How to Bring the Food Revolution to Your Child's School Start (Join) a Wellness Committee

In June I shared with you where my sons' school (in SBISD, Texas) is at in our journey to improve school breakfast and lunch. This is the second update in the series, How to Bring the Food Revolution to Your School.

First I'll share details with you about the campus and district committees that I'm participating in. Second, I'll share our Healthy Lifestyles committee's list of requests we'd like to present to Child Nutritional Services to start improving school breakfast and lunch. Lastly I'll share what our next steps are.

Start or Join a Committee
If you're new to the cause of bringing a food revolution to your child's school, the best place to start is with an existing group of like minded individuals. Some names I've heard of are Healthy Lifestyles (PTA group), Wellness Committee, or Student Health Advisory Council (a SBISD district initiative). Ask your child's teacher, principal or PTA president if a committee already exists. If not? You start one. That's what I did. Our district has SHAC, but since it focuses on student safety, counseling, staff wellness, community involvement, fitness and nutrition, I felt we needed a group that was more narrowly focused on fitness and nutrition for the students. I let our PTA president and principal know I wanted to start a committee, got the green light, and placed a sign-up sheet for volunteers at as many school functions as I can attend. We gave ourselves the name Healthy Lifestyles which is PTA's initiative that encompasses fitness and nutrition.

I am so thrilled with the current membership of our HL committee. It's nice to have other like-minded parents willing to take on some tasks to make nutrition and physical wellness a priority for Sherwood kids. Our principal also gives us the support we need, so that helps.

Student Health Advisory Council
I participate in our District SHAC and our Campus SHAC. I've attended one meeting for each. The District Council is where district wide initiatives can be brought for review and assessment. Then the council can make recommendations to the School Board of Directors. Our Campus SHAC council is focused on improving student safety, counseling, staff wellness, community involvement, fitness and nutrition to our campus. Our campus initiatives this year include:

• implementing and measuring results of the Eat to Learn program, which launched last week at Sherwood
• modifying the pre-K schedule to include 135 minutes of physical activity (they currently get 100 minutes).
  
• assessing our as-is in all components and planning programs for next year. Our campus SHAC is new so this is our practice year!
  

Healthy Lifestyles Committee
I've been recruiting for new members at school functions including the back to school coffee for parents, our first PTA meeting/Open House. We'll also have a booth at our school Carnival to sign up new members. We had our first meeting September 30th where we addressed:

• Brief members on Sherwood's Eat to Learn Program, grant application through National PTA. Goal is to increase participation and consumption of fresh food currently available in the school meals by connecting benefits of eating fresh produce with learning and movement (physical activity).
  
• Brief members on the summer meeting with Child Nutritional Services (see Good News/Bad News in the middle of the post)
• Plan for year (one member is planning the obstacle course booth at the school Carnival, two members are looking into the possibility of getting a salad bar at our school, one member is doing research on ingredients and recipes in current school lunch menu offerings).
  
• Discuss proposed menu changes to school lunch and breakfast. Included in the proposed recommendations are:
  

1. Eliminate or reduce frequency of chocolate milk availability at lunch.
2. Eliminate or reduce frequency of cinnamon toast crunch availability at breakfast.
3. Offer oatmeal and/or hard boiled eggs for breakfast
4. Add water as an a la carte option at lunch
5. Offer more unprocessed meat for lunch (right now baked chicken is offered once in a 5 week rotation, most other animal proteins are processed meats).
6. Offer deep fat fried foods less often (nuggets, chicken patties, "tater tot" ish type potato sides, taco shells, tortilla chips)
7. Less sausage more eggs at breakfast.
8. Eliminate days where pizza is offered for breakfast and lunch on the same days.
9. Reduce frequency of fruit juice offered at breakfast
10. Increase frequency of fresh fruit offered at breakfast
11. "Green our food", source food with less additives, ingredients that are GMO-free, rBGH free dairy (all our borden products are hormone free, but haven't verified yet if we get other non Borden dairy products), remove foods with petroleum based food coloring
    
12. Include non-wheat grains in the menu more often - rice is only offered once in a 5 week cycle. Oats are never offered.
13. Offer unsweetened applesauce. We currently have recipe that adds sugar and cinnamon to applesauce! Sigh.

Next Steps for Eat to Learn, Healthy Lifestyles Committee and C-SHAC.

• Healthy Lifestyles - Schedule meeting with Director of Child Nutritional Services to review the requested changes to the breakfast and lunch menu. Schedule next HL meeting.
  
• C-SHAC - hold Eat to Learn implementation session to plan curriculum with subject specialists.
• Eat to Learn - Write morning announcements for remaining 17 foods on the schedule, plan food sourcing for Taste off Competition.

This post is participating in Real Food Wednesday hosted by Kelly the Kitchen Kop.

Now I want to know how school food revolution initiatives are going at your school? What name does your committee go by? What unhealthy food has your school said good-bye to recently? Have you had to take any steps backward?