School Board Meeting Austin Briggs

By Austin Briggs


Pizza, cookies and nachos, your time is up.

That’s because students in Poudre Valley School District will have a wider selection of healthy, made-from-scratch-meals from which to choose in the near future.

At Tuesday night’s school board meeting parents and board members were shown possible timeline of the district’s plan to improve the quality and nutritional value of the meals that are served to students.

PSD Child Nutrition Director Craig Schneider noted four main areas to focus on to improve upon the 2.2 million meals the district serves every year.

This included increasing the Farm-to-School Program, which brings produce from local farms into the school; increasing the amount of food made from scratch; decreasing the amount of processed food that is served; and improving the nutritional taste and appeal of the food served, he said.

If the plan passes, a food advisory panel this spring would make recommendations to improve the nutritional content of meals that are served in PSD.

One of the major jobs of the panel would be to choose a task force to do an in-depth comprehensive assessment of all aspects of the food program in PSD.  To be decided is whether the task force is brought in from outside the district or whether it’s brought together with professionals from within PSD.

Once assembled the task force would look at what food is being thrown away every day by students, ways to improve efficiency in making meals, setting up a network to procure organic fruits and vegetables from vendors, what the best way to implement change would be and creating a blueprint to improve the nutritional value of the meals being served and to bring all the ideas together.

The school district would begin implementing the recommendations by the 2013 school year.

CanDo Obesity Prevention Coordinator Virginia Clark pointed out during her presentation a huge dialectic in the health of Coloradoans. According to Clark, adults in the state are the leanest in the country, the children are ranked 29^th.

Clark said that PSD already meets or exceeds the minimum USDA requirements for its school lunch program.

“That’s not enough though, we can go above and beyond that,” said Clark.

One of the first things to look at is the entrée. Clark said research has shown that the main entrée is the course that’s finished the most. Even if there are fruits and vegetables as side dishes, they are often times neglected and thrown away.

Clark said one way to improve the health of kids is to schedule recess before lunch.

 She explained that studies have shown having recess before lunch encourages kids to eat healthier, increases concentration and also decreases disciplinary problems later on in the day.

Clark said one of the successes so far has been putting salad bars in every school in the district.

Parent and school nutritionist Patty Dale spoke up before the meeting and said she believes the salad bars have been extremely popular with kids. After listing about 10 different fruits and vegetables that are available every day to students, she said from what she’s seen “kids eat all the vegetables at the bar in the lunch room.”

She contrasted that with what kids often times eat at home and said that PSD has done a great job so far of providing students with healthy meals.

Trisha Kob, a parent of two PSD students, said it’s a “very good idea” to bring in an outside task force to do a comprehensive review of the entire meal program in PSD. Kob said she wasn’t concerned about the costs.

“Greeley went to all scratch foods without extensive costs. I’m confident it can be done as they describe it.”