Results tagged “child nutrition” from EdLabor Journal

Today, the House is expected to vote on the Agriculture Appropriations Conference Report which includes temporary extensions of expiring provisions of the laws governing the child nutrition programs resulting in a cost savings of $150 million. These savings will be reinvested to meet critical child nutrition needs across the country to ensure more children have year-round access to healthy and nutritious meals at school, in child care settings, and during the summer months.

Ensuring More Children Have Access to Healthy and Nutritious Meals

ENSURING IMPROVED ACCESS AND QUALITY OF MEALS FOR ALL CHILDREN

Children should not have to go hungry – and they should have access to nutritious foods that will help them thrive physically and academically. In this difficult economic climate, the federal child nutrition programs have an increasingly important role to play in providing children with healthy meals while at school, childcare, or during the summer months. Over 32 million children each year are served by these programs. For many children, these meals may be the only healthy foods they receive during the day.

Research shows that children who are hungry have a harder time paying attention and learning in the classroom. Low-income children are also at greater risk of going hungry or becoming overweight, during the summer months. Providing children with access to healthier, nutritious foods at school, child care, summer programs, or other educational settings is vital to our efforts to help all children learn, succeed and grow.

To ensure that children can continue to benefit from these programs and services, Congress will temporarily extend expiring provisions of the Child Nutrition Act until a more comprehensive reauthorization of the law occurs next year. This one-year temporary extension will generate a savings of $150 million, which will be reinvested to meet critical child nutrition needs across the country. These new investments will address President Obama’s and Congress’ priorities to end hunger and improve child nutrition, increase access to quality school meals, and build program capacity.

On Thursday, October 9, 2009, the House Subcommittee on Healthy Families and Communities held a hearing to examine innovative strategies to ensure children have access to healthy, nutritious and safe school meals.

Visit the hearing page for the full list of witnesses.

Today's front page story in the USA Today about a recent GAO audit is recommended reading. The audit is in response to an investigation request by U.S. Senator Richard Durbin (D-IL), and U.S. Reps. George Miller (D-CA), Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), and Carolyn McCarthy (D-NY).

The USA Today says:

Federal agencies that supply food for 31 million schoolchildren fail to ensure that tainted products are pulled quickly from cafeterias, a federal audit obtained by USA TODAY finds.

The delays raise the risk of children being sickened by contaminated food, according to the audit by Congress' Government Accountability Office.

In recent recalls, including one this year in which salmonella-infected peanut butter sickened almost 700 people, the government failed to disseminate "timely and complete notification about suspect food products provided to schools through the federal commodities program," the audit says.

Such alerts sometimes took more than a week to reach schools, "during which time (schools) unknowingly served affected products."

Chairman Miller said, “Ensuring that all children have access to healthy and nutritious meals during the school day is vital to our efforts to help all children learn and succeed. Every possible effort must be made to make sure that the foods served to our schoolchildren are safe to eat. As we work toward reauthorizing the school meal programs, it is clear that further actions must be taken to strengthen the communications, planning and procedures needed to prevent recalled or contaminated foods from entering our cafeterias.”

We recommend you read the entire USA Today article, Democratic lawmakers' statements, and the GAO report.

The USA Today ran a story yesterday about the increasing demand for school lunches during this economic downturn.

Nearly 20 million children now receive free or reduced-price lunches in the nation's schools, an all-time high, federal data show, and many school districts are struggling to cover their share of the meals' rising costs.

Through February, nationwide enrollment in free school lunch programs was up 6.3% over the same time last year, to 16.5 million students, based on data from the U.S. Food and Nutrition Service (FNS), which subsidizes the programs. Participation in reduced-price lunch programs rose to 3.2 million students, the data show.

...

Preliminary school lunch data for March suggest that February's record demand may be dipping slightly. Still, Congress should give "serious consideration" to boosting the federal subsidy during the reauthorization this fall of the Child Nutrition Act, says Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., who chairs the House Education and Labor Committee. "For millions of children, this is the nutritional safety net."

This increased demand and other issues related to child nutrition were raised at the hearing regarding improving child nutrition programs to reduce childhood obesity on May 14, 2009.