By Nicole Achs Freeling
GreatSchools.net Correspondent
School officials appealed to the city for a $1 million electronic meal payment system that they said would save SFUSD $1 million a year, money that could go into providing healthier student meals. Following the meeting Thursday of the Select Committee of the Board of Education and Board of Supervisors, Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi (District 5) said he believed funding such a system would have broad support on the Board of Supervisors.
"It's incumbent upon us to figure out a way to come up with this money," said Supervisor Sophie Maxwell, (District 10), who was responsible for bringing up the discussion. "This is important for us, it's important for our children and it's a way for us to say that this city cares about its families."
Also in attendance at the meeting were Supervisors Bevan Dufty (District 8) and Commissioners Hydra Mendoza and Jill Wynns.
Representatives from the Mayor's Department of Children, Youth and Families, and from the district's Student Nutrition program, discussed efforts that have been made to improve student nutrition, beginning with outlawing the sale of junk food and soda in 2003. They highlighted some pilot programs that have shown promising results. One is developing "Grab and Go" breakfasts that students eat at their desks during the first 15 minutes of school. The idea came about because many students rush to class just in time for the bell without having a meal first. In the schools where the Grab and Go breakfasts have been implemented, the numbers of kids eating school breakfasts has shot up 225 percent, according to district representatives.
Another initiative has been putting salad bars in cafeterias at schools such as Balboa High; this has increased the number of kids eating school lunches by 26 percent.
However, the district's Student Nutrition Services continues to face a gap between the "lunch money" it gets from the state and federal government and the costs of operating the program. The gap has shrinking over the last several years from $1.2 million to about $560,000, but that deficit has to be made up from the district's much-strained general fund.
A point-of-sale system, in which students pay for meals using prepaid electronic swipe cards, would bring tremendous value, supporters said. They estimated after the one-time cost of installation, it would save the district a million dollars a year by eliminating the need to collect and count cash, providing better inventory control and enabling faster reimbursement from the government. The program would make meal lines move much faster and, because of this streamlining, make it possible to expand the successful Grab and Go breakfast program to every school, supporters said. Also important, the system would eliminate the stigma of receiving free meals by making it impossible to know which students qualified and which were full-paying. The reduced stigma could mean more kids would apply for free and reduced lunches, which are reimbursed through federal funds. The district policy is not to turn away any child who doesn't have lunch money; in the cases of children who haven't applied for free lunches, the district simply absorbs the cost.
The money the district saved each year would mean nutrition services would not encroach on the general fund budget, district representatives said. The district would also have about $350,000 a year to put back into school meals for improvements, such as expanding salad bars and bringing more seasonal produce to the menu.
"None of this is in the mayor's budget that has come to us," Mirkarimi said. "We need to figure out where to come up with it." But he said he thought there would be support for finding the funds. "I definitely think it will be well-received by the other supervisors. I can't see why it wouldn't be." He noted, however, that "we seem to be discovering this almost by accident. I'm wondering why it wasn't put to us more formally by the mayor's office or the school district."
For her part, Wynns said she hadn't known district representatives intended to ask the city to fund the program, although she supported the idea. Wynns said the district has applied for a grant to fund the system but could put those funds to other student-nutrition-related uses.
I'm a parent volunteer member of the SFUSD Student Nutrition and Physical Activity Committee, not a district representative strictly speaking, but one of the public commenters in support of the proposal at yesterday's meeting.
It's gratifying to learn that Mirkarimi is supportive, because he was impassive at the meeting, so it was hard to tell. But my understanding was that this WAS the formal proposal, so I'm unclear what more-formal request process would be expected. The presentation was made by Libby Albert of DCYF, Meyla Ruwin of SFUSD School Health Programs, and parent volunteer chair of the Student Nutrition and Physical Activity Committee Dana Woldow, with a polished, prepared PowerPoint.
Hovering around the edges of that specific request for funding the point of sale system is the expectation of further discussion of asking the city to help fund school meals overall. That's on the basis that an enlightened, compassionate city should be feeding its children as well as possible; that SFUSD can't possibly do that on the low federal/state reimbursement; and that this it's a shared community responsibility to feed the community's children -- not something to be left to educators, forcing them to choose between providing better meals and providing school resources.
Expect further discussion of that issue!
Posted by: Caroline | June 08, 2007 at 01:33 PM