In the spring of 2021, Dummerston School was awarded a $10,000 Farm to School and Early Childhood Grant from the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Farm and Markets (VAAFM). This unique grant includes customized professional development provided by Vermont FEED. At Dummerston School, principal Julianne Eagan decided to use that professional development to launch a new buddy classroom program with a Farm to School and outdoor learning focus.
In March 2022, Townshend Elementary School launched its Farm to School program, offering monthly taste tests and activities for students, focusing on the Vermont Harvest of the Month. Part-time teacher Kelsey Taddei volunteered her time to run the program with Food Connects FTS coach Jenny Kessler. By the end of the school year, it was clear that students and teachers alike really enjoyed growing their knowledge about local food. But the program needed resources to pay a Farm to School Coordinator to run programming, purchase supplies and curricular materials, and build a small garden.
What’s one of the best ways to ensure Farm to School becomes an integral part of school culture? Welcome students as partners and leaders in the movement. It’s always a goal when introducing Farm to School and is a big focus of our upcoming Farm to School Conference. The keynote address and one of the workshops are all about engaging students.
Because of all this, I quickly accepted the offer from the Leland & Gray Environmental Action Force (LEAF) to join them for lunch the Friday before winter break. I was excited to hear what they’ve been working on and to share some ideas for tackling food waste in their school.
Before meeting with advisors, Mary and Chris, and the students, I swung by the cafeteria to grab lunch and chat with Food Service Director Chris Parker. I was recently a judge for the local Junior Iron Chef competition and we caught up on the regional teams that will be headed to the statewide competition next month. The recently renovated cafeteria was bustling with students getting made-to-order sandwiches, making their own salads, and the main entree for the day.
With my plate loaded up with a BBQ Chicken Sandwich, corn salad, and more veggies from the salad bar, I headed back up to Mary’s classroom for the LEAF meeting. By the time I got there, they were already deep in discussion but were happy to backtrack for me.
So, what’s LEAF been up to at Leland & Gray? They’ve been deeply involved in climate change activism in their community and statewide. Students traveled to Brattleboro and Burlington for panel discussions and protests. Regularly, you’ll find students outside with signs during lunch, raising awareness of climate change issues locally and keeping it on people’s minds. The group also manages the school’s compost system and has been supporting sustainable school practices such as buying reusable utensils for the cafeteria.
The group was also receptive to the idea of digger deeper into food waste reduction. A lot of the strategies proposed in Food Connects’ recent grant focused on working with Food Service Directors, but engaging with student groups is arguably the best way to shift school culture. LEAF is going to start with a food waste audit to measure how much food waste is leaving the cafeteria and then evaluate what the best next step is.
We also talked about the upcoming Farm to School Conference and the group was excited to join. Mary, Chris, and a group of LEAF members decided to sign up. Having an engaged student presence at the conference and in the workshops will benefit everyone in the room! Students are often a stakeholder group that is absent in Farm to School conversations but can add depth to school partnerships when they’re involved.
We had covered a lot of ground in a small amount of time. Abruptly, the bell rang and ended our conversation. I looked down at my plate, I had taken one bite of my sandwich! Luckily, I didn’t have a class to get to and Mary let me finish lunch in her classroom. The impossibility of a 25-minute school lunch becomes clear when you have experienced it for yourself.
Leave class, get to the cafeteria, chat with a friend, wait in line, get your food, find a table, socialize and eat your lunch (without cramming!) all in 25-minutes—good luck!
But, that’s a topic for another time.
A recent partnership between Food Connects and RiseVT, the primary prevention program of OneCare Vermont, increases accessibility for Early Childhood Educators (ECEs) to attend the upcoming our Farm to School Conference. Funding through RiseVT’s Amplify Grant has made it possible for 15 ECEs to attend Food Connects’ Conference on April 8 at no cost.
“Food Connects provides a wide array of support services to area elementary and high schools. These include meeting facilitation, local purchasing and procurement support in cafeterias, grant writing support, and curriculum development,” says Farm to School Program Manager, Conor Floyd. “Food Connects’ work encourages healthier lifestyles for students by getting kids outside, growing their own food, and improving the quality of food served in cafeterias.”
As the Farm to Early Childhood Education movement grows nationwide, we are excited to partner with local child care centers to promote health, wellness, and high-quality educational opportunities. The scholarships provided through the Amplify Grant will help create a cohort of energized Farm to School champions at the early childhood level. These educators will bring their learning from the conference back to their respective organizations, incorporating Farm to School programming in early education settings and developing students' healthy lifestyle habits from an earlier age.
ECEs working with students from birth to pre-K in the towns of Brattleboro, Guilford, Vernon, Newfane, and Townshend are eligible for the scholarship and encouraged to apply. The scholarship application deadline is February 18 with applicant notifications going out on February 21. Registration for the conference closes on March 18.
Interested applicants can learn more about the conference at foodconnects.org/farm-to-school-conference or directly apply for the scholarship at bit.ly/ftsscholarship. Questions about the scholarship or conference can be directed to Conor at conor@foodconnects.org.
Food Connects has worked with schools for over 10 years to support Farm to School programs that bring together the cafeteria, classroom, and community. Oftentimes, when working with Food Service Directors, we focus on the procurement and preparation of local food in school cafeterias. Until now, less attention was given to food waste and food recovery, despite it being an essential part of Vermont’s food system. Thanks to the support of a two-year $55,550 grant from the Claneil Foundation, we now have the capacity to greatly build upon our current efforts to address food waste and better support our partners.
As a community, our awareness of the urgency and magnitude of climate change has grown. Farm to School programming is already linked to sustainability education in the classroom and carbon reduction in the cafeteria through local food procurement. We want to strengthen our commitment to these efforts and our work in cafeterias is the prime location for this increased focus. Reducing food waste and increasing food access are two sides of the same problem—this project supports the work we’ve done around trauma-informed approaches to Farm to School. All of which led us to the Claneil Foundation, whose Critical Issue Fund is currently focused on food waste.
Share Cooler at Academy School.
We’re excited to work with Food Service Directors to tap into the captive audience each cafeteria presents. Some schools we work with have already taken big steps to reduce food waste, notably Seed2Tray—Windham Central Supervisory Union’s nutrition program—and the Windham Southeast School District. At Seed2Tray, Chris Parker and his staff repackage leftover food to give students the option of taking an additional meal home with them. In the WSESD, share coolers are a common sight in cafeterias and Putney Central School replaced milk cartons with reusable cups and a milk dispenser.
Despite the promising progress, we anticipate obstacles along the way. The biggest of which is that change is often slow to happen and difficult to enact. This is especially true in middle and high schools. With fewer daily routines and more student autonomy, it becomes crucial to reach students with positive messaging and clear steps they can take to be a part of the solution. We anticipate student environmental groups in secondary schools to be our partners in implementing some of these changes. Research indicates that the longest-lasting interventions are those focused on teachers and staff in the school (as opposed to students). As the main implementers of new systems and the setters of culture in schools, co-opting school staff will be essential. We’ll need to ensure that our best practices are streamlined and easy for busy staff to incorporate into their daily routines.
With these potential challenges in mind, over the next year, we will work closely with schools to refine their current practices and pilot new ones. By the end of this stage of the project, we will engage with at least ten schools in southeast Vermont and the Monadnock Region of New Hampshire. The list of potential interventions includes share coolers, repackaging meals, composting systems, school-based food shelves, improving cafeteria environments, and continuing to improve meal quality. We’re also excited to discover new interventions along the way!
In the second phase of the project, we’ll refine this list and highlight the three best practices which have the largest impact relative to their ease of implementation. We will collaborate with state agencies to make sure the practices are aligned with relevant regulations and interview staff from pilot schools to better understand their perspectives. Finally, we’ll take all this information and create a toolkit and workshop to be shared with stakeholders throughout New England.
What I’m most excited about regarding this new project is how it connects strongly with the work we already do in schools and approaches that work through a new lens. I’m sure that in addition to new food waste reduction strategies, new interventions and practices will be uncovered that support other aspects of Farm to School programming. Collaboration is an integral part of this project. I’m looking forward to deepening the relationships we already have with our partners and beginning work with new stakeholders as well.
By Conor Floyd, Food Connects Farm to School Program Manager
How can we teach about large-scale problems—such as climate change—without discouraging students? This question vexes many educators as climate change and sustainability become a more integral part of classroom curriculums. Climate change is a big problem, and our initial instinct may be to lay out all the facts and urgency to our students. Not so fast though, if we only arm our students with the knowledge without also building their capacity to act, we may be discouraging future positive actions to address these important problems.
David Sobel, Director of Certificate Programs at Antioch University New England, has a solution to this dilemma—what he calls a Ladder of Environmental Responsibility. The purpose of this tool is to provide students with concrete tasks which demonstrate that their behaviors can have a positive impact on the environment. These tasks should gradually become more difficult as students move through the grades, be tied in with the existing curriculum, and provide students with nature experiences that help connect them to the environment.
As a part of a recent grant from the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets, Newbrook Elementary’s faculty came together last year to design their own Ladder of Responsibility. They were able to take the principles laid out by Sobel and adapt them to the specific context of their school. Now, Sam Kilmurray, NewBrook’s Garden Educator, is using the ladder as a framework for her Farm to School education.
In addition to a host of shared tasks, there is now a specific track for students as they move from grade-to-grade. For example, Kindergarten is in charge of the pollinator garden, second grade learns about medinicial gardening, and fifth graders are the school’s waste stewards. Not only does this scaffold environmental education for students, but it can also help teachers incorporate Farm to School education—which for some may feel intimidatingly broad—into their classroom curriculum by providing a defined list of tasks for students to participate in.
The Ladder of Environmental Responsibility can easily be adapted to fit within your school’s Farm to School program, provide clarity to your curriculum, and—most importantly—help students grow into empowered environmental stewards. If you’re looking for help to develop a Ladder of Environmental Responsibility for your school, feel free to contact Conor, conor@foodconnects.org.
Student investigates the classroom worm bin. There are six bins in classrooms throughout the school which are a part of the 5th grader’s waste stewardship responsibilities.
Thanks to grant funding from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Vermont and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, students at Green Street School will have many more opportunities to learn to cook in their classrooms and after school activities this school year.
Food Connects supported Green Street School in purchasing and fully outfitting a cooking cart, which is a rolling kitchen island stocked with all the equipment needed to successfully cook with students in the classroom. The cart has a food processor, electric griddle, two-burner hotplate, immersion blender, convection oven, and all the pots, pans, and utensils needed to prepare and sample healthy recipes.
Kelly Shifflette’s 4th graders were the first class to test out the cart, which will be used by all grade levels throughout the year with support from Green Street’s garden coordinator, Tara Gordon. They made a potato kale soup with fresh herbs from the school garden. Ms. Shifflette says that the soup “was delicious and we shared it with the whole staff. Using the cooking cart in my classroom was great and the students learned how to use knives safely.”
What delicious offerings will the students cook up next?
During April vacation, our Farm to School team went on a road trip with Brattleboro Town Food Service Director Ali West to Steiger Supply, a family-owned kitchen supply store in Rutland, VT. Ali was like a kid in a candy store, filling her cart with everything from small items like measuring cups and tongs to a commercial immersion blender for making soups and smoothies for the more than 700 students that she cooks for every day. Brattleboro Union High School and Brattleboro Area Middles School (BUHS/BAMS) Food Service Director, Justin Mcardle, also made a trip to Steigers and his purchases included a 40-quart stockpot and a food processor to help him make more soups, sauces, and spreads from fresh, local fruits and vegetables.
These shopping trips were funded by a generous Community Health Rankings and Roadmaps grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation applied for in partnership with the Vermont Department of Health. The goal of this project is to foster health improvement efforts in our community. As a result of this funding, Food Connects was able to provide funds for the Brattleboro Town School District, Brattleboro Area Middle School, and Brattleboro Union High School to buy some much-needed equipment to help them process more fresh, local produce.
Many thanks to our friends at the Vermont Department of Health for collaborating with us on this grant and supporting healthy, fresh, local food in our schools!
With the support of a $20,000 2-year grant from the Thompson Trust, Food Connects is excited to deepen our work in the Brattleboro Town Schools, strengthening nutrition and Farm to School programming as part of an effort to develop a Trauma-Informed approach to education in the Brattleboro Town Schools.
Trauma-Informed education provides support for students with high Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) scores. The ACE study measures 10 types of childhood trauma, including abuse, neglect (including persistent food insecurity), domestic violence, separation or divorce, substance abuse, mental illness, and incarceration. As ACE scores increase, so does the risk of disease, social, and emotional problems. The traumatic stress experienced by children with ACE scores of 4 or more has been linked to risky health behaviors, chronic health conditions, low life potential, and early death. Brattleboro Town Schools are actively engaged in conversations about how to support these students to have better outcomes, and we are proud to partner with them in this important work.
The objectives of this grant are to improve faculty & staff understanding of the connection between nutrition and trauma, to increase schools' capacity for coordinating food and trauma education and activities, and to strengthen local food purchasing and promotion by school cafeterias.
In partnership with the VT Department of Health, we've been awarded $4,900 in funding to increase food access and improve student nutrition in Brattleboro schools. We will provide additional support to the food service staff at BUHS, BAMS, and the Brattleboro Towns Schools. Key activities will include: 1) purchasing kitchen equipment that will aid in the processing of more whole, fresh ingredients 2) investing in school meal marketing materials to promote school meals to kids and families, and 3) technical assistance provided to food service professionals around menu planning, marketing, and related activities, and technical assistance provided to food service professionals around menu planning, marketing, and related activities.
We’re looking forward to digging deeper into the relationship between trauma and food and exploring how school gardens, community harvest celebrations, and healthier food choices in the cafeteria can nurture the most vulnerable students in our community and help them to grow and flourish!
