonnaise with mustard has less fat, and fewer calories.
Time for Lunch is a national campaign designed to provide students with foods that are clean, good and fair. Congress will be meeting in 2010 to address school lunches and Time for Lunch has hopes of change. Their mission is to get more funding to raise it from $1 a child, protect children from junk food, and link schools to local farms. Time for Lunch also partners with Better School Food and offers several suggestions for healthier eating in schools and at home.
I think change needs to happen in schools to improve their lunches and allow students to make good choices and take the time to eat. I feel this will lead to healthier classrooms and healthier lifestyles.
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Jenna, I like your blog alot because I find similar issues in our school. I think schools are doing the best they can to provide healthy meals for students but I wish there would be some alternatives for some meals that seem highly unhealthy. Your sandwhich example was a great one, I look at the meat on those sandwiches sometimes and they don't look very good. I have heard of some schools that also offer healthy snacks for studnets (fruits and vegetables) and I think this is great! The snacks student bring to school are full of sugars and fats and as much as we preech to parents or send home healthy snack lists they still bring the sugaring cookies or donuts.
ReplyDeleteAs far as students receiving enough time for lunch, I know the time required for each student is 20 minutes. In my school we allow students to sit longer if they choose to as long as they are eating and our janitor is great at suggesting to students to eat more if there try is full of food. We have also had students go to recess before lunch and we have seen huge changes! Studnets are no longer dumping their trays early to go outside. I know for some bigger school it is not possible to do recess first or extend lunch for students but it is something to look at and see if something can be worked out.
Jenna -
ReplyDeleteOur school has begun to adopt similar to those of Time for Lunch and we have had positive feedback from students overall. We got rid of ice cream and chips from the cold lunch line and replaced those with fruit and salads (students have a choice of taco, chef, fruit or oriental chicken salads). We are also getting rid of our pop machines (much to the dismay of the principal and PTA) and replacing them with a school snack store that will sell only healthy drinks. I think we all need to make steps to curb childhood obesity and must realize that generation Z is the only generation in history that will have a shorter life span than the prior generation. It all starts with schools - we must lead the way.
One part of your article piqued my interest and that was your comment on how much time the last student in line gets to eat. The way our lunches work is that we have A, B, and C lunches with two groups of students in each lunch. One group eats first for 15 minutes while the other group is outside the first 15 minutes, then they switch. I have literally seen students have only 2 minutes to eat their lunch after being last in line. To combat this I give every one of my students the option to get their lunch and have a working lunch in my classroom so they have a full 30 minutes to eat. All they have to do is place their lunch order with me at the beginning of the day and I will go down and get all of the lunches at about 10:45 and keep them in a mini fridge until they come up to eat. I get about 14 lunches per day (I only let them eat salads in my room) and those students end up having no missing work.
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Jenna,
ReplyDeleteSchool lunch has been something that I hold near and dear. I've eaten in the cafeteria with my students every day for the past 11 years. I'm the only teacher who does. In North Dakota, my teachers made us check our trays with them prior to leaving. They really monitored what we ate and made us take everything. I don't remember having time issues growing up. The kids really do have a tough time getting through the lunch lines at my district now, though.
The reasons for the time troubles seem to be many. One clear reason is our enrollment increased over 100 students in the past 3 years and our lunch schedules didn't change. Another reason is our students are give too many choices. This slows down the process of dishing up trays in the hot lunch line and the snack bar choice they have is slow as well. Not only time management, but choice of healthy food is a problem when that occurs. Our new administration is going to try to implement everything she saw at her old district, so we'll see dramatic changes, for the better is yet to be seen.
I know teachers at my district are not interested in eating in the cafeteria or having their lunch time spent with students. I've mentioned it a few times over the years and notice how poorly the kids eat. It's a true shame that adults think that most kids have the responsiblity to choose wisely when it comes to meals when they have peer pressure mounting. The kids want to eat fast and go play. They want to choose food everyone likes and not be made fun of for eating "gross food" or cafeteria lunches.
It comes down to who wants to make a buck. I know our current administration is upset about the $250,000 our school's lost over the past 4 years under another poorly run admin and lunch program, but they won't go back to the previous ways that worked and we actually had a profit at the lunch program. We're spending more money to give kids more choices and I'm afraid it means they'll be less healthy choices.
It amazes me the fact that so many districts really don't care about kids by their actions in matters such as these. I don't care what they say, if they only give 5-15 minutes to eat a major meal in the day, they don't care about students' health or education truly or in a way that shows common sense.
I hope articles like yours can help more people realize what's important.
Have a good week.
Randy B.
My district has only 1500 students k through 12. Even with this small number of students they managed to build a Cafeteria that was to small. for this reason the middle school students are able to walk off school grounds for lunch. The school also does not have any type of wellness policy in place because they cant control what the kids eat in town. One of the more odd things about my district.
ReplyDeleteJenna,
ReplyDeleteI find you blog choice very ironic because at a teacher conference last weekend school lunch was the topic of choice. I am blessed to have a cafeteria staff who not only cooks wonderful food but make sure the kids eat everyday. We have a salad bar everyday and two hot meal choices. We rarely have children not eat at our school. Our students are allowd to charge if they do not have money and some teachers have pitched in to help those who do not qualify for free lunch but do not have enoguh money to eat. The other teachers at the confference were talking about how kids efused to eat at their schools. How sad... students need food to think. I feel very lucky that my students have fruits and vegetables everyday and it scares me to think that other schools may be serving.
Good Article,
Blaire
Student choice for lunch has been a long standing problem. I do have to applaud our lunch program, however, because students on free or reduced lunches are forced to take selections that give them a well-rounded meal. Often I hear the head cook at our school remind students they need a fruit or vegetable, don't forget to take milk, etc. From things I have observed, I do feel comfortable that our low-income students are getting a well-rounded meal. However, it is alarming the number of students who go out for lunch. Our students have 35 minutes for lunch. That means they have to get to their car, a five minute drive to a fast food joint, get their order, five minute drive back, and find a parking place. That doesn't leave much time to eat their "nutritional meal" of a Big Mac or whatever. The students who eat school lunch do seem to have adequate time to eat at our school. The one objection I have is our ala carte. There are many selections that have a questionable nutritional value, yet they are provided by our lunch staff. It sometimes seems they send two different messages: a well-rounded lunch is important, but if you have the money to spend it is okay to eat a non-nutritional lunch.
ReplyDeleteI have always had a difficult time with the lunch program. At my kids school, they get twenty minutes to eat. My son is a very slow eater and he often ends up throwing most of his lunch. By the end of the day, he is starving and not concetrating on school, but what he will eat at home. The school that I teach at (a middle school) both teachers and students get 22 minutes to eat. This is not a lot of time and most student have to shove their food in. How healthy is that? With that time, there is no way that someone could leave to eat and make it back in time for class.
ReplyDeleteOur school offers a hot meal with all the food groups and a cold meal with all the food groups. The cold meal is a sandwich. Students do have a option of purchasing other items (i.e. cookies, fruit drinks etc). The students also have an option of having breakfast in the morning. They have a choice from a hot food and a cold food. My students always tell me that they like the food.