School meals are crucial to children
Thanks for your recent article regarding the new USDA school meals program to begin next school year. These standards brought big changes to the school meals program over the past 15 years, and they'll improve the health and learning ability of our nation's schoolchildren.
No parent wants to be told what his or her child should eat, but these new standards allow schools to offer healthy meals as the norm. Unfortunately, we are at a crisis point with our national childhood obesity epidemic. We've found no easy answers to stop its 30-year rise. But, with crisis comes opportunity.
This new initiative will reshape the school food environment and reach large numbers of children, enabling them to 'fuel up' with high-octane nutrition. Nearly 32 million children eat lunch at school every day. Nearly 12 million children eat breakfast at school every morning. School meals are crucial to these children, many coming from low-income homes.
These new standards will go a long way to improve nutritional shortfalls, boost student health, and address the nation's obesity problem.
School-aged children's diets fall short of dietary goals, especially for whole grains, fruit, dark-green vegetables, orange vegetables and legumes.
The average fruit intake for a school-aged child is only about one serving per day. The average vegetable intake is only 1.0-1.5 servings per day.
Though our kids eat about seven to nine ounces of total grains a day, only one-half ounce comes from whole grains. School leaders and food service staff are committed to serving our children healthy food.
But this law will present challenges and they'll need parent support as they begin implementing changes in the coming school year. With schools and parents working together, balanced, nutritious school meals will be the norm and the goal of making healthy meals popular meals can be realized.
Tom Hohensee
Fly Creek
Hohensee is the Healthy Schools New York Project Coordinator.
Oneonta is not a 'college town'
I am a student at SUNY Oneonta and I am sick of this notion that Oneonta is a "college town" and without the students we would be destitute.
This is not "their town" and we should not bend the rules for them, no matter how much money they spend.
What a terrible precedent to set for our youth. They are here to learn _ and from the 40th best public university in the U.S. (U.S. News and World Report), which I think is great _ and apparently so does Tina Fey.
Terry Jax
Oneonta
