Is Kaya Henderson Turning Out the Lights on D.C. School Food?

Henderson:Preparing meals is not a core competency for schools

By Ed Bruske

aka The Slow Cook

In a chilling rebuke, Chancellor Kaya Henderson has disavowed the ambitious plans for improved D.C. school food set forth by DCPS food services Director Jeffrey Mills and instead has ordered her staff to proceed immediately with a new contract to outsource cafeteria operations and try to stem the mounting deficits attributed to the system's current vendor, Chartwells.

In a letter to D.C. Council Member Mary Cheh (D-Ward 3), Henderson distanced herself from some 1,500 pages of documents Mills' staff had recently sent the Council detailing how Chartwells has contributed to some $14 million in red ink over the past year. Meanwhile, Henderson and her key management staff have refused to hear Mills' proposal to ditch Chartwells and bring much of the system's food service operations in-house.

Mills sent the proposal, in the form of a PowerPoint presentation, to Cheh. But Henderson withdrew it, saying "the views in the PowerPoint do not reflect the direction that DCPS food services is moving in...."

Henderson told Cheh that "some of my staff members may not necessarily agree with my decision" and that she was sending a revised response to questions generated by Cheh. Echoing former Chancellor Michelle Rhee's decision to hire Chartwells four years ago, Henderson wrote that "food service (like facilities maintenance and construction) is not a core competence of ours," adding that "the option of bringing food service back in house is premature at this point."

Henderson is scheduled to appear for questioning before the Council today, and Cheh, author of the city's Healthy Schools Act, plans to ask the chancellor a number of food-related questions. School officials have yet to explain whether annual deficit spending--now averaging more than $12 per year--is supporting better food, high labor costs, waste and inefficiency, corporate profits for Chartwells, or some combination of all of the above.

The emerging schism between Henderson and Mills casts a pall over a food service operation that otherwise was thought to be showing great progress since Mills was hired two years ago. Mills had forced Chartwells to completely revamp its menus, removing things like Pop-Tarts, chicken nuggets and strawberry milk in favor of low-sugar cereals, fresh vegetables and more lunch items prepared from scratch by school kitchen staff. But while Chartwells ostensibly was hired to gain control of budget shortfalls in school food service, the deficits according to Mills have only gotten worse.

For instance, the average loss per school in 2007-2008, the last year DCPS self-operated food service, the average loss per school totaled $80,000. That jumped to $115,447 the first year Chartwells took over, and in subsequent years has run around $90,000 per school.

The total food service deficit for the current school year is expected to reach $14.35 million, or more than double the red ink DCPS cafeterias generated in 2004, when the schools ran their own food service.

According to Mills' staff, Chartwells' average cost per meal is $4.21, compared to $3.06 for D.C. Central Kitchen, which prepares meals for seven schools under a pilot program, and $2.87 per meal for Revolution Foods, which caters to another seven schools. Officials said Chartwells runs up the cost with numerous contractor fees, and by paying inflated prices for many supplies and ingredients. Mills' plan to sever ties with Chartwells called for eliminating food service deficits by 2016.

Chartwells also collects millions of dollars in rebates from its suppliers. Under federal law, Chartwells is supposed to pass those rebates on to the schools, but officials said they still aren't sure they are receiving all of the funds to which they are entitled.

Chartwells has a "cost reimbursable" contract with the schools, meaning it is reimbursed for all of its expenses, as well as being paid an annual management fee and a small fee for each meal it services. Under its contract with the schools, Chartwells is supposed to hold deficit spending to no more than $6 million annually or forfeit its management fee. But according to one official, Chartwells has forfeited its management fee every year the contract has been in place while deficits zoomed out of control.

Mills, whose background was in developing restaurant concepts in New York prior to being hired as food services director for the schools here, has chafed under the Chartwells contract, hoping eventually to build a system in which the schools produced their own meals from whole ingredients. In anticipation of such a system, the Healthy School Act called on the city to provide a central kitchen and food processing facility that has yet to materialize.

According to Mills, only 8 of the nation's 135 largest school districts outsource their cafeteria operations to large food service companies such as Chartwells, Sodexo and Aramark. Neighboring Fairfax County, for instance, runs its own food service without creating deficits. But the food served there also is regarded a far inferior to the meals children in D.C. receive.

But in light of the school chancellor's latest move, Mills' vision for meals cooked fresh by local chefs may be a long way off.

D.C. Council Chair Would Have First-Graders Make School Food Policy, Reinstate Chocolate Milk

Just say no to chocolate milk

By Ed Bruske

aka The Slow Cook

D.C.Council Chairman Kwame Brown says he's in possession of "research" conducted by a first-grade pupil that convinces him schools in the nation's capitol should bring back chocolate milk.

Brown made the remarks in an animated exchange last week with Kaya Henderson during hearings to consider her confirmation as schools chancellor. Saying a sleuthing first-grader had conducted "a study" concluding that kids just won't drink milk unless it's chocolate--information Brown said he confirmed talking to children at two recent elementary school promotion ceremonies--Brown pressed Henderson to commit to reinstating chocolate milk, which school officials removed from the menu a year ago as part of a push to make cafeteria food healthier.

Brown said he was impressed by the nutritional information on flavored milk the first-grader had amassed. More likely, Brown was tagged by the long arm of the dairy industry, which relentlessly pursues efforts to keep flavored milk in schools to offset decades of decline in sales of plain milk. As one of a few major school districts to ditch chocolate milk, the District of Columbia has become a crown jewel for activists aiming to topple flavored milk's rule in the nation's lunch rooms. Brown parroted the dairy industry line that kids won't drink milk unless it's tarted up with sugar, and will collapse in a heap of osteoperosis and rickets without it.

Henderson says dairy lobbyists have been pressuring her as well.

So how does a six-year-old dicatate school food policy in the nation's capitol? Here's the transcript from last Thursday's hearing:

Brown: This is from our youth hearing, a first-grader, and he made sense. And I want him to know to get his question in. We have the Healthy Schools Act. And we all know we want everyone to eat healthy. And I’m all supportive of that. But he had a survey of about I think 100 and something students that he had spoken with and I did my own independent survey of a couple of graduation ceremonies I attended and I come to find out that most students agree. They want to know why they can’t have chocolate milk in the schools. They said they’re getting juices that have more sugar than chocolate milk that has protein and less sugar. And their question to you was to say that it’s not because it’s not part of the Healthy [Schools] Act but because the schools just don’t offer it. And it’s wrong that the schools don’t give them a choice to have chocolate milk anymore. And I want to know can you commit to make sure that we have chocolate milk back in our elementary schools. Because they made an argument that it has protein and calcium and is better than some of the juices they’re getting inside the school now.

Henderson: I got a call from the milk producers of America telling me that research effectively says that if kids don’t drink chocolate milk, they won’t drink milk. I’m happy to work with my food services department on it.

Brown: So we’re going to get chocolate milk back into schools?

Henderson: I will work on it. I mean, here’s the thing, right? We didn’t make that decision lightly. There was a reason.

Brown: I know. I’m not saying….

Henderson: I’m willing to reopen the conversation about chocolate milk.

Brown: We reopened it already. You called and you talked to the milk people and….

Henderson: The milk people called me. That’s the lobbying people [laughs].

Brown: The first-grader came and he did the study and it said that most kids aren’t drinking milk at all now. They’re drinking more juices with more sugar and they’re more inclined at a young age to drink chocolate milk.

Henderson: I’ll talk to my people. Our priority is to have our kids drinking milk.

Brown: Chocolate milk?

Henderson: Why do you all try to get me to get up here and….

Brown: This is an interview, right? We asked you a question and we want to know what you’re committing to.

Henderson: Until I talk to my food service experts, I can’t make that commitment.

Brown: Is anyone here from….

Henderson: No, food services is not here.

Brown: Chocolate milk. Kids won’t drink milk unless it’s chocolate. We want our youth to know when they come to testify, they sit all day long, and he put an incredible amount of work into some of this research and I went to two elementary schools and spoke at their promotional exercises— graduations—and I asked them about chocolate milk and, yes, they want chocolate milk.

Henderson: I’m on it Mr. Chairman.

Brown. Thank you.

Brown's remarks came as members of the school board in Los Angeles--the nation's second-largest school district--were voting to eliminate chocolate, strawberry and other flavored milk as part of that city's battle against childhood obesity. Schools in Berkeley, Boulder, Minneapolis and elsewhere also have sworn off flavored milk because of the added sugar it contains. D.C. school officials made the move with little fanfare nearly a year ago after appointing a new food services director who has aggressively redesigned the menu, removing many of the processed and sugary items that had been served daily to the district's 45,000 students. Nearby Fairfax County, Va., also removed chocolate milk, but then reinstated it to quell protests.

Elected last November as chairman of the D.C. Council, the city's law-making body, Brown created controversy when it was revealed that he had leased not one but two fully-loaded Lincoln Navigators at a cost to the District of nearly $2,000 a month. He had returned the first car because he didn't like the color of the interior--he wanted black-on-black.

A report by the Institute of Medicine last year found that most Americans do not lack calcium or Vitamin D, refuting claims by the dairy industry that children suffer from a "calcium crisis." School food guru Ann Cooper, who refers to flavored milk as "soda in drag," has recently said, "we don't have a calcium crisis, we have an obesity crisis." In fact, kids in D.C. rank eighth in the nation for being overweight or obese.

The average eight-ounce carton of chocolate milk contains 14 grams--or 3.5 teaspoons--of added sugar, usually in the form of high-fructose corn syrup. The American Heart Association has warned that children on average now consume an astonishing 21 percent of their daily calories in the form of sugar, and as a result exhibit common markers for heart disease, such as low HDL cholesterol, elevated triglycerides and high LDL cholesterol. Robert Ludwig, an expert in pediatric obesity at the University of California, San Francisco, has called sugar "poison" because of its link to obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease risk. Ludwig cites a worldwide epidemc of obese infants and fatty liver disorder in children.

No less an authority than Walter Willet, head of the nutrition department at Harvard University, has warned that children should not be served flavored milk in school and that milk itself "is not an essential nutrient."

As for sugar in fruit juices, the editorial board of the Los Angeles Times last week also wondered why chocolate milk has been getting all the attention, when fruit juice contains as much sugar. The sugar in juice occurs naturally. Still, proposed USDA guidelines [PDF] for school meals would sharply curtial schools' ability to substitute juice for whole fruit.

Milk is not categorized as a protein in the federally-subsidized school meals program. Because of the dairy industry's special relationship with the USDA, milk comprises its own food group and must be offered with all meals. Protein in school meals comes from other designated sources, such as meat, poultry and fish. Most schools elect to offer milk as an optional meal selection, but D.C. Public Schools officials, in an effort to speed up food lines, this year required all elementary school students to take milk with their meals. The schools have not released data indicating how much milk children are drinking.

The dairy industry has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into promoting chocolate milk while trying to scare parents, politicians and food service directors into believing that children won't grow healthy bones if they do not have access to milk with added sugar and flavorings. The slick industry campaign, including a "Raise Your Hand for Chocolate Milk!" promotion, pays for "studies" that bolster the industry cause, then dresses them up with statements cherry-picked from various health and medical groups to create an impression of widespread approval for kids drinking sugary milk products as much as they like.

Dairy interests have vigorously promoted one "study" in particular purporting to show that milk consumption plummets when flavored milk is removed from school. But that was the product of a marketing research firm hired by by the Milk Processors Education Program (MilkPEP), which refuses to make the "study" available for public inspection.

For the last year and a half, I've been monitoring what kids in the nation's capitol eat in the cafeteria every day and I can attest that they still drink plain milk. Sure, they'd drink more if it were chocolate or strawberry. But we already know kids love sugar. They'd eat lollipops instead of lunch if we let them--and some do. Only a year ago, they were pouring strawberry milk over Apple Jacks cereal as part of a breakfast that included Pop-Tarts, Giant Goldfish Grahams and Otis Spunkmeyer muffins. Kids as young as five were regularly being served the equivalent of 15 teaspoons of sugar before classes even started. All that is gone in favor of plain milk, cereal containing no more than five grams of sugar, string cheese and yogurt.

Still, just in the last week I saw children at my daughter's elementary school unpacking bottles of Sprite and Pepsi and containers of Kool Aide from lunch boxes they brought from home. I've seen kids eat bags of home-brought Oreo cookies, giant cupcakes, huge Hershey's chocolate bars and packages of Skittles. I recently witnessed one high-schooler make a lunch out of a 24-ounce bottle of Mountain Dew and a bag of Lifesaver candies.

Conducting my own unscientific survey for this article, I asked my 11-year-old daughter for her opinion. She said all schools should be made of chocolate and jelly beans, security guards should be replaced with giant Gummi Bears, and classes should be held at the Dave & Buster's arcade at the White Flint Mall. Her nine-year-old cousin, meanwhile, said half of all school hoursshould be spent in recess, the other half at lunch.

Schools are not free choice zones. Last we checked, adults--not children--were still responsible for making important policy decisions involving curricula, teacher hiring, standards and a host of other vital school issues--including nutrition and meal service. Local elected leaders are expected to act like grownups and look out for the welfare of minors, not pander to six-year-olds and the dairy lobby.

You can watch video of the Council hearing here. Fast-forward to 2:23.30 to view the discussion concerning chocolate milk in schools.

Feeding Children is Not Our Core Competency!

The position at the very top of D.C. Public Schools--interim Chancellor Kaya Henderson--continues to be that schools are incapable of running their own food service program. Henderson says she is glad to have a hired third party--Chartwells--handle it so she can focus on reading and math.

Henderson made her views on school food known in a meeting with a small group of activists--including myself--along with the director of food services, Jeffrey Mills, and Peggy O'Brien, head of "community engagement."

Henderson embraces the status quo as introduced three years ago by her predecessor, Michelle Rhee, who hired Chartwells in an attempt to stop the hemorrhaging of dollars from the food services operation, which was losing between $11 million and $14 million each year, according to school officials.

By comparison, the entire food delivery contract with Chartwells amounts to around $28 million annually. It includes $7 million worth of deficit spending.

But as school officials are learning, the "cost reimbursable" arrangement with Chartwells, in which D.C. Public Schools pays all of the expenses Chartwells incurs, is far more expensive than simply paying a contractor such as D.C. Central Kitchen or Revolution Foods to provide meals a flat rate, which they are doing in 14 schools as part of two pilot projects.

Think what D.C. schools might save if they learned to make the food themselves, as other successful school districts do. In fact, most of the nation's school districts--including the largest, New York City, and surrounding suburban jurisdictions here, such as Montgomery and Fairfax County--manage their own, in-house food service operations.

At the moment, Mills and others are locked in closed-door discussions about how DCPS will feed its 45,000 students next year. Unfortunately, they are doing so without any input from the community, an attitude that activists such as myself, along with Andrea Northup of the D.C. Farm to School Network, and Tara Flakker of Parents for Better D.C. School Food, would like to see changed.

In school districts where creating a successful food program is a priority, community involved has been key to success. That was certainly the case in Berkeley, Calif., and in Boulder, Co., two districts where I have spent considerable time in the kitchens and the cafeterias, and where parents rallied around the idea that children deserve better than processed convenience foods and tons of sugar for breakfast and lunch.

Here in D.C., many positive changes have been made to the menu in the last year, but precious little has been done in the way of involving parents or the community in those changes, or in educating children about why they should be eating something other than their beloved chicken nuggets and tater tots.

The education element will only become more critical as the USDA implements meal guidelines that restrict foods kids like most--such as potatoes--and require lots more "healthy" foods kids typically trash: green, orange and red vegetables, and whole grains. School kitchens will be further challenged by a requirement to reduce the salt in food by at least half. Kids already complain their food doesn't have enough flavor. The USDA anticipates that removing salt will mean schools ditching processed foods such as nuggets and cooking lots more from scratch.

Henderson and too many of her underlings seem to have not yet grasped this reality and the importance of involving parents and community leaders in each step of the process. In our meeting, the interim chancellor seemed astonished to learn, for instance, that a parent--me--was visiting his daughter's cafeteria every day, photographing the food and talking to children about it.

"Wouldn't that be like having a parent sitting in the classroom?" Henderson asked. In other words, how can children possibly focus on eating if there is a parent present?

But if only cafeterias were treated like classrooms, where the food they were eating were part of an important lesson, rather than a chaotic rush to find something appealing among all the USDA-required items on their trays, gobble it up in the 15 minutes they have remaining after they've stood in the meal line--only to toss the rest in the trash.

In some districts, such as Boulder, parents are actually encouraged to visit the cafeteria and help introduce new foods and coach kids in healthier eating. They know that leaving kids to their own devices is not a formula for success. Healthy eating habits need to be taught, just like reading and math. Parents, who are responsible for feeding their children from birth, after all, are very much part of that equation.

Solving this riddle--or at least shedding some light on it--is the purpose of the Better D.C. School Food blog. But the fact that the schools chancellor isn't even aware that this ongoing project exists--one year later--speaks volumes about the miles we have to go to turn things around here in the nation's captiol, right outside Michelle Obama's door.

A Shared Vision for DCPS Food Services

By Jody Tick

There has been a lot of buzz and excitement about the new leadership and direction of the DCPS food services. The conversation continued yesterday at a DCPS Community Forum, where about 60 parents, teachers, food service professionals, and community organizations gathered to ask questions of DCPS Food Services Director Jeff Mills, Chief Operations Officer Tony Tata, and Director of Health & Wellness Diana Bruce.

As an active DCPS parent, and a program director at the Capital Area Food Bank, I recognized almost every face in the room - fellow parent activist Constance Newman, garden educator Kacie Warner, and anti-hunger advocate Kristin Roberts, to name a few. Each of those wonderful stakeholders could be so much more than just a face in the crowd. We could be valuable assets to the DCPS school meal system, and advocates in support of the changes you plan to make.

Since coming in to town a few months ago, the DCPS food services team has undertaken incredible efforts to transform D.C. school meals. This has been a challenge, given that D.C. school meals have a rocky history plagued by contract mismanagement, financial accountability issues, food safety concerns, and inconsistent leadership. Jeff Mills and his team have inherited a 60,000 meal-a-day beast of a system, and have been quick to make big promises about how they’re going to turn it around on a dime. To their credit, they’ve made huge expansions to breakfast in the classroom, piloting supper programs at after-school programs, taking on two new vendors as pilot projects, and hiring new staff. And there are big promises of things to come, such as a garden-kitchen educational program, special celebratory events, a totally new menu based on unprocessed, fresh foods, 20% local produce, and compliance with Institute of Medicine standards. The list goes on.

But who’s calling the shots? What is the end goal? Where are we headed?

All the people in that room last night are on the same side as Jeff and his team. We want the great things for our kids and our community that they rattled off - more fresh, unprocessed foods, more local produce, better access to school meals. But we understand that it won’t be easy to get those foods on D.C. cafeteria trays, and then get kids to eat them. You’ll need the community to be your allies in this. But a few things need to change.

First, you must engage us. We need a formal system for providing input and giving feedback. It is not enough for you to stand in front of us and tell us what’s happening. We need to have a formal “Advisory Committee” comprised of a wide swath of community members and national experts to be a part of the planning and execution of the new DCPS school meal operation. We need this NOW, as plans for the future are being shaped and defined, not after they have already been developed.

Second, slow down. Nobody is expecting a barrage of reforms that will solve every aspect of the DCPS school meals all at once. The issues plaguing the DCPS school food system run deep, and have been decades in the making (as you probably know better than we do). We would rather see a few simple, measurable goals achieved than dozens of efforts pulled together quickly.

Third, show us a strategic plan. This city has seen too many well-intentioned but piecemeal efforts to improve the health and well-being of our youth. We need to be thinking not months, but years into the future at what DCPS food services will look like. Tony Tata himself said that DCPS has no idea what this operation will look like after this year, and that’s unacceptable. Other large, urban school districts have overcome the same issues we are facing and are serving the types of meals we strive to serve. Let us learn from their successes and failures, and develop a strategic plan to get where we all want to go, with attention to the unique strengths and weaknesses we have here in the nation’s capital.

Fourth, be transparent. Keep us in the loop with your plans, the criteria you use to evaluate foods, how you spend our taxpayer dollars, where your food is coming from and what’s down the pipeline. It’s not enough for you to give us vague responses to our questions from time to time - stay ahead of the curve and provide us with concrete information.

You can have our 100% support in these efforts if you engage us, and make calculated, strategic change towards our common goals, and are transparent with the community you’re serving. And believe me, it is going to take our support and buy-in on a much deeper level to realize the ambitious goals that we all have for D.C. school food. We owe it to the thousands of children who depend on these meals each day to work together on this while we have the chance. Let’s get it right.

Jody Tick is a member of Parents for Better D.C. School Food.