NYC Green Schools

When we joined the Wellness Committee at our schools, we were concerned parents with the simple agenda of wanting to improve the food in our school cafeteria.  We never dreamed we’d become ardent food activists meeting with PTA Presidents, community boards, non-profit organizations, and other impassioned food mamas about how to change the food system in our public schools.  But thanks to Chancellor Regulation A-812 banning the sale of home-cooked foods in our schools while allowing the sale of Doritos and Pop-Tarts instead, that is what we’ve quickly become.

Since our bake-in rally protesting the regulation in March, NYC Green Schools has been on the ground advocating for a repeal of the ban on the sale of home-cooked food at PTA president council meetings, community board meetings, and community education council meetings.  We are happy to report that Community Boards 1, 2, 3 and 7 in Manhattan have all passed resolutions urging the Department of Education to repeal the ban.  Their resolution will be presented at the Manhattan Borough Board Meeting this Thursday, May 18^th, where the rest of the Manhattan community boards and Borough President Scott Stringer can learn about the resolution.  Last week Community Board 6 in Brooklyn also passed a resolution asking the Department of Education to repeal the ban, and we’re confident their resolution will be brought to a borough board meeting as well.

What are the role of community boards in the political process?   That was our question when Community Board 2 in Manhattan invited us to speak about Regulation A-812.  While the Department of Education can willfully ignore resolutions passed by community boards, our elected officials cannot.  Resolutions passed by community boards signal to our city council members and borough board presidents that there’s broad support for a measure, prompting our elected officials to then put pressure on our Mayor and Chancellor to honor, or at the very least acknowledge, the will of the people.  In short, New York City community boards are a vital part of the democratic process ensuring that our city government is run by and for the people.

NYC Green Schools is continuing to broaden our coalition of parents, educators, community boards and community education councils, because we’ve learned that the only way we’re going to genuinely improve the quality of the food and, for that matter, education in our public schools is by coming together as parents, educators and citizens and demanding change.  Before Chancellor Regulation A-812, this idea of building, dare we say it, a people’s movement would have seemed too abstract and daunting; but these last few months we’ve come to understand these words by the great historian and activist Howard Zinn:  “And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”

Since our bake-in rally outside City Hall in March, NYC Green Schools has been working with Community Boards to pass a resolution urging the Department of Education to repeal the ban on the sale of home-cooked foods in our schools.  We are happy to let you know that CBs 1, 2, 3, & 7 in Manhattan have all passed resolutions urging the DOE to repeal the ban.  Together, they will ask that the resolution be put on the agenda of their next Borough Board Meeting.  A Borough Board Meeting would offer NYC Green Schools the opportunity to present the issue to all the Manhattan CBs as well as to Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer. If all the CBs in Manhattan were to pass the resolution, this would be a powerful message to Chancellor Klein to repeal the ban.

But this initiative isn’t limited to Manhattan.  Last Wednesday, NYC Green School member Helen Greenberg visited the Youth/Educational Committee of CB6 in Brooklyn, which also passed the resolution to repeal the ban.  The full board of CB6 will be voting on the resolution Wednesday, May 12th.  We’re hoping other CBs in Brooklyn will follow the lead of CB6 and that the resolution can eventually be brought to their Borough Board Meeting as well.

If you know someone serving on a Community Board who would be supportive of this effort, please contact us above.  We want to make CBs all over the city part of this campaign.

Thanks.

Right now a resolution asking for an amendment to Chancellor Regulation A-812 that would repeal the ban on the sale of home-cooked foods in our schools is with the City Council’s Committee on Education under Council Member Robert Jackson. Please copy these letters to CM Jackson and Speaker Christine Quinn requesting a public hearing on the resolution, sign and email to the addresses below.

This letter campaign is the most important political action we can take right now to get the ban on the sale of home-cooked foods in our schools repealed.  It’s our opportunity for the DOE and our elected officials to finally hear from parents and citizens directly about our children’s health and nutrition.   Help restore the democratic process to our schools.

You can email CM Jackson at rjackson@council.nyc.gov

For Speaker Quinn, go to http://council.nyc.gov/d3/html/members/home.shtml.  You must fill in the fields and then copy the attached letter in the message box.

Thanks!

We are thrilled to announce that Community Board 2 in Manhattan passed a resolution urging the DOE to repeal the ban on the sale of home-cooked food in our schools from 8am-6pm (with the exception of one PTA fundraiser a month). Community Board 3 will be passing a similar resolution.  NYC Green Schools will be working with CBs in Manhattan to bring the resolution to a Borough Board meeting for a vote.

If you know someone serving on a CB in any of the five boroughs, please send them a copy of CB2’s resolution and urge them to pass it as well.  Let them know that NYC Green Schools would be happy to attend their meeting to present the issue to their members.

One of the ways we can show the DOE broad support for repeal of the ban is through community boards.  Please do your part to help us in this critical component of our grassroots movement to get junk food out of our schools and home-cooked foods back in.

Childhood obesity, which is caused by a sedentary lifestyle and poor daily diet, is a serious health crisis in our country.  43% of NYC school children are overweight or obese.  30-40% of all U.S. children born in 2000 are expected to develop type 2 diabetes.  If the Department of Education wants to genuinely address what some health experts are describing as an epidemic, than they need to act quickly to improve the quality of the food that is offered every day to our children in our public schools and they need to ensure our children are getting the physical exercise they need and that New York State Law requires.

As parents on the Wellness Committee at our schools, here are our suggestions for how the Department of Education can effectively combat childhood obesity:

- Remove the vending machines from our middle schools and high-schools that sell highly-processed foods such as Doritos, Frito Lay Chips, and Pop-Tarts.  Marketing these foods and making them available every day to our children is not only filling our children with empty calories they don’t need, it’s also developing in them a lifetime of bad eating habits.

- Replace the foods containing corn syrup in our school cafeterias with healthier options that do not.  The wheat bread and buns served in our school cafeterias contain high-fructose corn syrup; the #2 ingredient in the peanut butter is dextrose (another form of corn syrup); the #2 ingredient in the chocolate milk is high-fructose corn syrup; and the #1 ingredient in the jelly is corn syrup.  What does this mean?  If your child has a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and chocolate milk for lunch, they are essentially eating corn syrup that is disguised as a meal (See for yourself here).  Corn syrup hiding in foods that don’t need to be sweetened is certainly a contributor to the health crisis we see.

- Stop serving chocolate milk in our schools.  Instead, provide every school cafeteria with a water jet machine, so that children have the option of drinking water with their lunch and breakfast.

- Follow the example of the Baltimore public school system and implement Meatless Mondays in all NYC public schools.  In addition, a plant-based meal should be an option that is offered every day for lunch.  50% of children 2-15 years of age have fatty streaks in their arteries, literally the beginnings of heart disease.  Animal products are a major source of cholesterol and the primary source of saturated fats.  Our children should be eating less meat and more beans, grains, vegetables and fruits for lunch.

- As proposed by our Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, the DOE should create a mandatory K-12 nutrition curriculum so that children can become educated about the food they eat, where it comes from, and its impact on the environment and their health.

- Bring yoga into the schools.  Many city schools don’t have gyms or even playgrounds where children can run around and get some exercise.  Yoga, which only requires a mat and can be done in the classroom if a school has no gym, is an inexpensive way for the DOE to ensure our children are getting the physical exercise they need.

For parents who don’t want to wait around for the DOE to implement these changes, our next post will address what parents can do at their schools to begin making some of the changes we suggest, so that together we can be part of the solution to this public health crisis.

The bake-in rally that we organized last Thursday outside City Hall to protest the new Chancellor regulation banning the sale of home-cooked foods in our schools while allowing highly processed foods to be sold instead wasn’t simply a contest between Mommy’s oatmeal raison cookies and a bag of cool-ranch Doritos, it was about the democratic process and the corporate take-over of our schools.

Council Member Gale Brewer and Public Advocate Bill de Blasio

Officials at the Department of Education consistently fail to engage parents on policy involving their children, and in this instance they experienced a serious backlash.  Parents don’t want the DOE mandating to them what to buy and feed their children if they want to raise money for their under-funded schools.  In fact, administrators and teachers don’t support this policy either, but they’re too afraid to speak out against the regulation; because a letter from Chancellor Klein to principals made it clear that failure to enforce the regulation would go on their non-compliance record.  Parents, administrators and teachers are being held hostage by a policy they don’t want, and the Department of Education still believes it’s doing the right thing.

The only time DOE officials reached out to parents about the new regulation was the night before the bake-in rally when, through the public advocate’s office, they requested a meeting the next morning with rally organizers.  This gesture by the DOE was not about democracy (rally organizers had no authority to decide policy with the DOE behind closed doors), but was a transparent attempt by the DOE to control the message of the rally.  Now that the rally is over and media coverage has come and gone, DOE officials have not shown any willingness to hear from parents.  It now falls on rally organizers to demonstrate broad opposition to the regulation.  But why is it the responsibility of mothers, juggling careers and families, to demonstrate broad opposition and not the responsibility of DOE officials to finally hold a public forum where they can hear from parents and students directly when opposition to the regulation has been so clear and strong?

With the assistance of our public advocate Bill de Blasio, parents have every intention of building up support from community boards and city council members to get the ban on the sale of home-cooked food in our schools finally repealed.  Community Board 2 in Manhattan has already passed a resolution urging the Department of Education to repeal the ban.  Council Member Gale Brewer will be reintroducing a resolution to repeal the ban to the Council at their meeting this Thursday, March 25^th.  The bake-in rally was just the beginning of a long, coordinated grassroots movement to get the ban on the sale of home-cooked food repealed and to bring democracy back to our schools.

Click here to sign the petition to repeal the ban.

Donning their aprons and cooking hats, droves of parents with their children came out for our bake-in rally down at City Hall to protest the new Chancellor regulation banning the sale of home-cooked food from our schools while allowing Frito Lay chips and Linden’s cookies to be sold instead.  Our public advocate Bill de Blasio spoke at the rally, echoing our call to repeal the ban.  Council Member Gale Brewer also attended the rally and will be reintroducing a resolution to repeal the ban at the Council meeting this Thursday.  To see the tremendous press coverage the bake-in received, including articles in the Los Angeles Times and The Financial Times, please click on “press” above.  You can read the speech Elizabeth delivered to the press corp below.

If you’re interested in finding out how you can help to get this ban repealed, please join our email list.  We are already building up a broad coalition of parents, community boards, and city officials to put pressure on Chancellor Klein to repeal the ban on the sale of home-cooked food in our schools.  We believe it’s up to the Wellness Committee and parents of each individual school to formulate their own policy on bake sales, since each school’s funding needs and abilities are radically different.

Our Public Advocate Bill De Blasio

“My name is Elizabeth Puccini.  I’m on the Wellness Committee at my son’s school, The Children’s Workshop School, and co-founder of NYCGreenSchools.org.

Parents have come here today with their children to say loud and clear that junk food has no business in our schools.  Every child enjoys a sweet now and then, but not all children are obese.  A sedentary lifestyle and poor daily eating habits are the cause of childhood obesity, not bake sales.  And so this regulation will do nothing to fight childhood obesity and will only end up teaching our children that highly-processed foods are healthier for them than foods cooked at home, a policy that will only end up encouraging a lifetime of bad eating habits.

If Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein are genuinely concerned about the health of our children – and I believe they are – than they should look at the foods that are served every day to our children in our school cafeterias.  The wheat bread and buns contain high-fructose corn-syrup, the #2 ingredient in the peanut butter is dextrose, the #1 ingredient in the jelly is corn syrup.  Last week I went on a field trip with my son to the Natural History Museum and this was the chocolate milk that appeared in his school lunch.  It contains 27 grams of sugar. These hidden sugars available every day to our children are the silent contributors to the public health crisis we see, not an occasional cookie or cupcake.

Had Chancellor Klein asked parents how to improve our children’s health, we would have told him to remove the vending machines that make junk food available every day to our children, we would have told him to get rid of the corn-syrup in the bread, peanut butter, jelly and milk, to put more water fountains in our schools, to fund physical education and sports programs so that bake sales didn’t have to, and to create a mandatory k-12 nutrition curriculum, so that children can become educated about the food they eat, where it comes from, and its impact on the environment and their health.

Parents love and want what’s best for their children as you can see by their presence here today and by the food on our table.  We are here to ask Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein to repeal the ban on the sale of home-cooked foods from our schools.  We believe it’s up to the Wellness Committee and parents at each individual school to decide for themselves their policy regarding bake sales.  We are also here to ask the Mayor and Chancellor to stop allowing our schools to serve as supermarkets where food companies can advertize and sell their processed foods to our children.  Our children’s health is not for sale.

Thank you”

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Dear Supporters against Regulation A-812,

The BIG day is almost here!  Please join us tomorrow at City Hall Park from 4-6 p.m. to rally against regulation A-812.

Take the 4/5 train to City Hall/Brooklyn Bridge Station.  Take the City Hall Park Exit and when you exit make sure you’re ACROSS the street from the Brooklyn Bridge (not on the same side).  Walk south on Park Row.  On the right-hand side, you will pass City Hall.  Keep walking south and there will be an entrance for the park on your right.

Come out with your aprons, whisks and baking sheets to make some noise!

See you there!

Get your aprons and whisks out!  The bake-in rally at City Hall is fast approaching!  Join us this Thursday to ask Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein to repeal the ban on the sale of home-cooked foods in our schools.  Public advocate Bill de Blasio and Council Member Gale Brewer will be speaking at the rally.

Let the DOE know that junk food has no busine$$ in our schools.