When is the last time you had a real, honest-to-goodness home-cooked meal?
At Cypress Cove Elementary School, nearly all meals served in the school dining room are made from scratch and prepared fresh the same day.
“All our bread items are made fresh daily. We prepare all the foods fresh the same day. We prep fruits and vegetables fresh that morning,” says Robin Blakeman, foodservice manager at the Slidell primary school for the past 17 years.
In 2004, Cypress Cove Elementary School became the first school in the nation to earn the HealthierUS School Challenge Gold Certification award presented by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The award honors schools that meet voluntary nutrition and physical activity standards set by the USDA Food and Nutrition Service. By 2005, every public elementary school in St. Tammany Parish had achieved the USDA Gold Award.
Cypress Cove Elementary students at lunch.
In 2009, the USDA established the Gold Award of Distinction, which raised the bar higher by increasing the nutritional standards of foods available in school vending machines and snack bars, physical education requirements and student participation in the school lunch program. The Gold Award of Distinction also requires a structured nutrition education component in both the classroom and cafeteria.
Aiming to meet the new standards, St. Tammany Parish again committed to ensuring healthy school campuses. By last August, fewer than 800 schools across the nation had earned USDA awards in any category (Bronze, Silver, Gold and Gold Award of Distinction). Just 59 schools had met the USDA Gold Award of Distinction level; 25 of those were schools in St. Tammany Parish.
All 23 elementary schools and two junior high schools, Fifth Road and Lee Road, are Gold Award of Distinction winners. St. Tammany School Food Services received $2,000 in monetary incentives for each school to support its ongoing nutrition efforts.
Pat Farris, supervisor of food services, says the schools focus on teaching children how to eat healthy at an early age—with the hope that when they are able to make decisions independently as they get older, they will already have established good habits.
“Our goal is to expose children to a variety of foods, to teach it in the classroom, experience it in the cafeteria and hopefully bring it home. We want them to be eating better at home and at school,” Farris says.
Last September, Rose Smith, Brock Elementary principal, had the honor of hosting a special guest, an experience she describes as “a once-in-a-lifetime event” for the school’s 365 pre-K to fifth-grade students. St. Tammany Parish’s achievement had caught the attention of first lady Michele Obama, who established the Let’s Move! Campaign to help raise a healthier generation of children. An initiative of the White House Task Force on Childhood Obesity, Let’s Move! has incorporated the HUSSC into its campaign, which aims to encourage children to lead healthier and more active lifestyles and to end childhood obesity within a generation.
Students at Brock Elementary were excited to welcome first lady Michelle Obama to their school.
The first lady and Let’s Move! came to Brock Elementary during the first of two events in the New Orleans area kicking off National Childhood Obesity Month.
Calling childhood obesity “a national problem affecting every single community,” Obama outlined Let’s Move!’s efforts working with food manufacturers to put better labels on their products, with restaurants to post calorie information and with grocery stores to provide healthier options in the communities they serve.
She highlighted steps schools and communities can take to combat childhood obesity and saluted participants in the HUSSC program, praising St. Tammany Parish for setting the standard for schools all across the country.
“The nutrition education [children] get at schools like Brock Elementary is often the only guidance they get on making healthy decisions about what they eat,” Obama said during the kick-off event. “So every day, with the food you serve, the lessons you teach and the example you set, you’re shaping their habits and preferences and affecting the choices they’re going to make for the rest of their lives.”
St. Tammany schools have a high level of participation in the school lunch program, serving more than 25,000 lunches and nearly 10,000 breakfasts per day, all prepared in on-site cafeterias. More than 70 percent of the students in attendance participate in the school lunch program, and several schools boast more than 90-percent participation, Farris says.
She credits her predecessor, Sylvia Dunn, who retired as supervisor of food services, with starting the long process of transforming her schools’ health and nutrition over the course of more than 20 years. Among her successes is the legacy that “the entire school system from the superintendent and principals to the cafeteria managers and gym teachers are supportive of school nutrition,” Farris says.
“This is a real nutrition program—this is not a feeding program. We want to educate the students on nutrition, not just feed them,” she adds.
Surpassing Guidelines
Obesity is a major risk factor for many chronic diseases such as heart disease and diabetes. With the increase in obesity, specifically in children, chronic diseases in young adults are becoming more prevalent in the United States. Today, nearly 25 million American children are overweight or obese. If these trends continue unabated, this may be the first generation to have a shorter life expectancy than their parents.
To help combat that sad possibility, the USDA has set specific nutrition criteria for elementary schools to meet the HealthierUS School Challenge including serving a different fruit and vegetable every day of the week, at least one serving of whole-grain food each day and offering only 1-percent or skim milk. Competitive foods and beverages available in vending machines, snack bars or à la carte must meet nutritional requirements restricting total fat, sugar and sodium content. Other requirements include a minimum amount of physical activity per week and nutrition education for students both in the dining room and in the classroom.
But just because the program has specific guidelines doesn’t mean St. Tammany takes a cookie-cutter approach. First, every school has an active student Nutrition Advisory Council comprised of students who help the cafeteria manager with product testing, menu development, student surveys, community outreach and more.
Several schools invited first responders to their schools to celebrate Louisiana School Lunch Week this spring, while others have held food drives to support local food banks. A number of schools hosted “Moo Dat!” events to promote dairy consumption as part of a healthy diet.
At Brock Elementary, the NAC group recently helped coordinate the school’s first community walk. Brock NAC students also go into the classrooms with Cindy Emmons, Brock’s cafeteria manager, to teach the nutrition curriculum, “Go, Glow, Grow,” taught in pre-K through first-grade classrooms in all elementary schools. During one session, they helped the students make ice cream cones filled not with ice cream but cheese, plus fruit such as melon, grapes and strawberries.
“It’s children teaching children about what’s healthy,” Smith adds. “They are taught how nutritional it is for them and how tasty it is.”
The “Go, Glow, Grow” curriculum uses a simplified version of MyPyramid so children learn the connection between healthy foods and what they do for the body. According to the curriculum:
Grains are Go foods; they help you run,
jump and play all day.
Fruits and vegetables are Glow foods;
they help you have shiny hair
and sparkly eyes.
Milk and meat and beans
are Grow foods; they help you
grow big and strong.
Cypress Cove’s Blakeman says the schools strive to use as little processed foods as possible in their efforts to serve nutritious meals, which means less saturated fats, sodium and preservatives. Her staff opts for fresh local fruit and vegetables when possible, serves whole grain pasta and brown rice instead of white and adds whole grains like wheat into breads, rolls and desserts.
She says the most gratifying part of her job is having the chance to reach children in their formative years with information that could help prolong their lives. Since the school only teaches kindergarten through first grade, she gets to reach every student in the school with the message and gives them an opportunity to sample foods they may never have tried before.
“We introduce zucchini and squash and kiwi. We try to introduce things that they may not have had, like cantaloupe and honeydew,” she says. “I’m always telling them to try new things because their taste buds change.”
Once Cypress Cove’s kindergarten, first grade and T-1 students make their way through the lunch line, they exit to the cafeteria through a salad bar, where they make their own selection from the offering of fruits, vegetables, whole-grain rolls and other healthy items available.
“They feel like they’re little people that are growing up, and they get to go through the lunch line, pick the tray up and decide what they want to eat from the salad bar,” Blakeman says. And, because the children are making the choice by serving their own fresh foods, they do a better job of consuming the food on their plates.
She notes that the children’s enthusiasm and the quality and care put into the nutrition program are what make the work rewarding. “They run up to you and tell you, ‘I’ve been eating oranges! I’ve been eating healthy!’ They come up and tell you they’ve been doing healthy activities.
“I get to introduce all these new kids in their first years in school to a cafeteria program that’s a good one and hopefully instill in them that cafeterias do have healthy foods,” she says. “Anything that you can teach for the future of our children to eat healthy and make healthier choices—you want to do everything you can for that.”
The post Better than Home Cooking!—St. Tammany’s Award Winning School Lunch Program appeared first on Inside Northside Magazine Online.