Suggestions for “Rallying the Troops” for more nutritious school meals?

Start squawking to everybody and at every chance you get. Go to a PTA meeting and state your concerns and see if other moms and dads echo your concerns and volunteer to chair a committee on this topic. Then approach your school board in your district and present your concerns with examples of cost effective healthy programs in other districts.

You are after all a taxpayer and a stakeholder and should not be shut out of the process. If they push back you just have to push back harder. But be prepared to be part of the solution and not just another hand waving critic of a very difficult task that school districts face across the country. Having happy kids with full bellies and feeding kids nutritious cost effective tasty meals is a lot harder than it looks.

I bypass all the fuss and pack my kids lunches…they are grateful to not have to rely on the crap served in the lunch lines.

I pack for my kid too, every day except Friday (pizza day) but there are kids whose families count on the school to give them a hot meal for lunch and kids who wouldn’t otherwise eat breakfast if they couldn’t get it at school.

It’s those people who can’t afford to feed their kids that are the first to get overlooked and yet those are the kids that are the most at risk to not do well in school.

Should I start getting documentation of the other school districts together right away? Do you think that the people that have done this in other schools will talk to “just a mom” to give me the info for how they managed to pull off feeding kids whole foods and keep within budget?

@christine215 Again, you are not just a mom, you are a stakeholder and part of the process. I wish I could say exactly where to go and what to say and what to do. I guess I would start at the school and talk to the Principal and or asst Principal and find out what they know. They should know and have been part of the process to date and know much of the nitty gritty details of how and why the program is what it is. They may have knowledge of where to go and who to contact to have your voice heard.

Don’t be afraid to go above the local school level and contact the district heads directly. They don’t bite and they will call you back….this what they are getting paid by you to do! You just have to be the squeaky wheel and you should get at the very least the details of the how and why things are the way they are. Good luck

Use the PTA to put pressure on her to take nutrition into account.

You might want to do some research to offer helpful suggestions. I would write the Berkeley CA School District; they have worked on affordable healthy lunches. Write or call Michelle Obama’‘s office, she is working on child nutrition. And look up Jaimie Oliver; his show last season was about healthy school meals in a district that had limited funding.

And this is the time to be a constant presence at the school board and PTA. It will not be an easy fight, but it is a good fight, and will benefit the whole community. Good Luck to you!

The power’s in the parents and through the students is the way to influence them. I’d have kids pass out food surveys, where students rate different inexpensive healthy food choices based on their preference and tell them to each individually take them to the front office. It might cause a little chaos with the administration, but even if it doesn’t it should get kids talking, which should get parents talking. Or maybe comparative charts with the school’s lunch items and more ideal lunch items, with the nutrition facts and information about toxins in generic foods. It’s not really impolite to go through the students instead of the administration or PTA alone as long as it’s done responsibly and it seems like it would be more effective.

” Or maybe comparative charts with the school’s lunch items and more ideal lunch items, with the nutrition facts and information about toxins in generic foods”

@zophu – It’s funny you should say this because this is another item for which I have a complaint with the school district.
The school district only provides nutritional information “at your request” via e-mail. however the e-mail address which they’ve posted online to ask for the information bounces back as an invalid e-mail address on their server.

The new Coordinator of Food Services indicated to me that would be fixed… it still isn’t and they have yet to provide me with any of the nutritional information I’ve requested so far. (I’m not being unreasonable and asking for it ALL either, I’ve requested some of the more ‘sinister-sounding’ items which they’re feeding the kids.

Write letters to everyone involved, including the district superintendent of schools, all the way up to the State superintendent of schools with information on what changes you want to see and how they can be implemented. Include letters to the various government level health departments as well.

Unfortunately, there is no central authority who is actually in charge of this sort of thing, so you have to stir up the pot a lot to get any response. Every official has the that’s not my job syndrome.