Local schools serving healthy foods

By Becky Brooks

Man­ag­ing Editor

news@gazettepublishingco.com

State Sen­a­tor Eric Kear­ney (D-Cincinnati) vis­ited Belle­vue City Schools Mon­day to see a local “healthy food” pro­gram in action.

Two mem­bers of the Belle­vue High School’s FCCLA pro­gram have been work­ing each week to intro­duce dif­fer­ent fruits and veg­eta­bles to kinder­gart­ners at Belle­vue Ele­men­tary School, accord­ing to a press release.

On Mon­day, BHS stu­dents and FCCLA mem­bers Jor­dan Halsey and Sonia Mott donned their fruity hats and reviewed health food lessons with classes of kinder­gart­ners in the ele­men­tary school as Kear­ney and Super­in­ten­dent Kim Schu­bert watched.

At the start of each of three ses­sions before lunch, Kear­ney intro­duced him­self to the stu­dents and spoke a bit about healthy eating.

Kear­ney pointed out he was inter­ested in the Belle­vue City Schools pro­gram, because he was the spon­sor of Sen­ate Bill 210 — The Healthy Choices for Healthy Chil­dren leg­is­la­tion, which was signed into law in 2010.

“This school is one of the lead­ers in the state in imple­ment­ing healthy choices,” he said Mon­day while at the school.

Kear­ney also joked he would drive any­where he was invited to visit.

The state sen­a­tor also has a BHS alum­nus on his staff, Leo Almeida, who vis­ited BES with Kear­ney on Monday.

Kear­ney said there are sev­eral schools in the state that are suc­cess sto­ries as to how they have imple­mented Healthy Choices as part of their nutri­tion program.

In Belle­vue, Jackie Hess, the Food Ser­vices Direc­tor, has made an effort to include whole grains and a vari­ety of fruit and veg­etable choices into the stu­dents’ daily lunches.

She noted that when chil­dren have choices they tend to buy more lunches. “In the past we had a lot of waste. Now I’m guar­an­teed stu­dents will eat their lunch, because they are choos­ing foods they want to eat and the trash cans are less full, and the stu­dents are get­ting the nutri­tion they need,” she noted in a press release.

Hess has made changes so the foods the chil­dren are get­ting are bet­ter for them such as using frozen veg­eta­bles when she can­not use fresh to avoid the sodium of canned vegetables.

Over 75 prece­dent of the grains served at lunch are whole grains — even in the mac­a­roni and cheese — which also uses reduced fat cheeses. The dis­trict is also serv­ing fla­vored skim milk as an option.

With so many foods — health­ier foods — being new to the stu­dents, the FCCLA teamed with Hess to pro­vide edu­ca­tion to young stu­dents to try new foods before they found them on their trays.

On Mon­day Jor­dan Halsey and Sonia Mott were intro­duc­ing stu­dents to pep­per slices — giv­ing them a chance to taste red, green and yel­low bell pep­pers with low fat ranch dressing.

The ses­sions were being video­taped so they could be shared with other stu­dents dur­ing lunch.

On Mon­day morn­ing, the stu­dents who braved the new food received a sticker. Some chil­dren ate the pep­per while oth­ers tasted and threw it away. Still the brave ones who tried it received their sticker.

Halsey and Mott also reviewed with the stu­dents the other foods they had tried in past lessons, includ­ing pump­kin cook­ies, fresh kiwi, sweet pota­toes and — the one the kinder­gart­ners seem to remem­ber most clearly — Brus­sels sprouts.

The local dis­trict not only has adopted HB 210 in its lunch lines, but also in class lessons on healthy living.

So Kear­ney also vis­ited the mid­dle school and high school on Monday.

At BHS, he vis­ited the Ag Sci­ences room and the Fam­ily and Con­sumer Sci­ences room to check up on two types of gar­dens being raised by stu­dents. One is a dirt gar­den where stu­dents are rais­ing salad-oriented plants and the other hydro­pon­ics — where let­tuce is growing.

The vis­it­ing state sen­a­tor also stopped to visit mid­dle school stu­dents for a ques­tion and answer ses­sion, accord­ing to the school press release.

As part of the Health Choices pro­gram, eighth graders in Fam­ily and Con­sumer Sci­ences have been learn­ing to cook with whole grains and to increase their use of fruits and vegetables.

Posted by Becky Brooks on Feb 14 2013. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.