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Sometime soon, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, is expected to raise quality standards for the meals provided in public schools.  It’s the first change like this in 15 years.  And among budget strapped school districts, there’s likely to be a scramble for how to meet the new standards and how to persuade kids to give healthier food a try.  One school district that already done all this is Boulder Valley.  Three years ago, the district hired Ann Cooper as the director of food services.  Under her guidance, the district has reduced salt and sugar, added salad bars, and made more food from scratch, all for the incredibly low price of around $1.15 per student per day.  Despite concerns that throwing out the junk would make kids abandon school lunch, today, more students choose it now than they did three years ago.   This doesn’t mean that kids aren’t still tempted by candy and other fast food snacks that they can bring to school in their packed lunches.  But it is getting more popular.  To find out more, let’s go to Casey Middle School, to talk with middle school students Sean, Ira and Jean.

SEAN:  I’m Sean and I’m a student at Casey Middle School.

JEAN:  I’m Jean.   At Casey Middle School, a lot of students do eat the school lunch.

IRA:
My name is Ira, and I get hot lunch here at school.  Some of the kids get a little jealous.  When we have nachos and tacos, that’s when they really get jealous, cause our, the nachos and tacos here are really good.

JEAN:  The school lunches have changed a lot.

SEAN:  Mainly because of a chef named Ann Cooper.

ANN COOPER
Before I came, the items that were being served here were corn dogs, grilled cheese sandwiches that were frozen in plastic, chicken nuggets, something called a pizza pocket which was frozen in plastic, bread with some goop on top.  It had chemicals and dyes and all that stuff in it.  Everything was bought frozen from some big company somewhere else. Nobody made any food, and it was just heated and served to you guys.  Since then, we’ve got the food that we have now, with  every single bit of it made from scratch.

JEAN:  So from what Ann Cooper said, the school lunches are made from scratch and they don’t have any dyes in it . . .

ANN COOPER We have in the district, eight chefs, and the chefs that we have cooking for you guys came from places that you might even think are kind of cool, like Rock Bottom, the executive from Pearl Street Whole Foods, Executive Chef from the  Cheesecake Factory, so you’ve got these people who are working eight nine hours a day doing nothing but cooking this food from scratch every day.  They really, really care.  Everyone just so cares about what you guys think and about how the food is, and about serving healthy food.  Between 40 % and 50 % of the kids every day eat here.  Which is actually pretty good.  Do you guys know how much money we’re allocated to spend on the food.

JEAN:  I think we talked about it awhile ago, but I forget.

ANN COOPER:  As a middle school student, you guys pay $3.00 for the kids who could pay, but there’s over 30%, over a third of all the kids here are free and reduced lunch kids and that means the government gives us $2.77 but of that, we get to spend $1.15 on food.  So when you think about what you might be able to bring in, you got to think that there’s $1.15, that’s all that we have. $1.15.

You know, there’s another part to this I think.  I don’t know if you guys know this, but in our school district, 25% of the kids live at or below 180% of the poverty line.  That means a family of four, they would be living on less than $30,000 a year.  So, there’s more than 5,000 kids in those families, and they don’t have the choice to bring their lunch from home.  They don’t have the money.  These are hungry kids living at the poverty line.

JEAN
A lot of the kids at our school kind of depend on the hot lunches.   I usually eat pretty healthy at my house, we have vegetables and fruits and meats, all that healthy stuff, but people who can’t have that, this hot lunch may be really important for their life.  That’s like their most important meal of the day.

SEAN:  We could make everyone like the lunches by making it, maybe a little bit unhealthier.

JEAN
I’ve always liked vegetables.

SEAN
Yeah, but not compared to candy.

JEAN
Yeah, compared to candy, everything else is like gone.

Thanks to Casey Middle School Students, Sean, Ira and Jean for that interview with Ann Cooper.  As for just who’s eating hot lunch at Casey these days, three years ago, about 30% of Casey students chose the hot lunch option.  Today, 40% do, and that includes an increasing number of students who get it at full price.  District wide, there’s enough participation that the healthier school lunches are now  budgeted to break even from an operational perspective.  That means they’ll soon be paying for themselves, right on schedule with the district’s three-year plan.