San Francisco Project
San Francisco Unified School District Project: Student Nutrition Reform
CBN is working with a community of partners to restructure and reform SFUSD’s approach to and implementation of nutrition programs in San Francisco’s public school system. Studies show that good nutrition is critical to cognitive development and the ability to set goals and achieve them. Thus, it is critical for San Francisco's children to receive proper nutrition and nutrition education to maximize their potential to learn so they can overcome poverty and be successful.
CBN is working with community partners and SFUSD do the following:
- Enhance and integrate nutrition education and garden projects with the school lunch, breakfast, and snack programs as well as with the home.
- Improve school meals dramatically, providing greater access for all children to higher quality food, more local and fresh produce, and more appetizing cooking methods and presentation.
- Eliminate systematic discrimination in the school nutrition program. This will benefit not only low income and minority students, but the entire school system as well, both socially and financially: Currently, students are easily identified as poor if they participate in the free lunch and breakfast program. This negatively effects them socially and eventually they skip meals to avoid the stigma. If this overt identification of income status were eliminated from the system, low income students will be more likely to apply for and participate in those programs. This has immediate and long-term benefits for the child. It also benefits the entire student body because it increases federal Title 1 funding to the school as well as federal support for all school meals.
To facilitate this work, CBN's executive director has been on the SF Board of Education Student Nutrition and Physical Activity Committee since 2003. In that time, the SFUSD program has improved significantly but the improvements are not always consistent and there is still a long way to go.
One of the most excited changes is a new pilot project at Balboa High School. The pilot was designed to eliminate inequities in the lunch program so that all students have access to all food, regardless of income. Prior to the pilot, the school sold snack bar-type foods and alternative entrees for cash, a practice that can make it obvious which students are receiving a free meal. The results have been overwhelmingly positive; participation in the program has nearly doubled. The students have more choices and low-income students eat the same food as all students. The district plans to replicate the pilot in all its middle and high schools over the next few years.
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