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For Windsor Schools’ wellness week, Lopez wore a yellow Arsenal jersey matching the color of the bananas. Other students and teachers also wore green and yellow — the school colors — to match the snacks of the day.
Lopez munched on a green bean and said they were good, but would “be better with Italian or ranch.”
Daily mid-morning snacks are offered to every elementary school student in Windsor through a federally-funded fresh fruits grant during the school year. Snacks offered other days last week were strawberries, carrots, blueberries and plums.
In Windsor — where, according to the Vermont Agency of Education, 48 percent of elementary school students qualified for free or reduced lunch last school year — school officials hope to further expand students’ access to nutritious food through a summer meals program, and, starting in the fall, a “breakfast after the bell” program and an after-school snack. Eventually, officials aim to offer a universal meals program, which would mean all students could eat school meals free of charge.
While this focus on food might strike some as an example of a school district that has strayed from its academic mission, Windsor and other educational officials believe the two are closely connected.
“In the classroom, students perform far better if they have all of their basic needs met,” Windsor Schools Principal Tiffany Cassano said.
The school received a $9,000 universal meals grant from the state Agency of Agriculture this winter. This is the first year of the grant program, which aims to provide all students with equal access to quality food, including some sourced from local farms. In addition to the money, the five grant recipients, including the Windsor Schools, are receiving technical assistance from Hunger Free Vermont, a South Burlington-based nonprofit that aims to end hunger and malnutrition.
One goal of the grant is to try to help schools qualify for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Community Eligibility Provision, a federal program that reimburses schools for all the meals they serve at the rate used for free meals.
To qualify for the program, schools must have at least 40 percent of students automatically qualify for free meals due to the fact that their families are enrolled already in other benefit programs such as the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as 3SquaresVT in Vermont, or Reach Up, a program to help low-income parents gain job skills and find work. Homeless, migrant and foster children, and children enrolled in Headstart also qualify for free meals without submitting additional paperwork.
Sixty-five Vermont schools — including Waits River Valley School in East Corinth — have already begun offering universal meals, said Anore Horton, Hunger Free Vermont’s nutrition initiatives director who is providing technical assistance to Windsor Schools. Most participating schools offer universal meals with assistance from the Community Eligibility Provision and have discovered that they end up feeding more students while also reducing the cost of their food service program, Horton said.
In New Hampshire, Charlestown Primary School is one of three schools in the state that offer universal free meals through the Community Eligibility Provision, said Cheri White, administrator of the New Hampshire Department of Education’s Bureau of Nutrition.
She did not know whether any other New Hampshire schools plan to enroll in the program in the future.
“Each school district would take a look at their own finances (and) make a decision on their own,” she said.
Windsor Schools, and the four others that received Vermont’s universal meals grant this winter, are close to qualifying for the additional federal reimbursements, but need to have a few more families sign up, Horton said.
“There’s just this group, they’re unsure if it’s going to work for them and they need help to figure that out,” Horton said.
The worst case scenario, Horton said, would be that a school would begin offering free meals to all students and then stop because it became unaffordable for the school district.
Expanding universal meals is a step-by-step process, said Amy Richardson, who helped Windsor Schools with the universal meals grant application and serves as the Windsor Southeast Supervisory Union’s farm-to-school and sustainability coordinator.
To qualify to host a summer meals program this year, the percentage of Windsor elementary school students signed up for free and reduced rate meals will have to be at 50 for a full month. While Windsor is close, it’s not quite there, Horton said.
Next, Windsor officials plan to target their efforts on breakfast. The “breakfast after the bell” meals will likely be grab-and-go, such as a carton of milk, a piece of fruit and a muffin, Richardson said. The hope is that by offering breakfast later in the day, more students will opt for the school meal.
“Breakfast can be a fun way to kind of take that first step into participation,” Richardson said.
While school meals might not be the same as home-cooked, “they’re balanced meals that are developed by dieticians,” she said.
The proposed change has encountered some opposition from teachers who are concerned about taking time away from instruction for breakfast and about the trash left after the meal, which would be eaten in the classrooms, Richardson said.
While teachers might need to be creative at first, Richardson said, students could still participate in class discussions while they eat.
In order to begin offering “breakfast after the bell” without disrupting instructional time, Windsor will need to purchase meal carts, Cassano said. School staff will then distribute the food to students during their advisory period, she said.
Other equipment the school is considering purchasing with the grant include a grow lab for herbs and salad greens, and a salad bar, Cassano said.
The effort to expand access to nutritional food in Windsor came out of the work of school-wide wellness and supervisory union-wide whole child committees, Cassano said.
In addition to pursuing funding such as the universal meals and the fresh fruit and vegetable grants, the school’s wellness committee also organizes activities such as last week’s wellness event — which, in addition to the focus on food, featured special fitness activities — and a harvest celebration in the fall.
Addressing the students’ health needs includes helping them get what they need to eat, exercise, drink water and sleep, she said. This approach comports with a theory known as “Maslow’s hierarchy of needs,” which holds that physiological needs must be met first in order for people to focus on other things, Cassano said.
“How can humans do well if they don’t have their basic needs met?” she said.
Nora Doyle-Burr can be reached at ndoyleburr@vnews.com or 603-727-3213.
