Healthier Schools
Eating and Moving with Miner Elementary Students
My fellow President’s Council on Fitness, Sports and Nutrition (PCFSN) members and I recently visited Miner Elementary School in Washington, D.C. led by Principal LaVonne Taliaferro-Bunch. The goal? To not only witness a model physical education (PE) program in action, but to experience it – in other words, walk the talk.
Healthy School Meals Fuel S.W.A.G. and Success
Ed. Note: Cross-posted from the USDA blog.
In August I went back to school with students in Albany and Newton, Ga., to see how healthy school meals help students get their “S.W.A.G. on” and prepare for success.
In Albany, 400 Sherwood Acres Elementary Magnet School students celebrated school breakfast, many wearing S.W.A.G. t-shirts, which stands for “Students with Academic Greatness!”
Vanessa Hayes, Dougherty County Schools Director of Child Nutrition Services, explained, “We understand that good nutrition is the fuel for the educational vehicle.”
New Haven Schools Grow Healthy Kids with Access to Salad Bars and School Gardens
On September 27, 2011, New Haven Public Schools and Whole Foods Markets will host a Celebration of Salad Bars to highlight New Haven’s leadership and commitment to healthier school meals. With the goal of increasing students’ consumption of dark green and yellow-orange vegetables, New Haven Public Schools is celebrating the start of the new school year with salad bars in 43 of its 47 schools. Almost all of New Haven’s 20,000 students will have access to a salad bar every day. New Haven Public Schools received their first two salad bars from Let’s Move Salad Bars to Schools, a comprehensive grassroots public health effort to mobilize and engage stakeholders at the local, state, and national level to support salad bars in schools,last fall and the success was immediate.
DC Students Benefit from Let’s Move Salad Bars to Schools
Last week First Lady Mrs. Obama was at CentroNía's DC Bilingual Public Charter School in Washington, DC to launch Let’s Move in Childcare. DC Bilingual was also the 2nd school in DC to receive a salad bar as part of the Let’s Move Salad Bars to Schools campaign. The first salad bar was such a success that after 6 months they requested a second for younger students in the elementary school. Now, a total of 27 public and charter schools in DC have received salad bars from Let’s Move Salad Bars to Schools during the last year through contributions from Dole Food Company, Whole Foods Markets, United Fresh Produce Foundation, Cambro Manufacturing Company, and Vollrath.
Video: First Lady Introduces Let’s Move! Child Care
You may have seen the blog post on Let’s Move! yesterday announcing Let’s Move! Child Care, a new effort to work with child and day care providers to help our youngest children get off to a healthy start. Using a checklist and web tools developed in a public-private partnership between the HHS, Nemours, and other partners child and day care providers will emphasize positive choices like increased physical activity, reduced screen time, and eating fruits and vegetables. The Department of Defense, General Services Administration, and the nation’s second largest childcare provider, Bright Horizons, have already committed to implementing this checklist, which will make a difference in the lives of over 280,000 children.
Ideas for Your Community
Let’s Move! is making great strides in our efforts to end childhood obesity, but we cannot reverse the current obesity trends without the the help of your communities and community leaders. To ensure a country where happy, healthy, lifestyles are the norm, community leaders have some of the biggest roles to play.
Secretary Vilsack Highlights Summer Food Service Program Week at No Kid Hungry Launch in Virginia
National Summer Food Service Program Week – Day 2!
Today marks day two in the first ever National Summer Food Service Program Week, a weeklong awareness campaign to promote USDA’s Summer Food Service Program (SFSP) and other programs nationwide to feed low income kids.
Lots of things are happening around the country this week to help feed more hungry children this summer. For example today is National Hunger Awareness Day – as designated by the U.S. Senate in a bipartisan resolution. This is very fitting, given that at least 17 million children in the United States face a higher risk of hunger in the summer. Also today Agriculture Secretary Vilsack joined Jeff Bridges, Share Our Strength founder Bill Shore, Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell and others to launch Virginia’s No Kid Hungry Campaign at Barcroft Elementary School in Arlington, Virginia.
Cooking Up Change Visits the Nation’s Capital
What does school lunch look like when students are in charge? As high school culinary students recently reminded me, a student-designed lunch is fresh, healthy and full of flavor.
For the past year, I have served with Christie Vilsack as National Honorary Co-Chair of Cooking up Change, a competition presented by Healthy Schools Campaign that challenges aspiring chefs studying culinary arts in our nation’s high schools to create a school lunch that meets high nutrition standards, draws from ingredients commonly available to food service, and can be easily prepared in a school kitchen.
Big Day in the Big D: 154 Schools Receive HealthierUS School Challenge Awards
May 25 was a fabulous day in Dallas, as I presented 154 HealthierUS School Challenge awards to schools of the Dallas Independent School District – the greatest number to a single school district thus far. 78 schools received gold awards and another 76 earned bronze level awards. And, Texas leads the nation with 228 out of 1155 schools in the 42 states that have earned awards.
Bellingham Team Scores Big with Double Winners
Students at Bellingham (MA) Public Schools found the key to attracting some top individuals to their school for lunch: they asked a state senator, state representative, a food industry executive, the state Child Nutrition director and me to judge the school’s entries in the national Recipes for Healthy Kids competition. The school had much to be proud of because their terrific team created not one, but two semi-finalist recipes: “Tasty Tots” and “Mediterranean Quinoa Salad.”
