‘Every kid needs to be fed’
Case for a universal affordable (and sometimes free) school lunch program
HALIFAX — The vegetarian shepherd's pie arrived.
Paxton and his Grade 6 classmates were at their desks. Paxton wasn’t interested, but about half his classmates were.
Paxton and his little brother Jasper, 6, go to Rockingstone Heights School. They live with their mom in subsidized housing in Spryfield. Their school doesn’t have a lunch program or cafeteria. Family SOS, a non-profit organization in the community, is doing its best to fill the gap by providing one hot lunch a week. Stir fry and rice, curry, and macaroni and cheese are some of the options.
The boys’ mom Jenn Spears is doing her best but is unable to work. The single mom has weathered a string of bad luck that forced her to quit her job as a continuing care assistant at Northwood nursing home. In the past couple of years, she's had a hysterectomy and surgery to replace her left hip. Her other hip is deteriorating and she's scheduled to have it replaced next month.
She’s determined to get back to work but in the meantime, she’s getting by on welfare. That doesn’t get her family very far. She buys as much fresh fruit and vegetables as she can afford every month — bananas, apples, lettuce and carrots — and whatever else she can get from the food bank. The produce is gone by mid-month. That leaves mostly food that comes from a box or goes in the freezer. Chicken nuggets and Kraft Dinner are their go-to meal.
The provincial budget released late last month included $18.8 million for a public school lunch program. It is supposed to begin in elementary schools next fall and expand over the next four years.
Spears and her boys are excited about the prospect of a free lunch every day.
HISTORIC STEP
Becky Druhan, Nova Scotia’s education minister, called the province’s investment in a lunch program a historic first step. This is not a free lunch program. The minister says that the lunches will be affordable for all families and
free “for those who need it.”
Spears is anxious to find out the details. She belongs to a growing number of parents in the province barely getting by. Nova Scotia has among the highest rates of child poverty and food insecurity in the country. Though Spears sees to it that her kids always have food in their bellies, it comes at a cost. She’s being treated for depression and anxiety. She’s lost a lot of weight. Not having to worry about school lunches would mean a little more money for suppers.
“We mostly end up eating boxed food and frozen foods because it lasts a long time. I can keep those things on hand.
“I would love to have a bit more money for half-decent dinners — meat, potatoes and salad — instead of nuggets and Kraft Dinner."
It’s unclear how the provincewide school lunch program will roll out in Nova Scotia. There's already a big discrepancy from school to school. The Department of Education school lunch program will be inclusive and non-stigmatizing and "have built-in flexibility to be delivered according to the needs of individual schools.”
The department didn’t provide any specific details of what that might look like or a breakdown of costs. It says more details will be shared in the coming months.
AT ÉCOLE ST. CATHERINE’S
Some already have affordable lunches. In west-end Halifax, École St. Catherine's Elementary School has a hot lunch program. It’s only eight kilometres away from Paxton and Jasper’s school, but the lunch menu is expansive and always changing. For $5, kids get revolving options including freshly made chicken pot pie, chicken wraps and whole wheat spaghetti and meatballs.
Every student on the South Shore can grab a nutritious fresh lunch at their school. The program is run entirely by South Shore Centre for Education, with help from RootEd School Food Program, a registered charity.
Then there's the simple logistics of running a universal lunch program. A third of all schools in the province don’t have a cafeteria. Of those that do, more than half are being run by “profit-driven” private companies serving largely bad food. That comes from auditor general Kim Adair's damning report on the state of school food programs. The report, released a year and a half ago, showed that these companies were meeting the department's nutrition policy only nine per cent of the time.
How will the province
make sure kids like Paxton and Jasper are getting the same access to nutritious lunches as kids on the South Shore? Ryan Lutes, president of the Nova Scotia Teachers Union, says it starts with the Department of Education. Right now, the department takes a hands-off approach, downloading the responsibility of running school food programs to regional centres for education. In some cases, RCEs put the onus on schools, which Lutes said are already overtaxed.
He says the South Shore model offers a practical model where the centre for education hired staff to run and monitor the program. This, he said, should happen provincewide.
Families, he says, are sacrificing in so many ways so their kids come to school with healthy lunches.
FAMILY SOS
Kids and their families need all the help they can get, says Johanne Thompson, executive director of Family SOS. The organization is being stretched. The number of families using its food banks has shot up 60 per cent in the past year. Thompson’s anxious to see how the province plans to roll out the lunch program.
“Families are relying more and more on organizations
like Family SOS to be able to provide these extra necessities because their wages are not keeping up with the cost of living, prices in the grocery store keep going up,” said Thompson.
Any way you look at it, a good universal food program comes at a cost, says Lisa Roberts, executive director of Nourish Nova Scotia.
“Running a great school program isn’t a way to make money,” said Roberts. “You can’t commit to running a program that feeds students so that they can learn, that they can feel good in school, only if they have enough money to pay for the food or only if the cafeterias break even or more than break even.”
There are models out there that work. That includes treating school cafeterias as learning spaces where kids can learn to be confident in a kitchen and prepare food for one another. Another is opening school kitchens to local entrepreneurs who can provide healthy food in schools and in the community.
The third is on the South Shore. “(They’re) really investing in a food service manager who’s going to make it work, who's going to find the staff, pay them decently, figure out how you procure food,” Roberts said.