The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Schools weigh healthy lunches vs. profits
Since 2006, every school district in the nation has been required to have a school wellness policy. Whether that means a few words on a paper that gets pulled out at inspection time, or real efforts to make healthy changes, however, is entirely up to each district.
Over the past several years, Marlene Shwartz, a professor at UConn’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, has analyzed the wellness policies at each school across Connecticut.
“We thought the wealthier districts would have stronger policies, but we found the opposite,” Shwartz said. “Wealthier districts thought they didn’t have a problem. They kind of blew it off. We found the best policies in the cities, with New Haven being the best.”
The same is true when it comes to following nutritional guidelines set by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In fact, for a variety of reasons, many wealthy towns choose to opt out of the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) — and its strict standards and
requirements — altogether.
That means towns like Westport and Darien, among others, forfeit funding from the federal and state government in exchange for retaining full control over what they serve their students.
When you’re part of NSLP
In the New Haven Public Schools, students can get beef fajitas on a whole grain tortilla with roasted fresh broccoli, skim or 1 percent milk, and a fresh piece of fruit or fruit cup filled with melons, pineapple and grapes. If they don’t like that, there’s always a falafel wrap, yogurt plate, deli bar or a sun butter and jelly sandwich.
If those options don’t work, on Tuesdays there are hamburgers, Mondays through Wednesdays there’s a bagel option, and on Thursdays and Fridays there’s a salad bar.
And it’s all free, at least for the students.
That’s because New Haven Public Schools – just like Hartford, New London and 35 other groups of schools or districts where more than 40 percent of the students are below the poverty line – participates in the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) of NSLP. The program requires the school district to serve every student a free school lunch. In return, the school or district receives reimbursement for 160 percent of the students who do qualify for NSLP.
This means that in a district like New Haven where more than 62.5 percent of the students are eligible for free meals, the district gets reimbursed for 100 percent of the meals they serve. In 201819, the New Haven Public Schools received more than $13 million in federal and state subsidies for school meals, including breakfast, lunch and snack.
In parts of Fairfield County, the wealthiest county in the state, the picture is very different. Darien, Easton, Weston and Westport have all opted out of the National School Lunch Program, forfeiting the chance to collect federal and state reimbursements while leaving behind the program’s stringent nutritional requirements, which mandate there be a fruit or vegetable on every child’s tray, require all breads and pastas to be wholegrain, and limit the number of calories per meal to 850 for high school students.
Fewer than 2 percent of the school population in these districts qualify for free or reduced lunches, so the loss in subsidies is negligible.
Greenwich — although neighbors with these four towns and one of the wealthiest communities in the state — has a more socioeconomically diverse school population. As of 2018, nearly 20 percent of the K12 student body qualified for free or reduced school meals.
Therefore, unlike surrounding towns, it would be nearly impossible for Greenwich to forfeit the federal and state subsidies it receives at the elementary and middle schools.
“That is an extremely large amount when you compare to the surrounding towns,” said John Hopkins, food service director for Greenwich Public Schools. “We have four severe need schools in this district where over 35 percent of the students qualify for free or reduced meals.”
While the NSLP combined with the CEP works very well in the poorer cities and towns, the NSLP sets up a bifurcated school lunch program that can become a financial drain on the entire school system and make both students and parents unhappy.
Serving two populations
Unlike in New Haven, the food service department for Greenwich schools cannot count on enough of its students buying the healthy lunch it provides each day — and the income that would come with that — and instead must rely on income it makes from selling a la carte items, like premade sandwiches, pizza and other snacks that are not compliant with the NSLP. None of these items are available to children as part of their free or reduced lunch.
At the high school, which is not part of NSLP, the Food Service Department brings in $1.3 million to $1.5 million in revenue from a la carte items, according to Hopkins. If the high school were to join NSLP, like the middle and elementary schools, or sign onto the state’s Smart Snack rule, it would lose all that income. This is something it can’t afford to do, as the department already operates at a deficit.
The Smart Snack Guidelines and Connecticut’s Healthy Certification took effect during the 201415 school year. They require that all a la carte items, vending machine foods or any food sold within the school meet the nutritional standards set forth by the Healthy Hungry Free Kids Act of 2010, and contain no more than 300 calories.
“To comply we would have had to reduce portion sizes and basically revamp the entire menu,” Hopkins said. “To say, ‘Hey, the a la carte items are all going away because the government decided you don’t need those things anymore’ just wasn’t going to fly.”
Therefore, Greenwich High School opted out of NSLP and Connecticut’s Healthy Certification in order to broaden choices for students, and hopefully increase profits. That means the district still offers free and reduced meals to students who need them at the high school, but does not receive any federal reimbursement for those meals.
“It is the devil we know verses the devil we don’t know,” Hopkins said. “We know what the dollar figure was for us if we go off the program verses staying on the program and implementing school snacks.”
Parents, however, are not necessarily pleased by the decision.
“It is absolutely disgusting that politics and management issues are getting in the way of good nutrition for the kids,” said Abby Large, a parent of schoolage children in Greenwich.
So, to put it bluntly, Greenwich can’t win. Students don’t think the healthy meals taste good so they opt for lesshealthy a la carte items, parents are unhappy about the nutritional content of their kids’ lunches, and the school board is constantly asking the department to reduce spending.
“Low rate of free/reduced lunch districts are in much more of a precarious financial situation,” Shwartz said. “You are almost catering to kids, whose taste may not be for healthy things. You are in a catch; you feel like you have to offer the students what they want, but now you can’t because it’s against the law.”