For the first time since the fall of 2019, Oak Grove School held its annual Harvest Dinner celebration with families. A longstanding tradition at the school, this event features food grown in the school garden and harvested and prepared by students. This year, the dinner was attended by over 50 families and was held during the school’s fall open house.
The week before the start of the 2022-23 school year, Food Connects hosted a Celebration of Farm to School for school administrative teams and food service directors. We are so proud of the work being done by Farm to School teams at our member schools in Windham Central Supervisory Union, Windham Northeast Supervisory Union, and Windham Southeast School District, and we are grateful to the leaders who help make the work possible. At the event, we shared highlights from the 2021-22 school year at each member school, and we want to take a moment to share those highlights with a wider audience. Read on to hear the wonderful things happening in schools throughout the region!
Gathering on the shores of Lake Champlain for three glorious days at the end of June, dedicated members of Oak Grove School’s Farm to School (FTS) Team immersed themselves in learning and planning their next steps towards strengthening their FTS program. The Oak Grove team is participating in the Northeast Farm to School Insititute (NEFTSI) this year. The June retreat began a year-long professional learning opportunity to strengthen FTS programming at the school. Now in its 12th year, NEFTSI is a tremendous resource for schools looking to increase the capacity of farm, food, and nutrition education to impact lasting change in classrooms, cafeterias, and the community.
FTS teams comprised of educators, food service professionals, administrators, and community members from 10 different schools and school districts in Vermont, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, Rhode Island, New York, and Nebraska were in attendance at NEFTSI this year. With such a diverse group of participants, there were many opportunities to cross-pollinate ideas among rural and urban schools serving pre-K through 12th-grade students.
The NEFTSI agenda featured a mix of inspiring speakers, hands-on learning opportunities, and focused work time with the support of a coach to set achievable goals for the upcoming year. Participants were nourished by delicious meals made from recipes in the New School Cuisine Cookbook and featuring local, seasonal produce throughout the institute. Workshop topics ranged from “Bringing the Food System Alive in the Garden and Compost” to “Farm to School in the Classroom Through an Equity Lens,” giving participants multiple opportunities to engage in hands-on learning with topics of their choosing.
Oak Grove School has had an FTS program for over 15 years. Their garden program has taken a big step forward in recent years by adding a part-time garden coordinator, Tara Gordon. Recent changes to the garden include moving the primary garden beds to a more central location and adding several pollinator gardens and other plantings to their Living Schoolyard.
At NEFTSI, the team began by crafting a values statement to guide their work and explicitly communicate their values to the greater community. After reviewing some sample values statements by other FTS teams and doing some group brainstorming, the team quickly agreed on the following statement:
“ Farm to School at Oak Grove School values growth, nourishment, and empowerment through hands-on experiences with food in the garden, classroom, cafeteria, and community.”
Next, the team moved on to goal-setting. Oak Grove’s FTS program had a few setbacks during the COVID-19 pandemic, one of which was that the school-wide harvest dinner was canceled for two years, and it is unknown whether it will return in 2022. This annual harvest celebration allowed the entire school community to engage in gardening and cooking together. The loss of that school-wide activity has impacted full school participation in the FTS program. On the other hand, the pandemic has motivated some classrooms to spend even more time outdoors in the school garden than they did before the pandemic. Currently, about ½ of the faculty at Oak Grove actively engage with their students in FTS activities regularly throughout the school year. One of the goals set by the team at the Institute is to increase classroom participation in FTS back up to 100%.
With no guarantee that the harvest dinner would come back this year, the team had to think creatively about other ways to encourage classroom participation in FTS activities. The team plans to kick off this goal by hosting a garden party for school staff before the start of the school year to encourage staff who don’t usually visit the garden to step outside and eat a delicious lunch together. A simple garden map will be created before the garden party to help teachers know what is growing in the garden and where to find it. Tara hopes to partner with a classroom to engage students in making a more detailed garden map as a special project this year.
Plans are also in the works to develop a menu of creative and easy-to-use FTS lessons and activities for teachers who are not inclined to garden or cook with students and to help teachers connect these lessons to things already happening in their curriculum. Tara is available to work with all classrooms, and Principal Mary Kauffman will use the existing system of grade level accountability partners to encourage teachers to check in with a peer once a month about this school-wide goal of engaging with the school’s FTS program at least once during the school year.
That’s just one of the five goals set by the team to work on this year. Here’s a snapshot of the other four goals:
Increase student participation and reduce food waste in the fresh fruit and vegetable snack program
Bring back monthly Harvest of the Month taste tests
Increase family engagement in FTS throughout the whole year (including summer)
Increase communication about FTS to families & staff
Freshly inspired, this team is ready to continue transforming their school culture to offer more and more opportunities for hands-on learning with farm, food, and nutrition education, and we can’t wait to see the fruits of their hard work emerge throughout the year!
The youngest Oak Grove School community members recently completed a delicious in-depth study of local foods, gardening, and cooking! Oak Grove School’s Pre-K program was one of the 2021 Early Childhood Education CSA grant recipients through the Vermont Agency of Agriculture. In its first year, this grant subsidizes 80% of the cost of a community-supported agriculture (CSA) farm share at the Vermont farm of your choice. Oak Grove’s Pre-K chose to work with Full Plate Farm in Dummerston, VT.
13 lucky 4 to 5-year-old students got to enjoy many locally grown treats this year, including radishes, kale, beets, scallions, brussels sprouts, and winter squash. It was their first time trying some of these new flavors for many students. Pre-K staff Jen Tourville and Jamie Champney and garden coordinator Tara Gordon found creative ways to inspire the students to try new things. Adding mystery to the tasting lessons was one successful approach—from the five senses mystery box to mystery smoothies, student curiosity was encouraged.
Each week, Jen and Tara put a different produce item into the five senses mystery box—an oatmeal container with a sock sleeve attached by a rubber band. They invited the students to put their hand in and feel the item and describe it with words, strengthening their language skills while also piquing their curiosity.
Recently, Jamie made a mystery smoothie for the class with bananas, frozen berries, yogurt, and a mystery ingredient (spinach). “Some students had never been willing to taste a smoothie before because they were already convinced that they wouldn’t like it,” Jamie said. “Adding mystery to the activity made all students curious enough to try it, and big surprise—they all liked it!” After they had tasted the smoothie and made guesses about the secret ingredient, Jamie revealed the spinach to her surprised students.
Produce that arrived weekly in the CSA share helped students make a connection to their school garden, where many of the same plants were growing. Tara regularly took students to the garden to harvest produce, and they combined their school garden-grown produce with produce from Full Plate Farm to cook some delicious recipes. The class cooked twice a week throughout the season, which was new and wonderful! Here are several of the most popular things they made:
Fresh vegetable spring rolls
Many soups, including stone soup and root vegetable soup
Sweet and salty radishes
Coleslaw
Jamie shared that often the students’ first response to the idea of new food was, “Yuck, I don’t like this!” but she discovered that when they cut the veggies into fun shapes or tried adding interesting flavors, for example, agave syrup to change the flavor of the radishes, students were pleasantly surprised to learn that in fact, they did like that food after all! For the more reluctant students, Tara introduced a five senses taste test, where the students closed their eyes and sometimes even plugged their noses when trying new food to focus on the texture of the food in their mouths.
The entire Oak Grove community benefitted from this in-depth study of local food and cooking by the Pre-K in several ways:
Food cooked by the Pre-K was often shared with school staff as a special meal. The staff got to enjoy several different soups and a root vegetable casserole prepared by the students and their teachers.
Bags of extra fresh produce were sent home regularly for students to share with their families. The produce came with a small sample of the meal that the students had made in school and the recipe, and families were encouraged to try the same recipe at home.
Extra produce was also shared with other classrooms in the school. For example, Erek Tuma’s 4th-grade class benefitted from pre-K’s abundance of kale for their kale Harvest of the Month taste test.
The classroom curriculum connections were particularly rich, linking cooking, gardening, and produce exploration with science and literacy. A visit from Ragan Anderson supported the program, nutrition educator from the Brattleboro Food Co-op, who came into the classroom, read stories with the students, and did a cooking project featuring butternut squash.
Jamie is already thinking about what she will do differently next season to improve the program. Some of her goals are:
Increase family feedback and family engagement. For example, send home every recipe with ingredients and invite families into school to participate in cooking and harvesting.
Build more community throughout the school. For example, have cooking buddies from other classes and cook for other classes.
Cook something once a week for staff.
Overall, this program was a huge success! As a result, the students are very excited about the school garden, and they look forward to cooking and gardening as a regular part of their weekly routine. Support from garden coordinator Tara Gordon was a key component to the success of this program, allowing students to spend time in the garden every week and engage in cooking activities throughout the whole season.
Seeds planted during the 2018-2019 school year at Oak Grove School are bearing fruit as a living schoolyard and a vibrant garden featuring native plants take root on Oak Grove’s campus. Over the past two and a half years, a collaborative process between school staff, parents, students, and administration unfolded, making steady progress in spite of several obstacles. Principal Mary Kaufmann celebrates the project’s success, stating that “the schoolyard has developed into a lovely and welcoming space. Kids love to be outside! The more we have worked on the space, the more time we see classes outdoors.”
The visioning process for the project began in 2018 as a conversation between then principal Jeri Curry and a group of parents interested in making improvements to the playground. They identified problems including:
A lack of quiet spaces for students in need of a less stimulating recess environment
Outdated play structures and not enough swings
A lack of shady areas on hot, sunny days
Limited choices for a range of play opportunities across all ages, especially pre-K and older students
Every project needs champions, and there are several champions of Oak Grove’s living schoolyard project. This project weathered a change of administrators, superintendents, and facilities manager, as well as a school district merger and a global pandemic. It’s not been easy, but as the rewards start to emerge, it’s worth it. Some of the champions who helped bring this vision to reality are:
Former principal Jeri Curry. Curry began the project in her final year as principal, acknowledged parents' ongoing concerns about the outdated playground, secured start-up funds, formed a committee, and approved the idea to invest in mapping a long-term, broad scope vision by hiring a designer.
Current Oak Grove principal Mary Kaufmann. Kaufmann has supported the continued progress on the project’s goals through many transitions and prioritized hiring a school garden coordinator.
School garden coordinator Tara Gordon. Gordon led the move of the school garden and is connecting the garden to the classroom through meaningful hands-on learning and curricular connections for all students.
Former facilities manager Greg Frost. Frost supported the garden relocation, built outdoor stump seating and other outdoor classroom spaces, and managed many other project logistics.
New facilities manager Chad Pacheco. Pacheco continues to support the project as he enters into his new role.
Academic support teacher Laura Haskins. Haskins leads the Oak Grove Green Team and has been planting trees with students on the playground for many years.
Fifth-grade teacher Karen DiIorio-Bowen. Dilorio-Bowen has been integrating nature-based education into her curriculum for many years and built part of her curriculum around the living schoolyard this year.
PTO chair and parent Tara Davis. Davis immediately took a keen interest in the project—standing at the crossroads of parent, neighborhood, and teacher perspectives as a former teacher interested in outdoor education and a neighborhood resident.
The project began with visioning, which included surveying students, staff, and parents to get feedback on which playground elements these stakeholders wanted to keep and what new ideas people had that could be expanded on and prioritized. As part of this visioning process, the team brought in Nancy Striniste, a landscape designer with a background in child development, to help create a master plan redesigning the playground and school gardens. Certain elements of the plan have already happened, such as:
Relocating the school garden
Building a footbridge for creative play
Creating a new, wider, curved welcoming pathway at the playground entrance
Building cedar stump seating for the outdoor classroom
A highlight has been the move of the garden. Kaufmann says the garden has “grown and flourished thanks to the work of Tara Gordon and the students at Oak Grove.” Kaufmann notes that students take pride in the work they do in the garden. She sees many benefits in students “being able to be a part of something so beautiful that leads to harvesting and enjoying their hard work.” According to garden coordinator Tara Gordon, “The Oak Grove School garden is developing into a special place abundant with a rich array of perennial and native plantings, garden cultivars and annual florals, vegetables, fruits, and even mushrooms.” These plantings are designed to support and encourage outdoor learning, foster connections to nature, and provide opportunities to learn about the local landscape. Gordon sees garden education as an integral part of the school curriculum and community development. Community engagement has been one of the keys to success—during the fall of 2020, a group of “guerilla gardeners” came together and planted more than a hundred spring bulbs donated by various community members and kept the location of the plantings secret from the students for a spring surprise.
Student involvement is another key component of the project. The school invited all students to participate in the Pennies for the Playground initiative—a program designed to teach the power of the penny. Back in November 2020, tennis ball piggy banks were distributed to all students. As a show of gratitude, students were invited to collect pennies to help support the living playground project. Working with pennies made it accessible for students and families from all economic backgrounds. Collaboratively, the school community has raised $649.34 so far, including $163 raised by a penny challenge organized by Brattleboro Savings and Loan. Students voted recently to spend this money towards another step in the master plan—creating a new digging area won by a landslide. This will be completed over the summer and ready when students return to school.
DiIorio-Bowen’s fifth-grade class has been a key partner in the project this year through participation in the Wild Treasures program, 350 Vermont’s Rewild Vermont project, and a collaboration with Edible Brattleboro to plant additional trees on the campus. Kaufmann says, “The work the fifth graders did this year to learn about the carbon cycle and the environment led to an amazing culminating activity in which plants and trees were added to the playground, bringing more beauty and function to the space.” Karen’s students worked and consulted with Gordon to develop a plant list and placement throughout the school grounds following the master plan. Plantings included a whole array of native perennials, including trees, shrubs, and herbaceous pollinator plants. The project's budget also includes an extensive signage collection with artwork and research by the students displayed throughout the gardens. The fifth-grade planting day culminated with a closing circle around the new sugar maple tree. Students placed handfuls of soil around the tree roots along with special wishes they had written on pieces of paper to place into the hole. Together, everyone recited the Earth Pledge and sang the official state song of Vermont, “These Green Mountains.”
Jen Tourville's pre-k class has also been involved in lots of garden work this year, setting aside time weekly for planting, harvesting, and cooking together with Gordon. They are also enjoying an infusion of local produce into their snack program thanks to a CSA grant from the Vermont Agency of Agriculture.
All classes took part in the project in one way or another, thanks to Gordon’s ability to engage all classrooms in food preparation with garden produce, foraging education in the neighborhood, and a dedication by all staff to get students out in the gardens and onto the living schoolyard regularly.
This project has relied on the incredible generosity of spirit, time, resources, and skills coming from the community. Many thanks to:
Edible Brattleboro for donating fruit trees and a hickory sapling,
Bonnyvale Environmental Education Center (BEEC) and local arborist Bob Everingham from All About Trees for donating large cedar stumps for stump seating,
numerous neighbors and community members who donated supplies for a mud kitchen playspace for preschool students, bird feeders for classrooms to feed birds throughout the winter, and permission to tap maple trees in the neighborhood,
Heritage Maple Farm for supporting the first school sugaring operation by supplying buckets, taps, and other resources,
Hamilton Lumber for providing firewood for the wood-fired sugaring operation,
and the Food Connects Farm to School team for their continued support throughout the garden move, providing professional development opportunities, and a matching donation to the Pennies for the Playground initiative.
Davis made a point of reaching out to the community via Facebook, Front Porch Forum, and casual conversations with neighbors. She believes in creating connections, “especially as we emerge from the pandemic—connection is vital in bringing joy and meaning not only to Oak Grove students but our community at large. Everyone benefits when we work together for the collective good - in this case, the creation of a vibrant living schoolyard that also happens to lie in the heart of the Oak Grove neighborhood.”
Looking ahead, there are several next steps in the process for the living schoolyard:
The creation of a sensory path around the playground’s perimeter, funded by a grant from RiseVT, This path will build upon the new bridge, incorporating a living tunnel and a balance trail.
The construction of an edible mushroom garden along the north side of the building will feature shiitakes and oyster mushrooms.
A digging area, funded by the Pennies for the Playground initiative, some mounds for climbing, and some cob construction structures.
Kaufmann sums up the success of the project, saying, “our school grounds are something we take pride in, and the work of the living schoolyard team, the community, and the students and staff at Oak Grove School have made it a wonderful place to be and to learn!” The living schoolyard project actively seeks support from local businesses and community members who want to be involved. For more information, call Oak Grove School at (802) 254-3740 or email principal Mary Kaufmann at mkaufmann@wsesdvt.org.
As we reflect on the anniversary of the statewide school closures that resulted in overnight changes for families and school staff, Food Connects celebrates School Nutrition Professionals. These school lunch heroes stepped up every day to ensure our community remained fed. What a challenging year this has been for everyone working in school kitchens!
Last spring, while teachers, students, and families were making the difficult shift to remote learning, School Nutrition Professionals continued to work in person in school kitchens, making thousands of meals for youth in our community. They faced the anxiety of working in person while so many others were sheltering at home, the fear that they or their loved ones might be infected, or that they would spread the virus in their workplace. Steve Napoli is the head custodian at Putney Central School and was part of the core team working in the kitchen to get meals out in those early days. Napoli commented that it felt “eerie” at the start, but knowing they had to get meals out to take care of the community was essential.
Food Connects conducted a series of interviews last spring with School Nutrition Professionals and other school staff working in kitchens in Windham County schools. We wanted to learn more about the effects of the pandemic on their work and how they were coping with challenges such as consolidating efforts into centralized kitchens, making the switch to unitized meals, managing childcare as working parents, and keeping spirits up during challenging times. Their responses inspired us.
Many changes needed to happen quickly when school kitchens made the switch to delivering meals remotely. According to Steve Hed, Food Service Director at Putney Central School, “The whole meal preparation system changed. It got crunched into a shorter period of time.” Along with the crunch of preparing meals in time to be delivered to families by bus, the packaging requirements shifted as well. Ariane Lavoie, also of Putney Central School, said it best: “Less kids, more packaging!”
Schools with salad bars like Putney Central and Central Elementary School in Bellows Falls noticed a difference. Erica Frank, Site Manager at Central School, said, “We got a salad bar going in 2019, and it really took off. We had so many options, and it was so fun. It helped the kids try new things, and we don’t have that this year.” On the other hand, eliminating the salad bar simplified food prep, which helped free up kitchen staff to meet additional individual packaging requirements.
The challenge of finding foods that could be pre-packaged easily and travel well allowed schools to try out new recipes. Steve Hed reported that they’re trying new things in the kitchen, “like a gluten-free, vegan quinoa salad with garbanzo beans for protein, and all kinds of veggies.” They also added a Peruvian recipe for black bean and rice burritos, both of which have been “a big hit.”
With the switch to Universal Meals for all students, Food Service Directors’ paperwork has decreased. However, last spring, developing the meal delivery system added a brand new challenge to the job, including mapping out routes to efficiently deliver food to families throughout the school district.
When asked what kept them going, School Nutrition Professionals spoke passionately about community food security needs and the importance of feeding their students. The physical act of going to work helped keep their spirits up as well. “It keeps me going to have something to do every day when I wake up in the morning, someplace to go,” said Linda Griffin, who works in all 3 Brattleboro elementary schools. “I’m not the kind of person who can sit around doing nothing. Having this job has definitely saved me from going stir crazy.”
Thinking about their biggest challenges, most spoke about missing the students. Academy School’s lead cook, Jasmine Star Nightingale, summed it up perfectly, with tears in her eyes, saying, “My biggest challenge is not seeing the children. It is very painful. They're all just wonderful kids, and just seeing them smiling every day...I miss that!”
Many changes happened quickly, and it was a challenge to adjust. Lori Reynolds normally works at Dummerston School, serving meals to 80-100 students each day. When schools closed, Reynolds started reporting to work daily in the centralized kitchen at Academy School, where meals were being prepared and packaged for multiple schools in WSESD. She was in charge of the alternative meals—approximately 28 daily orders for gluten-free, dairy-free, vegetarian, and/or vegan meals. “I'm learning new things, which is a little bit challenging for me, but I’m doing it!” said Reynolds. She paid acute attention to detail to fulfill these orders, which she said “got my brain going very quickly” first thing in the morning.
Another challenge for School Nutrition Professionals with children was managing childcare and supporting remote learning while working in the kitchen during the day. Jill Harnish from Oak Grove School described the challenges faced by many working parents, saying, “It’s hard because my youngest is a senior this year, and he’s in special education. He’s got homework to do, so when I leave work, I have to go home and help him with his homework because he won’t do it when I’m not there.”
Community support helped keep everyone going, both in the form of additional school staff and community volunteers coming in to help the kitchens and in community expressions of gratitude for the invaluable work of School Nutrition Professionals. Nancy Gagnon is the office clerk at Putney Central School. When schools closed, she began working in the kitchen regularly, helping prep food and pack meals. When asked about community support, she responded by saying, “One of the biggest things the community is doing is showing appreciation for the effort that this whole team of people have provided. We've been getting some feedback from families...it buoys you and makes you really feel like your efforts are being appreciated. There’s a back and forth, connecting with families and knowing that they're happy with the food they're getting, and you feel happy that you're doing it.”
Many people mentioned the satisfaction they get from knowing that they are feeding children who need it, and they are proud of the quality of the food they make. Mary Beth Peterson is a kindergarten paraeducator at Putney Central School, and she helped out regularly in the school kitchen during the spring when her students were fully remote. Working in the school kitchen gave her a new perspective, and she proudly stated, “The quality of the food and the personalization that our food service staff put into what they do is phenomenal. The quality of the food is WOW; I can't believe it! The diversity and the kid-friendly food, it's quality stuff.” Thristan Coke from Bellows Falls Union High School said, “I am a firm believer that kids must be fed, no matter what. What’s going on is not their fault, and they shouldn't be punished for anything. So I take pride in that...I know what my kid is like when he’s hungry; I can’t imagine anybody else’s, so I am happy to feed them.”
We also asked what brought these folks joy in their lives and what they were grateful for. Jess Boucher of Dummerston School shared that some of her joy comes from “seeing smiling kids, happy kids, and when the kids tell me they like the food and how good of a job I’m doing.” On the topic of gratitude, people were universally grateful for their families, health, and jobs. Erica Frank from Central School spoke specifically about her appreciation for her co-workers, saying, “I’m grateful for the team who comes together at this time to make it work, no drama and just getting the job done. People coming together and bringing lots of different skill sets has been really nice.”
We are grateful for these unsung heroes in our community who nourish children in our community each day. The complete series of interviews can be found here: https://www.foodconnects.org/news-2/tag/Who+Feeds+Our+Kids
What better way to spend one of the first days of spring than touring farms and learning about greenhouses?
Last month, educators from Academy School, Green Street School, Guilford Central School, Oak Grove School, and Winston Prouty Center joined Farm to School Coordinators Sheila and Conor to check out Wild Carrot and Milkweed Farms’ greenhouses. More and more schools are looking to greenhouses throughout the region to extend their growing season and expand their “outdoor” classroom space during the winter.
Some schools like Guilford and Academy are in the information gathering process while Green Street has purchased a greenhouse and is preparing to set it up this spring, and Winston Prouty’s Early Learning Center is bringing an old greenhouse on campus back to life in partnership with the Inspire School.
While the school greenhouses will be much smaller than the production greenhouses visited, many of the nitty-gritty details are the same: what does irrigation look like, cold frame houses vs. sheet plastic, what crops thrive best, and how long you can extend the growing season by using a greenhouse. It was also great to see the other possible uses of greenhouses, such as a year-round playground and yard for kids!
“I’m lucky to have a very supportive family. They praise me every day and say thank you for what I’m doing, and that’s really good.”
Jasmine Star Nightingale, a.k.a. Jazzy, has worked in school food service in Brattleboro for over 5 years. She started in the kitchen at Oak Grove School and later switched to Academy School, where she was the lead cook prior to the pandemic. We sat down with her to hear more about how her work and life have changed over the past year. In this interview, she spoke about the fact that she was no longer cooking due to staffing changes, and she really missed it. Since we spoke, Jazzy is now back to cooking and she is currently cooking for 4 public and 6 private schools out of the central kitchen at Academy School. She does an amazing amount of work, sometimes cooking 4-5 different meals at once for over 500 students daily!
Sheila Humphreys (SH): How has your work changed due to COVID-19?
Jazzy Star Nightingale (JSN): I'm no longer cooking, which has its ups and downs. I'm working with new people, which I actually really enjoy. I love getting to know everybody, and they're all so wonderful, so that's really good. I’m not seeing kids, and that's terrible. That's the worst thing.
SH: Tell me more about your switch away from cooking.
JSN: One of my new co-workers, Danny, the chef from Guilford Central School, is cooking for all the schools right now from our central kitchen and I'm part of a team that is portioning and packaging. It’s a good switch, but I also love to cook.
SH: I heard about your tomato sauce that you were making before the pandemic. You started making tomato sauce from scratch for the pizzas on Fridays, right?
JSN: Yeah, that was really good.
SH: What are some of your favorite things to cook?
JSN: Mac and cheese, the kids love that, and tacos, that's fun! And pasta with meat sauce. That's easy, but it was so good. And tomato soup, I love making tomato soup.
SH: You make all that from scratch?
JSN: Yes, I do!
SH: What has kept you going during these unusual times?
JSN: Just knowing that I'm making a difference, and helping people that are in need. I’m lucky to have a very supportive family. They praise me every day and say thank you for what I’m doing, and that's really good.
SH: Do you have children at home?
JSN: I do! I have a one-year-old daughter.
SH: How are you managing with child care while you are at work?
JSN: Luckily, her grandmother is watching her. We’re so lucky for that.
SH: What has been your biggest challenge during this time?
JSN: My biggest challenge is not seeing the children. It is very painful. They're all just wonderful kids and just seeing them every day smiling...I miss that!
SH: How can the community support you and other food service workers during this time?
JSN: Just being recognized for our work is good, and our volunteers are so amazing. We're so lucky to have a lot of help from teachers, paraeducators, and everybody in the community.
SH: What advice would you give to someone who is interested in this career?
JSN: You have to be on your toes! You really do. Every day is different. There are new challenges that come with each situation, so just be prepared.
SH: You started this job when you were pretty young, right?
JSN: Yes, I was eighteen when I started part-time.
SH: And it has suited you?
JSN: Apparently, yes! I didn't think that I would be cooking now, but I'm really glad that I got the opportunity. It was a split-second decision that I decided to try it, and now I really enjoy it!
SH: Did you do the culinary arts program at WRCC when you were in high school?
JSN: No, I discovered cooking after high school.
SH: What brings you joy?
JSN: My family and my daughter and knowing that I'm helping people and that they appreciate it and they need it.
SH: What are some things that you are grateful for?
JSN: My family, my daughter, same answer! I'm just glad that I can be here and be helpful.
Leaves are starting to change and there’s a hint of fall in the air, and during this most unusual year, students are learning and growing in schools and homes throughout Windham County. One of the benefits of working as a Farm to School team coach is that we get to experience the many diverse colors and flavors of back to school throughout the region. Here are a few from schools and districts across the region.
At schools throughout the Windham Southeast School District (WSESD), teachers and students are spending more time than ever in school gardens as they learn to maximize their time outside and use school gardens as outdoor learning spaces.
At Academy School, plans are being made to add a new pumpkin patch where students can grow pumpkins for the school’s annual pumpkin festival. Teachers are working together to see what’s possible in terms of building an onsite composting system as part of hands-on science for 6th grade, and Academy welcomes back Kathy Cassin for her second year in the role of Garden Coordinator. The gardens are looking great, and Food Connects’ summer garden coordinator Tara Gordon froze basil for fall cooking projects with students. The school is hoping to find funding this year to buy 2 or 3 mobile cooking carts to enable them to cook more with students.
Oak Grove School’s garden is bountiful this year with watermelons, tomatoes, acorn squash, Aronia berries, and kale. Normally the school community gathers together each October to celebrate the harvest with a community meal made by students using produce grown in the garden. Instead, this year teachers are getting creative and finding ways for students to enjoy the harvest during their in-person learning days throughout the fall. The first farm to school meeting of the year included conversations about the best recipes for kale chips and what to do with dehydrated tomatoes. Students will make signs for the garden to identify the variety of foods they’ve grown, and thanks to a grant from Blue Cross Blue Shield, garden coordinator Tara Gordon and pre-K teacher Jamie Champney plan to buy more kitchen equipment for the school’s cooking cart.
At Guilford Central School, Sarah Rosow, the Farm to School Coordinator, continues to work with students in the garden. She hopes to grow the garden and replace aging infrastructure—a grant was submitted for new raised beds and more supplies. The Guilford community is busy supporting the school by expanding the outdoor learning spaces. They are constructing two beautiful pole barns and work on their forest classrooms continues.
Twin Valley Elementary School is wrapping up a School to Farm project with NOFA-VT in which they built connections with Boyd Family Farm in Wilmington. The project was interrupted this spring by COVID-19 and will continue this fall with farm-fresh taste tests for students and a virtual tour of the farm filmed by NOFA staff to share with the school community.
The newly formed Farm to School Team at Winston Prouty’s Early Learning Center is excited to use produce from their garden to make homemade baby food this fall to feed to their youngest students. The first recipes use mashed squash from their plentiful butternut squash crop. The students thoroughly enjoyed playing in the gourd house throughout the summer, which became more and more magical as the gourds grew above their heads!
At Riverside Middle School the Farm to School team worked with students to collect pumpkins from the nearby church garden. The garden club will put Greenies Garden to bed this month and plan for next year. The last funds from a Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food, and Markets (VAAFM) Nutrition Grant were used to buy two Jora brand composters for the school. Cliff Weyer, the Design and Technology teacher, is working with his Community Engineering class to assemble both units.
In the Windham Northeast Supervisory Union (WNESU), a new commercial veggie peeler at the high school kitchen means the food service team can process more local produce and include it in lunches! Harley Sterling, the School Nutrition Director, recently processed a large batch of potatoes from Westminster Center School’s (WCS) garden. WSC built a chicken coop over the summer and a flock of chickens has now officially moved in! Now, in addition to a bountiful garden, students can collect fresh eggs for classroom cooking projects and share them with the nutrition program, Farm to School Cafe.
At Newbrook Elementary School, the community harvested potatoes, squash, corn, and herbs from the garden. Some of the produce will go right into the school nutrition program while others will be saved for activities with students throughout the year. Teachers are getting ready for students to return to the classroom and thoughts have turned to the annual Farm and Field Day celebration. While it won’t look the same as in years past, there’s still hope that an adapted version can be held for the students to celebrate their school community.
It’s 5:30 am, and Brattleboro Town Food Service Director, Ali West, and her kitchen manager, Linda Griffin, are already hard at work preparing to feed a nourishing breakfast to more than 550 local children in the three Brattleboro Town elementary schools.
Green Street School was the first school in the district to offer Breakfast After the Bell, and it is a wildly successful program, with the highest breakfast participation rates in Windham County last year. This year, Academy and Oak Grove Schools decided to follow Green Street’s lead, which created a welcome challenge to Ali West, who is fiercely dedicated to feeding children in our schools. Breakfast After the Bell builds time to eat breakfast into the school day eliminating the difficult decision students are otherwise faced with—do I play outside with friends or fuel up before the start of the school day? It’s widely promoted as a way to increase breakfast participation rates—and Oak Grove and Academy are excellent case studies.
School breakfast participation rates
January 2019 vs January 2020
Academy School 45.6% 84.4%
Green Street School 78.7% 84.8%
Oak Grove 52.5% 83.1%
The breakfasts are all prepared at the Academy School kitchen, which serves as a central kitchen for the three schools. Ali and her staff developed systems to enable this morning ritual to run like a well-oiled machine, and a few months ago she invited us in to see just what goes into prepping breakfast every day.
In addition to waking up early to get things going, breakfast prep actually begins the afternoon before when all components of the breakfast are assembled. Then, before sunrise, final preparations go into full swing, the positive energy of three strong women (Linda is joined in the kitchen every morning by Lucia Hawkins and Jazzy Nightingale) working together as a team to feed the children while chatting, laughing, listening to the radio, and answering trivia questions.
Each classroom receives a bag packed with student’s orders, which might include breakfast sandwiches, bagels, homemade muffins, or the ever-popular option for picky eaters: cereal and milk. Each breakfast also comes with fruit or juice. Bags are delivered to classrooms as students arrive, and teachers have developed creative ways to successfully incorporate breakfast into their morning classroom routines. From Lauren Reavey’s 1st grade class whose “student breakfast helper” fills out the paperwork to Eugene Frost, facilities manager of Green Street, who delivers each bag to the classrooms before the students arrive—all staff and faculty take some part of making this a thriving success for our students.
“Knowing that I’m feeding children who might not otherwise get a healthy breakfast helps me start the day out right,” says Linda. “It’s important that our students receive the nourishment they need to be successful in the classroom, and I’m proud to be a part of universal breakfast in Brattleboro.”
