![]() This year, Czaja hopes to secure money to cover last year’s spending. In the 2021-2022 school year, Mountain Views spent around $88,000 on the Vermont definition of local foods, about a quarter of its annual food budget. “Gretchen has been great about introducing the kids to local food and getting them to try new produce, like kale, and other things kids may not normally like,” Emmons said. Meat, which is more expensive, is more useful.Ĭloudland Farm brings between 200 and 250 pounds of beef to the school district a month for the lunch program, said the farm’s owner, Cathy Emmons. In other words, they don’t contribute much by way of getting the school closer to the 15% purchasing target. “Apples are easy to source, but they’re not high in dollar value,” Czaja said. There’s a strategy to sourcing food, Czaja said. “Though household access to fresh, healthy, local food is often striated by income, public institutional food service, and Vermont’s K-12 schools in particular … (have) the unique ability to equalize this access within its cafeterias,” Griswold said. The products sourced through the local foods incentive grant can expand the impact of the bill, largely making the meals it guarantees healthier and more environmentally sustainable. The Universal School Meals bill, which became law this summer, expanded on a program started during the Covid-19 pandemic and guarantees free meals for students in Vermont public schools. The funding is an opportunity to “advance equity in the community by serving healthy, fresh, local food to everyone, regardless of income,” said Lauren Griswold, local food access director for Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont, or NOFA-VT. Fewer eat breakfast at school, but nearly three-quarters of students participate in the lunch program. It’s a Vermont company but not produced in Vermont.”īetween breakfast and lunch at the school, more than 900 students are served a meal each day across the supervisory union. “For example, King Arthur Flour doesn’t count. ![]() “And it has a very specific definition of what Vermont products are,” Czaja said. The stipulations of the grant require that about a quarter of the spending for the supervisory union’s food budget goes toward Vermont products. Participating schools got 15 cents back for each lunch that includes 15% local food, a metric that extends up to 25 cents and 25% local food. ![]() Act 67 - passed to give a boost to struggling Vermont farms and to cut down on the greenhouse gas emissions associated with trucking in out-of-state food - created a tiered system. The Local Food Purchasing Incentive Grant for schools provides funding to school districts and supervisory unions that meet local purchasing targets in their school meal programs. In 2021, the Legislature passed a bill with that goal, too. “My goal was always to connect kids’ lunches with food producers and local foods,” Czaja said. The Cloudland Farm beef she served the kids at the elementary school made it out to the rest of the district. Czaja, along with a coalition of parents who valued food-based learning, put together a proposal themselves.Ĭzaja became the food director of the entire supervisory union, formerly the Windsor Central Supervisory Union - which serves students from Barnard, Bridgewater, Killington, Pittsfield, Plymouth, Pomfret, Reading and Woodstock - with a mandate to replicate across all schools what she had done with food education and local cooking at Woodstock Elementary. In 2017, the supervisory union wanted to put the food served at all of its schools out to bid to a third-party food provider.
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