Some districts planned to seek local food grants

The funding gaps leave uncertainty for schools that have begun incorporating more locally grown foods into meals.

Sabra Sowell-lovejoy, a social studies teacher in the Vilas and Campo school districts in southeastern Colorado, has been running a pilot program for locally grown food there. Students immediately took to the fresh vegetables, she said, including a surprising taste for the tops of green onions and parsley. Their preference for tomatoes grown on campus was so strong that they started to snub the store-bought varieties.

She noticed that was true among some students who previously had eaten prepackaged foods, like ramen and Hot Pockets, whether because of their taste or economic necessity.

The rural districts are small enough that the new state program’s broader subsidy for students’ regular meals wouldn’t result in huge windfalls, Sowelllovejoy said. It’s the local food grants slated for the second year — the ones that will most likely be cut to address the shortfall — that offered the most potential, both for the local growing economy and for keeping fresh, local food in the schools.

Sowell-lovejoy spent years working with area growers to build interest and host training sessions, she said.

“It’s very, very exciting that schools are considering this, and they’ve bought into this idea,” she said. “That’s really wonderful because, ideally, our schools should be serving fresh, nutritious, local foods. It’s a part of the Colorado economy that we really need to build, so that’s hopeful.”

Now she’s concerned the state might pull back on that part of the program amid the funding crunch — a worry shared by Rachel Landis, in Durango.

She’s the executive director of the Good Food Collective, a nonprofit group that works to increase access to healthy food. She said her phone started ringing almost as soon as Proposition FF passed.

School dining directors from across the southwest corner of the state, along with some three dozen farmers, soon were talking about how to work with the program to boost the local agricultural economy and help feed kids. That effort could face a struggle if the state’s grants don’t materialize.

“(Growers and administrators) got really excited, but it’s going to be tough to sustain funding in a state where funding for education in general, and other crucial services, can be really limited,” Landis said.

“The framework and the value is still there. The resources are not. But if there’s one thing rural communities are really good at, it’s being scrappy and doing things without the resources to back them.”

Bird, the budget committee’s leader, said she’s committed to making sure the core free meals part of the program stays intact. But the grants for school food services and local growers are more likely to depend on how federal money and tax collections come in.

Fulfilling those parts of the program may even require another ballot measure to ask voters for more money, she said. No legislation has been introduced yet to address the shortfall in the near or long term.