Free Republic

WESTFALL — Delaware Valley School District will be making sweeping changes to their career vocational-technical department, curriculum and lunch program. At last Thursday’s Board of Education meeting the directors voted to increase lunch prices by 10 cents for elementary, middle and high school and 25 cents for adult lunches. The new prices will be $1.85 for elementary, $2.10 for middle and high school. Adult lunches will now be $3.25. This is due in part to new federal guidelines requiring public schools that receive federal funding for free and reduced lunches to serve more costly items such as whole grains and...

School administrations continue to hang posters in cafeterias trying to convince students that what is being fed to them is "fun food" which is healthier for them than the foods they enjoy eating. Meanwhile schools are having to purchase more garbage cans to contain the Michelle mandated foods that kids are dumping, some preferring to go hungry rather than eat "required" foods. Students just throw away the food being forced on them by the US Government.

If the goal of the federal school lunch overhaul is to improve outcomes for children, somebody should tell its chief cheerleader -- First Lady Michelle Obama -- that it’s actually backfiring. Officials in New York’s Burnt Hills-Ballston Lake school district have become the latest to opt out of the National School Lunch Program, citing “hungry, frustrated children plus lost income.” “[Food service manager Nicky] Boehm and her staff worked hard to implement the new regulations, but there were just too many problems and too many foods that students did not like and would not purchase. Students complained of being hungry...

First lady-backed school lunch regs cost school district $100,000 Posted By Caroline May On 12:25 PM 07/09/2013 In Education | No Comments A New York school district is giving the boot to the National School Lunch Program (NLSP) and its new restrictive regulations mandating the number of calories and nutrients in each meal. The Burnt Hills-Ballston Lake school district announced this month that after a school year struggling with the new guidelines under the Michelle Obama-backed Healthy and Hunger Free Kids Act, the school will not be participating in the program this coming school year. “Students complained of being hungry...

As schools continue to grapple with the school lunch menu overhaul pushed by First Lady Michelle Obama, some are realizing their headache isn’t just from a lack of food. The program involves way too much green -- and we’re not talking lettuce and brussel sprouts. We mean the estimated $3.2 billion schools will have to find to implement the new federal regulations. Many schools are also losing money due the unpopular Obama menu. “New school lunch regulations mean financial losses for Pittsfield Public Schools,” reported the Berkshire Eagle in Massachusetts. The school district expects a program operating loss of more...

In a year of transition toward healthier school lunches, the Pittsfield Public Schools food service budget is headed for an operating loss of more than $100,000. The reason, other than the nearly $60,000 spent to replace the failing food warming line, relates to new federal nutrition guidelines that took effect, and to a state nutrition law that limits the types of snack foods and drinks that can be sold in public schools. "This [deficit] is in line with what is happening around the state". The number of meals served has fallen, and revenue from snacks is well below the level...

Republican Reps. Steve King of Iowa and Tim Huelskamp of Kansas continued their fight against the Agriculture Department’s recent public school meal regulation overhaul on Friday. The congressmen have argued that the new regulations imposed by the USDA, as required by the Michelle Obama-backed Healthy and Hunger Free Kids Act, are overly restrictive for growing and active children, largely due to calorie caps on meals. “The voluminous menu that’s good enough for the federal bureaucrats’ cafeteria should be good enough for our children’s school lunchroom,” Huelskamp said in a statement Friday. “If USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack thinks the federal government...

Why stop there? Maybe public schools should buy clothing for children, take them to the doctor and teach them to walk. Little by little, progressives are trying to remove the role of parents from the lives of children and this will continue unabated until Republicans are back in power at which point, liberals will once again decry the overreaching power of the state. The Hill reports… Dem bill would expand school lunch program to weekends, holidays Four House Democrats have proposed legislation that would expand school lunch programs to weekends and holidays. Rep. Dina Titus (D-Nev.) proposed the bill, which...

Not so long ago in this republic, most parents of school-age children would frequently visit grocery stores where they would use their own money to buy things like peanut butter and jelly, and bologna and cheese to make lunches for their kids to haul to school in brown paper bags. It was an American tradition. Now, like other great things about America, brown-bag lunches are being driven to extinction by politicians seeking inordinate government control over our lives. In fiscal year 1969 (which started in 1968), there were approximately 47,906,000 American children enrolled in elementary and high schools,

It is an old saying that there is no such thing as a free lunch, but a record 18.7 million American schoolchildren would not have learned that lesson when they attended school in fiscal year 2012. That is because U.S. taxpayers—via the U.S. Department of Agriculture—were picking up the tab for their lunch. According to new data from the USDA, during the average school month in fiscal year 2012, 18.7 million students in U.S. high schools and grammar schools were given completely free lunches, courtesy of the department’s National School Lunch Program. That was up from the record of 18.4...

WASHINGTON — A bipartisan group of senators is backing a bill that makes permanent a more relaxed set of U.S. Department of Agriculture nutrition guidelines for students’ breakfasts and lunches in the nation’s schools. The Sensible School Lunch Act was recently introduced by Sens. John Hoeven, R-N.D., and Mark Pryor, D-Ark. The act fixes the latest rulings on meat and grain servings made in December by the Department of Agriculture. It will “make sure that schools are able to provide healthy, nutritious school lunches” and breakfasts, Hoeven said Tuesday. “But at the same time, that we have the common sense...

Goodbye candy bars and sugary cookies. Hello baked chips and diet sodas. The government for the first time is proposing broad new standards to make sure all foods sold in schools are more healthful, a change that would ban the sale of almost all candy, high-calorie sports drinks and greasy foods on campus. Under new rules the Department of Agriculture proposed Friday, school vending machines would start selling water, lower-calorie sports drinks, diet sodas and baked chips instead. Lunchrooms that now sell fatty “à la carte” items like mozzarella sticks and nachos would have to switch to healthier pizzas, low-fat...

WASHINGTON (AP) - Most candy, high-calorie drinks and greasy meals could soon be on a food blacklist in the nation's schools. For the first time, the government is proposing broad new standards to make sure all foods sold in schools are more healthful. Under the new rules the Agriculture Department proposed Friday, foods like fatty chips, snack cakes, nachos and mozzarella sticks would be taken out of lunch lines and vending machines. In their place would be foods like baked chips, trail mix, diet sodas, lower-calorie sports drinks and low-fat hamburgers.

I’m pretty critical of Senator John Hoeven at times, but he deserves credit for going to bat against federal overreach on school lunches. New federal guidelines that, among others things, limited calories in school lunches rankled parents and school administrators across the nation. It was a one-size-fits-all policy for a nation full of students who have very different nutritional needs.Now, thanks to the work of Senator Hoeven (who teamed up with Arkansas Democrat Mark Pryor), the calorie restriction is no more, though just for the 2012-2013 school year. So it’s a temporary reprieve, for now. From a press release sent...

I see that Ag Secretary Tommy and his Vilsacks were forced to walk back their recent schoolyard food police “guidelines.” I’m referring of course to the USDA’s dictates restricting the amount of fat, salt, sugar, meat and grains in public school lunch programs. Under the new program some of the kids were so hungry that the schools evidently had to add breakfast and after school mini-dinner programs as well. So clearly this was not a cost cutting measure, butt simply a well intentioned “we know better than you what to feed your kids” edict (sponsored by the SEIU, now representing...

In a taste test of new lunch items last year in the Long Beach Unified School District, the fiesta salad received a nearly 73 percent approval rating. One student even declared that the dish of pinto beans, cilantro, corn, tomatoes and cayenne pepper was "better than McDonald's." Yet the salad was a flop when the district put it on the menu this year. A recent statewide survey shows that although students overwhelmingly support the new nutrition standards, most are tossing the foods they don't like. About 40 percent of students say they eat school lunches in their entirety. But what...

Annika Eriksson, a long-time Swedish chef revered for her school lunches, has been squelched. Has she made errors? Are her meals contaminated? Has the quality of her ingredients slipped? No, none of the above. The trouble stems purely from the fact that her meals are too good. Yes, you read that right. She’s exceeding expectations. She bakes fresh bread every day. She offers 15 different vegetables at lunchtime. She knows it pleases the students to have choices. This is her crime because, you see, other schools don’t have the same benefits in the Falun district in Sweden. (This is called...

School lunches are now the hot topic as lunch trays are a bit lighter and calories are being limited. The so-called “nanny-state” has spread across America and into our schools as First Lady Michelle Obama, despite not being a nutritionist, has decided she knows what's best for our children’s diets. This is part of her “Let’s Move” campaign, and it resulted in the “Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act” which was passed into law by the lame duck, Democrat-controlled Congress in December 2010.[1] Now the frustrations that played out in the Occupy movement have moved into the hallways of our schools as...

WEST HARTFORD —— The beef is there, but where's the pickle? That's the question students at Hall High School have been asking on hamburger day in the cafeteria since the food services department made menu changes to meet new school lunch rules from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Students are "outraged over the removal of pickles and salt from the cafeteria at Hall to meet nutrition guidelines," student representative Kendall Teare told the school board last week.

House Republicans say new U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) guidelines aimed at forcing students to eat fruits and vegetables are a failure because students across the country are simply tossing the healthy fare into the trash. "[T]here remains great concern with the amount of food waste generated at school cafeterias, much of it brought on by requiring students to take fruits and vegetables rather than simply offer them," Reps. John Kline (R-Minn.), Kristi Noem (R-S.D.) and Phil Roe (R-Tenn.) told USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack in a letter sent Thursday. "This is a waste of federal, state and local funds and...