Farm to School Annual Report
Summer Reading Recommendation
Growing School Gardens
We’re Hiring!
Who Feeds Our Kids?
Harvest of the Month
Summer Garden Hours
Growing School Gardens!
When schools closed in late March, the Farm to School team—along with everyone else—wasn’t sure what would happen next. We knew teachers were swamped, had overflowing inboxes, and not enough hours in the day—so we took a step back, not wanting to add any more noise to their already loud lives.
In early April, we began fielding questions from teachers interested in school gardens who were unsure as to how best to maintain them during the outbreak. We connected gardeners with resources (notably the Vermont Community Garden Network) and started meeting virtually with Farm to School teams interested in maintaining their outdoor growing spaces and looking for a concrete project to focus on.
We saw an opportunity to expand the support Food Connects offered and facilitate planning calls and a community of practice for school garden coordinators. The group was able to visit two school gardens—Academy School in Brattleboro and Westminster Community School—before the buzz of summer took hold. These meetings became spaces for educators from throughout the region to share ideas, troubleshoot obstacles, and brainstorm solutions.
The coming school year is still cloaked in uncertainty, but—thanks to this group of dedicated educators and growers—students can expect to find bountiful gardens. And who knows, teachers may find these outdoor classrooms a useful alternative for lessons beyond life cycles, nutrition, and garden education.
Food Connects works with schools throughout the region. If you have questions or are interested in joining a Farm to School community of practice, let us know! We hope to be able to host our Regional Fall Gathering, in addition to coordinator calls and more informal gatherings this year.
More Than Local
Jennifer Gaddis’ new book, “The Labor of Lunch,” broadens the spotlight on school meals. Without diminishing the importance of healthy, local foods, Gaddis explores the activist work that brought the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) to where it is today, exposes the systemic roadblocks preventing a new “economy of care” within our schools, and suggests actions readers can take now to be a part of the solution.
What made you last think about school meals? When your child started Kindergarten? During Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! Campaign in 2010? Not since you graduated high school?
To many, school meals are boring—as enticing as the thought of reading a 200+ page book on a dull government program. Food Connects works to dispel people’s biases of the former, partnering with school nutrition programs to incorporate more local food and scratch cooking, and to share stories of their success. Gaddis does quick work of the latter in her introduction:
Ultimately, school lunch is about community. It’s also about the conflict between civil society, the government, and the private sector over what children should be fed, whose responsibility it is to feed them, who should do the work of feeding them, and what, exactly, this work should entail. More often than not, food for children to eat at school is prepared by a woman—a child’s caregiver, a private sector factory worker, or a public sector lunch lady—for free or for poverty wages.
Labor of Lunch, p.5
All of a sudden—five pages in—school lunch doesn’t feel as innocuous as previously thought.
The history of the NSLP starts back in the early 1900s with feminist activists Emma Smedley and Ellen Swallow Richards taking on the work of a nonprofit lunch program and advancing the new science of home economics. What’s most striking in these early sections of the book are the examples of how far we’ve come—far stricter food safety regulations and cafeterias finding a permanent home in schools—adjacent to conversations we’re still having today—debates over universal free meals and for-profit vs non-profit lunch programs. It’s a good reminder that progress isn’t always linear and successful activism is a balance of ideology and pragmatism.
One of these pragmatic compromises made by early activists sets the stage for the dichotomy we’re still working to dissolve today—that school nutrition programs need to “break-even” financially, despite no other school program shouldering the same expectation (imagine the administration expecting the science department to raise revenues to cover the cost of lab equipment). Due to the conservative, mostly male, school boards and administrations dictating policy, in the newly created school lunch programs, cheapness—at the expense of quality and workers—reigned supreme.
The next three chapters—much of the book—is a chronicle of the persistent efforts of schools to reduce costs and corporations to eke out profits. Both, typically, at the expense of those serving our kids and most affecting poor people and communities of color. Along with women, BIPOC leaders were often on the frontlines fighting for change. The 1960s saw Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s Poor People's Campaign call upon the government to provide free lunch to all poor children and the Black Panther Party running the Free Breakfast for Children Program. Following in the 1970s was a conservative backlash and opening up of cafeterias to private corporations.
The Labor of Lunch closely follows New Haven chapters of the labor union Unite Here, as well as the Minneapolis Public Schools, as examples of how to establish better economies of care within schools. These labor movements have emphasized the inextricable connection between food justice and racial justice. While both should be taught to our students, they should also be practiced in our schools.
In Windham County, we can look to Windham Central Supervisory Union (Seed2Tray) and Windham Northeast Supervisory Union (Farm to School Cafe), as well as individual schools such as Putney Central School and Marlboro School, to find schools valuing labor. In all these cases, staff saw their pay increase and were offered school benefits. These are the test pilots for our entire region as we move back to locally-focused school nutrition programs that value their workers and the quality of the food.
Gaddis concludes by suggesting a “more expansive vision of what food systems could look like if we focus our collective efforts on transforming the NSLP into a hub for food justice—real food and real jobs—in every community across the rural-urban divide” (215). From the push for universal meals to local food hubs and community kitchens, much of that work has already taken hold in our region. With widespread community support and creative solutions, we could find our community leading the next step in the food justice movement.
Order your copy of The Labor of Lunch: Why We Need Real Food and Real Jobs in American Public Schools today.
Written by Conor Floyd, Farm to School Program Manager
Hot Off the Presses: 2020 Farm to School Annual Report
Our 2020 Farm to School Annual Report is now available! Download it today to read our year in review and learn about our accomplishments and partnerships.
Who Feeds Our Kids: Linda Griffin
Food Connects is launching a new series highlighting the amazing essential workers in our community who work hard every day to keep our children fed. Read on to learn more!
Linda Griffin
Linda Griffin has worked in school food service for the past 3 to 4 years. She is trained to work at Oak Grove School, Green Street School, and Academy School. She drives the food delivery van between these three schools so she is at each school every day. We sat down recently and had a chat about her work and how things have changed for her this spring. Here are some highlights from that conversation:
“I got to know kids in every single school because I got to work at every one of them. When I go out sometimes I see a kid and he’ll say, ‘Hey mom, I know her, she’s the lunch lady!’”
Sheila Humphreys (SH): How has your work changed due to COVID-19?
Linda Griffin (LG): I’m not driving the delivery van anymore which I like because the loading and unloading is a lot of heavy lifting which hurts my back. What we’re doing now with packing food for the bus delivery is also a lot of heavy lifting and I don’t think I could do both.
In the kitchen, we’re preparing similar food, but the quantities are a lot more and we’re doing it in the same amount of time. We’re providing breakfast, lunch, and dinner now. When we took on doing dinners that made it a little more stressful but now that we’ve been doing them a while we’ve got our systems down. We weren’t sure we could pull it off in the same amount of time that we were doing breakfast and lunch, but we’ve got it figured out now so it’s fine.
SH: What is keeping you going during these unusual times?
LG: It keeps me going to have something to do every day when I wake up in the morning, someplace to go. I don’t know if I could have handled this sitting at home doing nothing and not being able to see my kids or my grandkids. I’m not the kind of person who can sit around doing nothing. Having this job has definitely saved me from going stir crazy.
SH: What has been your biggest challenge during this time?
LG: My biggest challenge has been not seeing my family. My grandkids came over last weekend and it’s the first time I've seen them since this started. It was so nice! We sat outside and chatted about “old times.” It was funny, they aren’t little kids anymore, but it’s not like you would think they’d be sitting around talking about what we used to do, but they were.
SH: How can the community support you and other food service workers during this time?
LG: The community can support us by volunteering and helping out, and by saying thank you for what we do. That means a lot.
SH: What advice would you give to someone who is interested in working in school food service?
LG: Absolutely do it! It’s fun. We have a great time! It’s busy, you’ve got something to do every minute so the day goes by fast and we have fun. We talk, we play the radio. When school’s in session you get to see the kids and that’s really nice. I got to know kids in every single school because I got to work at every one of them. When I go out sometimes I see a kid and he’ll say, “Hey mom, I know her, she’s the lunch lady!”
SH: What brings you joy?
LG: My kids, my family, and getting up and being able to go to work every day.
SH: What are you grateful for?
LG: I’m grateful for having a job, my family, my kids, my friends, the school, and working with the kids. I like people!
School meals continue through the summer: WSESU looking for volunteers to help with the effort
The Vermont Summer Food Service Program kicked off on June 22. For school kitchens throughout the state, that means continuing serving thousands of meals a week to their communities’ children. In the Windham Southeast Supervisory Union (WSESU), they can’t do it alone. While school staff are the backbone of the operation, the program can’t operate without volunteers helping with food preparation and working at the distribution sites.
“I am grateful and in awe of all of our volunteers and can not thank them enough for ensuring our students get the nutrition they need to thrive,” said Ali West, Brattleboro Town Schools Food Service Director, Fresh Picks Cafe. “Many of our regular volunteers from the school year are taking a much-deserved break, meaning we have lots of volunteer slots to fill in the coming weeks.”
Shifts range from 30 minutes at distribution sites to 3-hour shifts helping with food prep. If you’d like to help—whether it be weekly or just a few times throughout the summer—you can sign up online at https://bit.ly/2Nu4RZB.
For families looking to sign up their kids for meals, please complete this form: https://bit.ly/3dAGHqM. Meals are available to every child 18 years and younger for free.
Who Feeds Our Kids: Kerri Harlow
Food Connects is launching a new series highlighting the amazing essential workers in our community who work hard every day to keep our children fed. Read on to learn more!
Kerri Harlow
For 12 years Kerri Harlow has worked in school food service at Putney Central School (PCS). Before she was in food service she worked as a paraeducator at PCS for 10 years in the 1990’s. And this month, she is retiring. We sat down recently and had a chat about her work, how things have changed in her work since COVID-19, and some of the things she loves about her job. Here are some highlights from that conversation:
Sheila Humphreys (SH): How has your work changed due to COVID-19?
“It keeps me going to think about the children and know that we are still impacting their lives even though we’re not seeing them. I know that there are so many people that are totally dependent on 2 school meals a day for their children and it’s rewarding to help.”
Kerri Harlow (KH): For the first 3 weeks I continued to work all the hours that were needed to get the lunches out. Then, as the COVID cases got closer because my husband and I are both considered high risk (especially my husband) for a while I couldn’t come in to work at all. When things started opening up I began coming back in the afternoon every day and preparing food for the next day. The worst part for me is to be in the building and have it be totally empty. It seems very odd. Not seeing the kids is very hard. We try not to always make sandwiches and brown bag lunches, so what we’re cooking hasn’t changed that much, it’s how we distribute it that has changed.
SH: What is keeping you going during these unusual times?
KH: It keeps me going to think about the children and know that we are still impacting their lives even though we’re not seeing them. I know that there are so many people that are totally dependent on 2 school meals a day for their children and it’s rewarding to help. Everyone receiving the meals has been so wonderful! We get emails and pictures of the children with their food, and one woman sent us a picture when we sent food for the entire week during April break. The picture was of her 2 children and her refrigerator that was packed and organized with the whole week's lunches and breakfasts. Knowing how much people have appreciated the meals and the fact that they are showing their appreciation with what they can, mainly with a note here or there has meant a lot.
SH: What has been your biggest challenge during this time?
KH: As far as school goes, it’s been challenging to feel like I am contributing enough because I have had to stay home for part of the time. It was hard for me to feel like I was doing my share, so I’m very happy to be back now, in the afternoons. I just made it my mission to put little gifts in the bags every Friday for the kids. It’s been the worst thing, not being at work when I know I’m supposed to be. Sometimes you come to work and you think, oh I wish I could stay home today, but then when it happens it’s not fun and you realize how much being at work really means.
SH: How can the community support you and other food service workers during this time?
KH: We’ve had a wonderful response from the staff members who are coming in and helping. This came about so quickly and we’ve never done this before, but it’s gone much more smoothly than I would have thought it would. I worry about next year. I wonder what's going to happen and how it's all going to come together. I wonder how long people can keep this going because it’s hard. As far as the community, they’ve done all that they can, and it definitely has been enough. Everyone has come together. It’s got to be done so we’re doing it!
SH: What advice would you give to someone who is interested in working in school food service?
KH: It is the most rewarding job I’ve ever had. It’s not easy at times, but since COVID-19, I have a whole new appreciation of the job. If someone has children in the school or in the district, it’s a great job because you have the same schedule as your children. When I was here as a paraeducator for 10 years in the 1990’s my children were in school here, and when I came back 12 years ago I was taking care of my granddaughter and she was in school here. It’s fantastic because the pressure is reduced as a working parent. The school understands when your child is sick and you have to stay home. Having the school vacations and snow days is great peace of mind. Working with the kids is wonderful. You get so close to them, handing them their meals every day. You wouldn’t think it would be enough time to connect with them but you do. It’s very, very rewarding and great to spend that much time with children.
SH: What brings you joy?
KH: My family and my work, and I love to do all different types of crafts. I’m retiring this year, and I can’t wait to come back as a volunteer. It’s not a job that you walk away from easily. I’m such good friends with everyone in the building, so I realized that if I volunteer I can have more one on one time with the kids. I love interacting with the kids and I’m looking forward to that when I come back as a volunteer. I love working with children. I had a home daycare, I was a para, and then I have been a cook here. Everything I’ve done for work has been child-oriented.
SH: What are you grateful for?
KH: I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to work here twice when it was the perfect fit for my family. I’m very grateful for all the people here that I’ve met, some of whom have been friends since I worked here back in the 1990’s. I am extremely grateful for the insurance that the school provides. I didn’t have that as a paraeducator or when I worked here with a food service company, but when our meal program became independent the school put us on their insurance which was amazing. I’m very grateful to have had this job and have had it work so well. It’s been really, really wonderful. Seeing the kitchen change to an independent food service while I’ve been here was amazing, and Food Connects’ staff Helen, Katherine, and Richard were so wonderful. It is something I loved that happened while I was working here! It was very good for the school and we have such support from the community for the food program and I’m very grateful for that also.
SH: Final thoughts?
KH: I'm retiring at the end of this year and it’s going to be very, very hard to leave. It’s been a fantastic job. The closer retirement gets, I think, “what am I doing?” but it’s time to move on, and by no means am I walking away from this building. They will probably get sick of me! It’s been a fantastic job. I broke my shoulder this winter and I was out of work for 2 months. I was just starting to come back when the school closure happened. All of the kids made me cards and the staff made me food and I had all these special things I was going to do for each classroom when I came back but I couldn’t do any of it because of the school closure. I’m looking forward to making good on my intention to pay it forward when I come back as a volunteer.
Addendum: We learned after this interview that Kerri is an incredible baker and she is making individual graduation cakes (yes, a whole cake!) for all of the 8th graders.
Vegetable Starts Make it to the Community
Hundreds of veggie starts made it out to the community in early June thanks to Sarah Rosow (Guilford’s Farm to School Coordinator), Lilac Ridge Farm, and VT Hemp!
It started early on a Wednesday morning, with Sarah distributing 6-packs of kale starts donated by Lilac Ridge Farm. Amanda Thurber of Lilac Ridge donates plants to Guilford Central School garden every spring. This year she had an abundance of kale plants and wanted to donate them. Sarah worked with her and Ali West (Brattleboro Town Food Service Director, Fresh Picks Cafe) to figure out how to distribute them. 10 trays/80 six-packs/640 plants ended up getting distributed to Guilford families with their normal school meal delivery. Families who don't get lunch delivered were invited to pick up plants from school.
Paraeducator Sandy Cutting delivers kale plants and lunch to Guilford Pre-K student Leah Hurst.
Kale ready to be loaded onto buses for delivery to Guilford residents.
Amanda and Lilac Ridge Farm also had cabbage and tomato plants to donate and hope to do another distribution later in the month. Sarah shared planting instructions through the school’s Facebook page and in the school newsletter and plans to share recipes later. Anyone who wants to support Lilac Ridge Farm can buy plants or produce at their farmstand on Ames Hill Road.
Isaac Freitas-Eagan of Guilford, and Amanda Thurber, co-owner of Lilac Ridge Farm of West Brattleboro, prepare to send off 10 trays of kale plants to Guilford families.
In the afternoon, Jon and Harley from VT Hemp set-up shop in the Brattleboro Union High School parking lot to distribute a variety of veggie starts to the community. Community members, school gardeners, and various organizations stopped by to pick up the starts for the season! VT Hemp hopes to continue this program in the future with more veggie starts to come.
Veggie starts from VT Hemp.
There’s a lot of gardening happening this summer. Want to get involved but don’t have space? Looking for advice from an experienced garden? Join Tara Gordon at one of Food Connects many open garden hours. It’s free for children and parents and art activities will accompany each session. Sign up ahead of time to reserve your spot!
#growingresilienceVT #vtvegout
June 2020 Farm To School Newsletter
Summer Gardens are Back!
Reenvisioning the Oak Grove School Garden
Growing Resilience
Thank You, Walker Farm!
Who Feeds Our Kids?
The Lunch Monitor: Pandemic EBT
Springfield Cafeteria Change
Change is Coming to Springfield School District’s Cafeterias this Fall
One of the mantras of Farm to School is the three C’s—classrooms, cafeterias, and communities. Of the three, cafeterias are arguably the most complicated—federal nutritional guidelines dictate much of what is served, complicated funding and eligibility formulas heavily influence School Nutrition Programs’ finances, and procurement regulations add to the pile of paperwork on Food Service Directors' desks.
In an effort to simplify all this, many districts contract out the work of feeding their students to Food Service Management Companies (FSMC, usually for-profit companies). Economies of scale and specialized experience in the field can give these companies a competitive edge and increased efficiency of feeding kids. There can exist a tension between school meal affordability and quality and the profit motive inherently tied to for-profit businesses. Similar discussions are playing out in other areas of American life where public services are privatized—healthcare, prisons, and schools at large.
For our discussion today it means that behind the scenes at the most local level, an individual school’s cafeteria, there are two bureaucracies sharing responsibility—the school administration and the FSMC. That can make effecting change more difficult and clear communication essential. It effects what students are eating every day. To get a better picture of the landscape of school lunches in southeastern Vermont, check out our Cafeteria Unknown stories.
Every five years, a district’s food service contract needs to be re-bid, which is when the school nutrition contract is open to the public for other companies and individuals to bid. This can be a time to reflect on the current state of school meals and reassess what values the district wants to elevate—this could include incorporating more local foods, improving meal quality, or moving towards universal meals. Springfield School District (SSD) completed its contract rebid this spring and staff from Food Connects, the Department of Health, and Springfield Hospital worked with the school staff to update the nutritional guidelines in their wellness policy.
Beth Brothers, SSD’s Health Coordinator, led this effort on the wellness team, which also serves as the district’s nutrition advisory council. Given the team’s interest in nutrition, it was a natural fit for them to take on much of the work in preparation for the contract being re-bid. Laurie Colgan, former State Director for Child Nutrition Programs, was contracted to manage the entire process and the wellness team dug into recommendations for nutritional changes.
Of all the bids received, one stood out to Beth and many others on the review committee. The Abbey Group, a Vermont-based FSMC, ultimately won the contract. In addition to being a local company, their bid stood out to Beth because of the emphasis placed on nutrition education for their staff. The commitment to professional development and higher wages helped the Abbey Group’s bid rise to the top.
Beth is excited to see what the new program looks like for SSD’s students this coming fall. Despite uncertainty over what school will look like, Beth and the wellness team hopes to see more local and healthy foods on the menu. She’s excited about starting a new relationship with the Abbey Group. When looking back on the entire process, Beth reflected that “the thing I have seen the biggest need for is stronger communication and collaboration.” It’ll be with that takeaway in mind that the wellness team starts the new school