When Espie Chapman began teaching introductory agriculture classes at Kailua Intermediate School three years ago, the plot of land near her classroom was mostly vacant except for a small orchard of fruit trees.

Chapman had no farming experience, but she was determined to create a space where her seventh and eighth grade students could grow fresh fruits and vegetables. She asked the teens what they wanted to plant and got to work purchasing wheelbarrows and seeds for her class.

The school’s garden now produces fruits and vegetables like bok choy, spinach and papaya that Chapman’s students transform into soups and salads to sample during class.

“We just try and look at what’s in our farm, and what kind of recipes can we do with that,” Chapman said. “If they’re going to try and eat it, we’ll make it happen.”

Chapman’s class teaches teens about nutrition and sustainability, but while students are cooking the kind of locally sourced and culturally relevant lunches that the Hawaii Department of Education aspires to provide in all schools, they can’t actually serve meals in the cafeteria.

DOE previously ran a pilot program to train schools on food safety and enable them to serve produce from their gardens, but the program has been on pause since the Covid-19 pandemic. Without it, Chapman would have to figure out how to meet strict federal and state protocols on her own to supply the school’s cafeteria with produce from the garden.

DOE did not respond to questions about the status of the Garden to Cafeteria program and whether schools will be able to participate in the future.

Approximately 85% of Hawaii schools have gardens, but only a few have serious agricultural programs where students earn certifications as food handlers or gain firsthand experience harvesting and selling produce and using sustainable growing methods.

Typically teachers use school gardens for lessons ranging from the life cycle of a plant to a poetry unit focused on nature. But some want to take their lessons a step further by using produce from the gardens in school meals, exposing more kids to fresh fruits and vegetables and giving students a sense of ownership over what they’re eating.

DOE has historically struggled to increase the use of local ingredients in school lunches, and advocates say gardens can encourage students to eat healthier.

“School gardens can galvanize a community,” said Natalie McKinney, chief program officer of the Kokua Hawaii Foundation, which promotes environmental education and runs a learning farm in Haleiwa.

‘A Hidden Gem’

Third grade teacher Rex Dubiel Shanahan planted a garden at Sunset Elementary when she first started teaching in 1987 and takes pride in showing students how to plant seeds or make kimchi using the carrots they grow.

“You can teach almost everything through the garden,” Dubiel Shanahan said.

Sunset Elementary participates in the Aina In Schools program, which is run by the Kokua Hawaii Foundation and provides schools with activities that tie gardening to lessons in science and nutrition. But, Dubiel Shanahan said, she would like more schools to have access to resources on sustainability and healthy eating for students.

In recent years, DOE has offered more professional development opportunities for teachers interested in starting gardens. It has developed resources for schools to create peace gardens to support student mental health and is helping teachers incorporate more lessons about native plants into their classes, said Jennifer Ryan, the department’s school garden coordinator.

Even with more resources and professional development available, it can be daunting for teachers to maintain school gardens on their own, said Waikiki Elementary Principal Ryan Kusuda. Schools don’t have a dedicated source of funding to hire full-time garden coordinators, and many campuses rely on families and teachers when it comes to weeding, harvesting and other tasks.

Waikiki Elementary has the extra budget to pay for a sustainability teacher and a part-time farm manager dedicated to facilitating student learning and keeping up the garden, Kusuda said, adding it would be difficult to maintain the space solely through volunteers.

“It’s a hidden gem,” Kusuda said, adding that the school has roughly 80 fruit trees supplying tangerines and starfruit that students can sample during class.

In some cases, schools use gardens to help jump-start students’ careers.

In Leilehua High School’s career and technical education program, students in the natural resources pathway are responsible for 3.5 acres of land on which they grow lettuce, beets, radishes and more. CTE teacher Jackie Freitas requires her students to earn their certifications in food handling and gain experience selling produce to teachers and families every week.

“We are trying to help our community and provide them with fresh produce that they can afford and that they know is safe,” Freitas said.

Other schools have taught their students the importance of eating local by drawing on their gardens to supply produce to their cafeterias.

Last month, students at the Hawaii Academy of Arts and Science supplied 160 pounds of kalo from their garden to the cafeteria. Cooks at the Big Island charter school turned the taro into poi, which students enjoyed with their lunches of kalua pork and rice, said teacher Wendy Baker.

While the gardens don’t produce enough fruits and vegetables to supply 600 lunches every day, Baker added, occasionally incorporating food from the garden in school lunches helps students appreciate the time and effort that goes into their meals.

“When they help the garden, the garden helps them,” Baker said.

But including produce from the garden in school meals raises the stakes when it comes to requirements around food safety.

Schools already follow best practices around harvesting and preparing produce, such as requiring students to sanitize their hands and thoroughly wash their fruits and vegetables, said Debbie Millikan, a member of the Hawaii Farm to School Network and director of sustainability at Punahou School. But when it comes to growing food for school meals, campuses need to comply with additional state and federal guidelines like testing their water for E. coli every year and tracking the exact location where students harvest produce.

If students get sick from school meals, Millikan said, it’s important for schools to identify the source of the problem and know where their ingredients originate.

“Food safety and garden safety is absolutely critical, no matter whether you’re growing it at home or growing in a school garden,” Millikan said. “The record-keeping part is really critical because you’re serving a large group of students a large amount of food.”

In 2018, DOE started a Garden to Cafeteria pilot program to adopt federal regulations around food safety and apply them to schools. Participating campuses were required to document their compliance with water, soil and food safety requirements in order to incorporate fruits and vegetables from their gardens into meals.

A dozen schools participated in the three-year pilot, but frequent turnover in DOE’s food services branch put the program on pause as schools reopened during the Covid-19 pandemic, said Dennis Chase, program manager at the Hawaii Public Health Institute. Most schools, including past participants in the pilot, haven’t been able to serve food from their gardens since.

McKinney at the Kokua Hawaii Foundation said she’s hopeful DOE will revive the program. Schools are unlikely to grow at the scale they need to produce all their own food, she added, but it’s important to incorporate more local produce in school meals so students will be more receptive to trying new fruits and vegetables in the future.

Other Ways To Meet School Food Needs

Numerous schools on the mainland — and a few in Hawaii — have been able to tackle food safety issues to grow food for their lunch programs, proving that the challenge is not insurmountable.

San Diego launched a program 10 years ago to train teachers and garden coordinators on how to safely plant and harvest food for school lunches, said Janelle Manzano, the district’s farm-to-school program specialist. Before the pandemic, she added, 10 to 15 schools participated in the program, although the number dropped to five last year.

It’s been difficult for some campuses to revive their gardens after the pandemic, Manzano said, but she’s hopeful more schools will start growing their own produce in the coming year.

At Leilehua High School, Freitas was undeterred when DOE’s Garden to Cafeteria pilot ended. Last year, Freitas received a Good Agricultural Practices certification from the United States Department of Agriculture for the school’s hydroponic greenhouse. The greenhouse is subject to audits twice a year to make sure students are following safety requirements for harvesting produce and tracking their cleaning and sanitation schedules.

The certification means Leilehua’s greenhouse is held to the same standards as commercial farms and can supply produce to the cafeteria like any other vendor, Freitas said. While the garden’s safety procedures have not changed much, she added, students are now required to keep a more detailed record of when they clean their tools and harvest produce.

Freitas said her students are still working with cafeteria staff to determine how the produce can fit into the school’s meal plan, but she’s hoping the process will help them understand how they can contribute to food production in Hawaii and take pride in their work.

“It can be done,” Freitas said.

This story was originally published on Honolulu Civil Beat. 

Civil Beat’s education reporting is supported by a grant from Chamberlin Family Philanthropy.

“Hawaii Grown” is funded in part by grants from the Stupski Foundation, Ulupono Fund at the Hawaii Community Foundation and the Frost Family Foundation.

Earlier this spring, Noma Projects took its efforts across the Atlantic, embarking on a weeklong tour of New York City through a series of pop-up events, ranging from book signings to cooking at the Union Square Greenmarket. Among those tour events: a school lunch takeover, closed to the public, in which DREAM Charter School students in grades K-8 were offered sandwiches and yogurt parfaits made using Noma Projects’ Pumpkin Seed Praline.

The DREAM Charter event on April 19 was facilitated by , , formerly Noma’s head chef, that places professional chefs in public foodsystems like schools, senior organizations and prisons.

Through three back-to-back lunch services last month, the Noma Projects team experienced first-hand the challenges — and joys — of ensuring students are provided a nutritious, delicious lunch every day. Watch how this unprecedented service went for a team from the world’s best restaurant as they faced their toughest critics — schoolchildren.

“It was just an astronomical amount of money,” said Cullipher. “We would either have to write it off or the local government would have to step in. We did have some local donations that would assist, but it was never enough to cover the multitude that we had.”

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A found that 75% of school districts nationwide had unpaid student meal debt at the end of the 2017-18 school year and the median amount of unpaid meal debt per district rose by 70% since the 2012-13 school year.

Then the pandemic hit, and a series of waivers from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) granted school nutrition departments . This included being able to serve meals under the Summer Food Service Program (SFSP), which provides higher per-meal reimbursements and allows ages 18 and under. In Perquimans County, Cullipher’s department pivoted quickly, offering meals to students via school bus delivery and curbside pickup.

Since then, Perquimans County Schools has continued to serve free meals to all students under ongoing waivers from the USDA, as have But without Congressional action, these waivers will expire on June 30, 2022, marking the end of a more than two-year period where school meals were provided at no cost to students across the country.

In a recent email to Lynn Harvey, director of school nutrition and district operations for the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, Cullipher shared what the discontinuation of universal free school meals would mean for her district.

“Perquimans County is a small, rural county and the largest employer in the county is the school system. There is not a lot of wealth in our county, but a lot of families that are just barely getting by. Our county is built off of farm families and working class families living paycheck to paycheck and they oftentimes just miss qualifying for free or reduced meals by dollars, and I mean times such as $4,” she wrote.

“Universal meals have been AMAZING! The outpouring of appreciation and love for this from the community has been overwhelming and eye opening. To take this away, especially during a time when the economy is as it is right now, would be devastating.”

Cullipher is not alone in her desire to see school meal flexibilities, including the option to offer free school meals to all students, extended beyond June 30. In February, nearly 2,000 national, state, and local organizations from every  to extend the USDA’s authority to issue nationwide waivers beyond this school year. Then, on March 31, Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-MI, introduced the , which would extend USDA’s authority to issue waivers through September 30, 2023. Cosponsors of the bill include Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-AK; Sen. Susan Collins, R-ME; and Sen. Joe Manchin, D-WV. The bill was referred to committee and currently remains there.

According to Cullipher, the expiration of universal school meals would wreak havoc on school nutrition department finances. At the same time that costs are rising, revenues would fall. Sources of increased costs include inflation, higher labor costs, and having to meet stricter meal pattern requirements. Under , the minimum wage for all non-certified school employees, which includes cafeteria workers, will increase to $15 on July 1, 2022.

The waivers expiring would also remove flexibilities when it comes to meeting . Right now, if a product isn’t available due to supply chain disruptions, Cullipher has more flexibility to substitute alternative items than she would without these waivers. A  found that 92% of school food authorities reported experiencing challenges due to supply chain disruptions, such as limited product availability and orders arriving with missing or substituted items.

“There’s been a number of times where we can’t get simple things like trays and forks and cups,” Cullipher said.

Sources of decreased revenues include under the National School Lunch and School Breakfast Program (as compared to the , the program most child nutrition departments are currently operating under) and an expected decline in participation once some students are asked to pay for the meals they’ve been receiving for free over the last two years.

“There’s no balance there,” she said. “You’re expected to pay these higher wages, and you’re expected to still meet these federal requirements, but you don’t have the money and you don’t have the participation. You have to pay more out than you get in.”

Cullipher also worries that the waivers expiring would further exacerbate hunger, especially for families on the threshold of eligibility that don’t qualify for free- or reduced-price meals and can’t afford to pack a lunch for their child. As of 2019, that the child food insecurity rate in Perquimans County was 20% — or one in every five children.

“Taking away the universal meals is just a huge, huge burden,” she said. “When they get here … they’re not going to be able to afford to buy the meals for their children at school. And it may be children that have never experienced hunger before or who have never been told at the lunch line, ‘I’m sorry, you don’t have money on your account, your mom is going to have to send some money with you tomorrow.'”

If the waivers expire at the end of June, school districts across the country would return to collecting applications to verify eligibility for free- and reduced-price meals, a process that is often burdensome and time consuming for both families and child nutrition staff. Cullipher said some families in her district are hesitant to submit applications because they assume they won’t qualify, while others have their applications rejected because their income is just above the qualifying threshold. Serving universal free school meals has eliminated many of the barriers and stigmas associated with this verification process.

“Having the universal feeding has been a level playing ground. No matter what else has gone wrong, when it comes time for them to go to the cafeteria and pick up their lunch, it’s been an even, level playing ground across the board,” said Cullipher. “No matter how rich you are, how poor you are … whatever situations have gone on for the last two years, it’s just been a level ground for every student. And that’s how it should be.”

This year, participation in school meals in Perquimans County has reached record high levels. In March 2019, the district served roughly 18,000 lunches. This March, the district served almost 25,000 lunches. This bucks the national trend, where average daily participation in the National School Lunch Program from the 2018-19 to 2020-21 school years.

Cullipher sees her district’s increased participation even amid the uncertainty of the pandemic as a testament to the importance of offering school meals for free to all students, regardless of their income. In her email to Harvey, she concluded with this:

“Universal feeding allowed me to know that no child that attended school went hungry that day. That’s our purpose. That is why we show up every single day, fighting daily uphill battles that get harder each day; our purpose, our why, which is to ensure that no child goes hungry.”

This first appeared on and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced Friday that is Florida’s share of $1.5 billion being provided to states to buy food for school meals, including $200 million to be used for cooperative agreements to buy food locally from historically underserved producers.

Most of the funding will be supplied by the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service in cash payments known as Supply Chain Assistance funds for up to 100,000 schools in U.S. states and territories, including public, charter, tribal and nonprofit private schools and residential child-care institutions. The purchased food is to be unprocessed or minimally processed domestic food such as fresh fruit, mil, frozen vegetables and ground meat.

The largest allocation, at $171.5 million, is for California, followed by Texas, at $168.3 million, New York, at $88.1 million, and Florida, at $86.9 million.

The funds, authorized in an executive order by President Joe Biden, are intended to help schools and school districts make arrangements to offset disruptions in the nation’s supply chains for food and other goods and to build more resilient networks for feeding children at school.

“USDA is aware that some schools are experiencing challenges purchasing and obtaining food for their meal programs and is taking swift action to ensure that doesn’t interfere with their ability to serve meals to the children in their care,” the Food and Nutrition Service says on its website about efforts to help schools provide meals for school children regardless of supply-chain difficulties.

Providing meals for school-age children has been a source of contention this year between Gov. Ron DeSantis and Agriculture and Consumer Services Commissioner Nikki Fried. After DeSantis opted not to sign up for $820 million in federal food aid for children for 2021-22, Fried and other Democrats protested, as . Florida was the only state then to have not applied for the available funding. Fried is a gubernatorial candidate in the 2022 election.

The DeSantis administration has since applied for the 2021-22 food aid, but Fried wrote to DeSantis demanding to know why some families still had not received all funds approved the prior year, covering the 2020-21 school year and summer 2021.

At issue in the dispute is the Pandemic-Electronic Benefits Transfer program, which provided funding to feed children who were out of school because of COVID and would otherwise have been eligible for free or reduced-price meals at school.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Diane Rado for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com. Follow Florida Phoenix on and .

Faced with burnout, low wages and now COVID-19, scores of education workers — including not just teachers but also school bus drivers, special education paraprofessionals, cafeteria and afterschool workers, nurses, school safety agents and custodians — have left their posts.

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Districts have been forced to cancel classes, close cafeterias and feed students pizza, bring back remote classes, and hire per diem emergency workers. School officials have also increased salaries and other incentives to attract and retain staff.

Âé¶čŸ«Æ· has found school staffing shortages in all 50 states.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ most recent data show there were in July. The rate of workers leaving their job only — wholesale trades and education.

“I fear the worst is yet to come,” Highline public school superintendent Susan Enfield told Âé¶čŸ«Æ·. Her district outside of Seattle has had to send central office staff to fill teaching positions. Enfield believes the approaching cold and flu season and new vaccine requirements will exacerbate shortages in the coming months.

In one Idaho district, the staffing situation was so dire, schools were “due to excessive staff absences and the shortage of substitute teachers.”

When schools managed to open, staffing shortages created headaches for students: A lack of cafeteria workers meant children at S. Weir Mitchell Elementary in Philadelphia weren’t served breakfast or lunch one day in September.

Many students haven’t made it to school at all because of a shortage of bus drivers. In a National School Transportation Association , more than half of the school district officials polled described their bus driver shortage as “severe” or “desperate.”

In Minnesota’s St. Francis Area Schools superintendent Beth Giese got her bus driver’s license to help ease the shortage.

“​​A very wise mentor once told me, never ask an employee to do anything you wouldn’t do yourself. Guess who got her bus license!” Giese in a Facebook post.

To see how widespread and pervasive the school staffing shortages are, click on states below to see ways they’re experiencing — and tackling — the back-to-school hurdle.

If you are having trouble viewing the interactive, click here