Check out a great blog post over at The Slow Cook capturing one parent's role in helping to revise wellness policies in his daughter's school district.
Over the last several months I’ve been meeting with D.C. school officials and now it can be revealed: We have a new wellness policy that prohibits flavored milk and sugary cereals, requires that all children have at least 30 minutes to eat their food at lunch, limits classroom celebrations to just one per month and mandates that all food served on school grounds–including vending machines, school stores, bake sales and other fundraisers–comply with HealthierUS School Challenge gold-level standards.
Congress in 2004 mandated that all public schools must have a wellness policy in place that sets goals for nutrition education and physical activity and establishes guidelines for the food available during the school days. The federal law also requires that schools involve parents and students in developing the wellness policy. But it doesn’t give precise directions on how this is to be done, so parents in too many cases have been frustrated in their efforts to make wellness policy changes.
The policy is supposed to be updated every three years.
Fortunately for us in the District of Columbia, we now have a food services director–Jeffrey Mills–who would like nothing better than serve the kind of food Alice Waters would be proud of. I was pleasantly surprised at how open the process of revising our wellness policy was–even though I didn’t get everything I wanted.
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As we are learning, however, drafting a policy and seeing it actually take effect can be two different things. For instance, in our last meeting we learned that while schools are required to provide at least 30 minutes of physical education for all primary grades, and 45 minutes in senior schools, some principals have instructed their PE teachers instead to have the kids read, to boost test scores. In fact, the school officials at the table urged me and other community members that the best way to address problems like that may be for us to draft a letter to the schools chancellor. Apparently, working up the chain of command doesn’t necessarily get results.
Yet under “Healthy Schools,” kids beginning in 2014 are supposed to be getting five times as much PE–150 hours per week in elementary school, 225 minutes per week in grades six through eight.
Similarly, although the wellness policy states that every child should have at least 30 minutes to eat lunch “after the last student passes through the line,” I don’t know of any school where that currently is the case. Especially in schools with high enrollment of low-income children, who tend to take the federally subsidized meal rather than bringing one from home, those lunch lines can be very long. In my daughter’s elementary school last year, for instance, the lunch period was only 30 minutes long, and the last kid who went through the line typically did not have much more than 15 minutes to eat.
Next on the agenda for the wellness committee may be figuring out how the school can arrange training sessions for staff so that they actually know what’s in the policy and what they need to do to comply with it. Federal rules require that the wellness policy be distributed to staff and made easily available to the public, such as by posting it on school websites and keeping copies for public inspection in the school office.
Other highlights: nutrition education that integrated into other content areas such as math, science, language arts and socials studies and teach “media literacy with an emphasis on food marketing.” Schools must provide at least 20 minutes of recess daily, and it should come before lunch “whenever possible.” Schools are required to increase participation in meal programs through a “coordinated, comprehensive outreach plan” that builds community coalitions and may include after-school cooking clubs for families, parent workshops and community/school gardens.
Under the federal mandate, we are also required to figure out a way to collect data and masure the impact of implementing the wellness policy. In other words, we still have our work cut out for us.
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