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Farm and Field Day Returns to NewBrook Elementary School!

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After a break forced by the COVID-19 pandemic, NewBrook Elementary School was able to host Farm and Field Day for the first time since 2019. The entire student body took a break from academics to spend an afternoon outdoors learning about food, recycling, and the natural environment.  

A multitude of community volunteers came out to run “stations”—where groups of students rotated through. The Windham County Game Warden, Dave Taddei, had a table full of pelts for students to explore and learn about. Giant Journey Farm brought adult rabbits and kits. Meadows Bee Farm had a faux milking station and taught students about June’s Harvest of the Month dairy. Food Connects made strawberry banana “nice cream” (sweetened only with fruit), and students assembled and ate their own pizzas, cooked by a West River Community Project volunteer. Amy Duffy, the school’s Farm to School Coordinator, made herbal salt scrubs with students. And the team from Windham Solid Waste ran a recycling relay! Art teacher Suzanne Paugh engaged students in making a mural for the garden shed out of recycled plastic!

Parents Elizabeth Erickson and Sara Webb, working with NewBrook’s Farm to School Committee, led the efforts to organize the event. Heather Sperling, the school’s wood-fired pizza expert and Farm to School veteran, and Amy Duffy, the school’s FTS Coordinator, were also central to the effort. Thank you so much to all the community members and families who volunteered to help with this event. Principal Scotty Tabachnick said, “it was just beautiful to see everyone outside, enjoying the day as a community again. We’re so thankful to everyone who supports our school.”

It was a wonderful day for all, and NewBrook Elementary School looks forward to hosting more events for students and families.

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Food Explorers

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This spring, Food Connects and Edible Brattleboro partnered up to run a Food Explorers program at The Boys & Girls Club of Brattleboro. The group was small but mighty, and Food Connects staff had a lot of fun getting to know the club kids and building stronger relationships with the amazing folks at Edible Brattleboro. 

Let’s start with some background on The Boys & Girls Club Flat Street location. Inside the inconspicuous doors is a huge, welcoming space. There are hanging plants, plenty of foosball and air hockey tables, a place to play basketball, a stage, and even an indoor skate park. Upstairs is a tech room and space to play creative games like Magic the Gathering and Dungeons and Dragons. Trust us when we tell you, this place has something special for every child! This location is open to middle and high schoolers from 3:00 PM to 7:00 PM, Monday through Friday during the school year, with differing summer hours, and serves as a safe place for kids to learn, grow and have fun. 

In late winter, Food Connects staff gathered with Boys & Girls Club staff to brainstorm ways the two organizations could work together. Excitement filled the air as the idea for the Food Explorers program began to take shape. Soon, Edible Brattleboro, a local organization that works to address food insecurity by building and caring for help-yourself gardens, also joined in, and Food Explorers was born.  

Thanks to Edible Brattleboro's generous donation, we built a grow cart together, started seeds using said grow cart, and planted them in the help-yourself garden at Turning Point Recovery Center. Our Farm to School Manager, Sadie Hunter, joined the kids seven times between May and June to engage them in food and gardening activities. Participating in a growing cycle this way was very rewarding, and we hope these plants will be enjoyed by many all summer long. 

Some of the other activities that we did together the past few months include an activity around light and seeds, a science experiment examining starches, and seed starting in many different ways. 

We hope that we can all continue working together to bring local, yummy food (and engaging Farm to School learning) to our community!

Amy Duffy Is Named Farm to School Champion!

“This school is magical!” is what Ali Tomer, a third-grader, had to say when asked about her experiences with NewBrook Elementary’s Farm to School (FTS) program. Another third-grader, Piper Stafford, chimed in, “I like how we help each other. It feels like we’re all connected because we’re all working on this one thing together, no matter how different we are. And the sugar snap peas are delicious!”

With a degree in Health Science with a Nutrition focus, Amy Duffy hadn’t previously worked with children when she accepted the Farm to School Coordinator position at NewBrook Elementary, but that hasn’t stopped her from having a major impact on their lives. That’s one of many reasons Food Connects recognizes Amy as this year’s Farm to School Champion!

Since beginning in August 2021, Amy has worked with NewBrook students weekly, bringing FTS programming into their classrooms. She’s designed lessons, come up with recipes, run taste tests, and read books to educate students about food—where it comes from and why it matters—the students and staff more than appreciate her efforts. 

Principal Scotty Tabachnick shared, “In the midst of the pandemic, Amy hit the ground running. She quickly built positive and trusting relationships with our students and staff, and through her work, she actually helped us to bring our families to visit NewBrook as soon as the restrictions were lifted. Our students look forward to Amy's enriching lessons; she takes them outside, she has them working with their hands, and she ties new learning with prior knowledge in a natural and effective manner. It makes total sense to me that Amy Duffy's work would have such a positive outcome. Her diligence, positivity, and skill set all add up to benefit our students and NewBrook's programming as a whole. No one deserves (this award) more than her. She’s just been so amazing. Her way with the kids is wonderful.”

When I spent a day with Amy and her students at NewBrook, much of what Mr. Tabachnick said was evident. She is patient, kind, and gentle with students while also keeping them engaged. When students in one class grew agitated with each other, she stopped the garden activities and led them in a mindful breathing exercise. (It worked!). When Kindergarten students made text-to-self connections during a read-aloud, Amy made space for them to share their experiences (“tell us about your bees”). Students were eager to participate in Amy's planned activities, each of which seemed to build on what the students had done in previous weeks.

Later that week, the third-grade class tasted “microgreens” they had seeded and grown in their classroom. Amy set up trays with crackers, cheese, microgreens, and some herbs from the garden. Students made their own gourmet crackers and enjoyed their sprouts. “They are so good! I’m having a third one! It just tastes awesome, cause I like the hotness!” exclaimed Gunner Hackett, referring to the spiciness of the radish greens. 

Staff member Wendy McFadden said this enthusiasm is the norm. “The kids love this. They’re all about it. And Amy is so great. She does tastings with them—they get the movement, the outdoor time, and the education piece. This year the kids are even more into (FTS) because of Amy. She gives them a lot of information, and they retain it.” 

In addition to her position at NewBrook, Amy has also volunteered to be on the new Townshend Elementary FTS Committee, which began meeting in January. She’s a parent at the school and has been instrumental in helping to get a FTS program started there, as well as advising on which activities might be the most engaging or feasible given the school's programming needs. 

Amy has gone above and beyond as the FTS Coordinator at NewBrook. The school and Food Connects are so thankful for her work. She’s applied for grants, picked up donated loads of firewood and compost, fixed up garden structures, and prepared recipes at home for classroom tastings. 

In response to being recognized as our Farm to School Champion, Amy remarked: “I’m genuinely just happy to be able to be part of this wonderful program and work with such dedicated, creative, passionate & motivated people. Everyone involved cares so much for the kids and dedicates so much of themselves to making FTS a success. Not to mention the kids who make it all worth it! I never dreamed how invested and interested in learning the kids would be. It is so encouraging and fulfilling.”

Thank you so much for all your hard work, Amy. We are proud to name you a Farm to School Champion! 

Blue Cross and Blue Shield Mini-Grants Support FTS Programming in Area Schools

Several area schools, including Academy School, Towsend Elementary, and Newbrook Elementary, were awarded grants by the Windham County Community Advisory Board of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Vermont. This is a volunteer board of dedicated Windham County residents who are local champions of healthy activity and programming of all kinds. Several proposals were submitted for this round of funding to strengthen Farm to School (FTS) programming, and Food Connects is thrilled to celebrate this vital support for FTS-related wellness projects in some of our member schools!

At Academy School, 4th-6th grade classes are excited to receive funding to purchase a grow lab and humidity tent that they will use to grow plants for their garden beds. The grow lab will provide approximately 180 students the opportunity to become more involved in starting seeds in their classrooms. The seedlings grown will stock their school garden beds with vegetables, herbs, and flowers that can be used for cooking activities in their classrooms.

Townshend Elementary School launched a brand new FTS program in March. This grant will provide vital funding for purchasing ingredients and materials for Harvest of the Month taste tests and seed money for starting a small garden at the school. Taste tests are being given in each school classroom, reaching all 110 students. Students enjoyed the first Harvest of the Month activity in March, which focused on maple syrup. Teachers have already utilized funds from the grant to purchase a variety of whole grains for students to see, touch, and make art with, as well as some whole-grain bread and plain, refined flour white bread for April’s taste test. Garden planning is underway!

Just down the road at Newbrook Elementary School, the grant will fund multiple FTS-related projects. A woodfired pizza oven is central to Newbrook’s school culture and FTS program. This grant will fund the purchase of firewood to fuel the oven for six months and ingredients for pizza dough and sauce. The FTS team is also building two new raised beds next to the pizza oven so that students will be able to enjoy or work in the garden during recess time, if they choose, and will be able to harvest herbs and pizza toppings moments before their pie goes in the oven! The remainder of the grant will be used to restock the school’s cooking cart so that Amy Duffy, the school’s Garden Coordinator and FTS Educator, can continue to cook with students during her weekly visits to each classroom.

Many thanks to the Windham County Community Advisory Board of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Vermont for supplying these grants and providing essential funding for activities and green spaces at our local schools.

Food Justice Ideas for Teaching about Dairy, the June Harvest of the Month

Next month’s Harvest of the Month is dairy.  Learning about dairy in Vermont provides an opportunity not only to sample delicious offerings like Vermont cheese, yogurt, and ice cream, to talk about beautiful cows and our pastoral Vermont landscape, but also to engage in rich discussions with students about food justice, economic justice, human rights, and Vermont’s dairy farming industry.

Vermont is fortunate to have strong advocates for our many migrant workers in the dairy industry. Migrant Justice, Vermont’s worker-led farmworker rights organization, leads this effort.  After many years of laying the groundwork, in 2017, Ben & Jerry’s became the first business to join Milk with Dignity, a worker-driven model for social responsibility in the dairy industry.  Currently, Migrant Justice is working hard to encourage Hannafords to be the next large New England-based business to join Milk With Dignity, and local activists participated in a day of action at the Hannafords on Putney Road in Brattleboro earlier this month.

If you would like more information, lesson plans, and resources for working with students to learn about the complex and important issues surrounding dairy farming in our region, here are a few resources to get you started. 

Fresh Picks Bringing Fresh Food to Schools

Many of Food Connects’ sponsors are local businesses looking to support Farm to School that may not directly do so with their work. Food Connects has the unique privilege, however, of working closely with one daily—Fresh Picks Café.

Based out of Manchester, NH, Fresh Picks Café is a food service contracting company that works with public schools and school districts to provide meals for their students. These meals, often sourcing local foods and always following state and federal guidelines, are quite delicious! Our Farm to School team works with its team members at schools across Windham County, and their values align well with our work.

“The motivating philosophy at Fresh Picks Café is that wellness and good food go hand in hand—especially in education. Our comprehensive, coordinated, pro-active wellness programs promote this belief with an emphasis on fresh and whole wheat foods that are locally grown and produced.”
— Fresh Picks Café

And so, a symbiotic relationship was established. Fresh Picks Café supports our Farm to School program and helps us grow and thrive. At the same time, our Farm to School team helps their school teams apply for kitchen equipment grants, provides professional development opportunities, and partners with them on multiple projects (like the Where in the World Are We Eating series).

This long-lasting partnership has helped feed children throughout Windham County for years and will continue to bring the most nutritious food possible to help kids in our neighborhoods thrive.

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Honoring Two Local Heroes

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Two local Farm to School champions were honored this year by the School Nutrition Association of Vermont and Hunger Free Vermont—Ali West and Harley Sterling!

The Outstanding Achievement Award for “Directors or Managers whose efforts exemplify positive attitudes, creativity, and expertise regarding the challenge of providing nutrition services to Vermont students, especially in times of elevated standards, fewer resources, and recently, a pandemic” went to Ali West, Brattleboro Regional Food Service Director for Windham Southeast Supervisory Union (WSESU). 

The Innovation and Advocacy Award for “any school nutrition employee who has taken an idea, developed it into a goal, and carried out a specific project to help their program expand student access to quality school, afterschool, and/or summer meals as well as elevate their community’s image of school meals and school nutrition personnel,” went to Harley Sterling, Food Service Director for Windham Northeast Supervisory Union (WNESU).

A summary of both nominations follows. Congratulations, and thank you, Ali and Harley!

Ali West

Ali West is an incredible asset to Windham Southeast Supervisory Union (WSESU). She has worked tirelessly during the pandemic to ensure that all students in our community are well-nourished. In March of 2020, she pivoted her entire operation and sent meals home to students within three days of school closures. She managed teams of volunteers in her kitchen throughout the spring of 2020, creating efficient systems for getting students fed at home daily. Ali maintained a positive attitude throughout all the challenges that presented themselves during the pandemic, from staffing shortages to supply chain issues, finding creative ways to solve numerous seemingly impossible problems.

Ali is committed to serving high-quality, nutritious food to students and staff. During her five-year tenure, the food quality has increased enormously, prioritizing purchasing local food whenever possible given her tight budget and a shift to scratch cooking. Ali tries out bold new recipes on her menus, such as French lentil soup with fennel, carrots, onions, and thyme and Asian chicken salad with crispy veggies, mixed greens, and a sesame ginger dressing. Her menus always feature a vegan option. For example, when hot lunch is a tuna melt, she also makes a chickpea “tuna” melt. Meal participation among students and staff has increased dramatically. For example, staffing changes have allowed her to become much more hands-on with managing the BUHS kitchen during the 2021-2022 school year. As a direct result of the changes she has made to improve the food quality and the menu, staff participation has increased by 20%, and student participation has increased by 25% this school year alone.

Ali cares deeply about all students, and she is committed to equity in her work. She strives to make all students feel welcome, no matter where they are from, and that desire inspired her to create the Where in the World are We Eating Program, a monthly program where the entire school community celebrates diversity through their taste buds. Ali collaborated with teachers of English Language Learners in the district to compile a list of the 22 different countries students are from. Each month, cuisine from a different country from this list is featured on the menu, and Ali also encourages the entire school community to get involved by learning about the featured country in their art, music, library, and social studies classes.

Ali recently embarked on a new journey, nourishing a group of Afghan refugee families who moved to the Brattleboro area. She is committed to welcoming them with warmth and care through what she does best, food! She has all pork items in the cafeteria marked haram so that these students know which food to avoid to honor their cultural traditions. She has also translated her menus into Dari to make them accessible to these newest students.

Harley Sterling

Harley Sterling is laser-focused on one goal—feeding kids the best quality food possible.  And when Harley has a goal, he makes it happen. Throughout 2021, we’ve seen Harley feed more students than ever before, increase his already impressive local purchasing, reimagine how school meals can be used to feed families, and continue to value and champion his staff.

In the fall of 2020, students were back in school, but Harley knew families were still greatly struggling from the pandemic and its ramifications. He and his team worked hard to feed students nutritious and delicious meals every day, as he has done for years. But he wanted to do more. Over the Thanksgiving break of 2020, the food service team offered the first “meal boxes” to the community, modeling the idea off of a program the Burlington School Food Project had undertaken. Anyone in the community who had a child could pick up a meal box, which included enough groceries for 2-3 meals a day (depending on the time of year), seven days a week, for one child. Boxes were filled per child—so if a family had five children, they could take five boxes. Each box contained fresh fruits and vegetables, whole grains, milk, and packaged foods and recipe ideas for meals using the boxed ingredients. On top of all this, Sterling purchased as much local food as possible. Think Bread Shed bread, Miller Farm milk, and Vermont grass-fed beef and produce. This amounted to Sterling’s program spending over $100,000 on local purchases from Food Connects, his local food distributor, for meal boxes alone. 

The first two meal box distributions were a roaring success, with over 700 boxes going home with families over the December break. Sterling and his team knew then they were meeting an essential need in the community and vowed to continue making food available to families in whatever ways possible. The team offered boxes over the February and April vacations and made a plan to continue this service throughout the summer.

During the summer of 2021, Harley and his team sent hundreds of meal boxes home every week—averaging around 500 boxes/week., They also continued to feed children who were participating in summer programming at the schools in WNESU. In addition, Sterling secured a contract to feed the children in Keene summer programs. This meant that approximately 500 additional students a day were being fed scratch-cooked meals with a large portion of fresh and local ingredients. ISterling and his team were serving roughly 2000 meals per day throughout the summer of 2021. 

Why would Windham Northeast District be feeding students in Keene? This is where Harley’s exceptional innovation, leadership, and passion combine to allow him to identify and capitalize on opportunities—which leads to benefits not just for students but also for his team, local farmers and producers, and the community. Sterling believes strongly in his team and even more strongly in rewarding and elevating them. He offers his staff some of the highest kitchen wages in Vermont, alongside great benefits. One staff member reflected “I’ve never made more money in a restaurant. This is the best paying kitchen job I’ve ever had, and I’ve had many.” Harley doesn’t decline requests for time off.  Once a staff member is trained, they are trusted and given a lot of autonomy. He is serious about elevating the community’s image of school nutrition personnel. Sterling is trying to inspire a new movement that he believes is just beginning—a movement to transform school food.  Sterling explained, “It starts with taking care of people. Paying them. Giving them great benefits. And elevating them so that people see them and value them for what they are: badass chefs.” He hopes this will motivate others to join the effort. 

How can Sterling pay more than “any other kitchen job?”  By being innovative, creative, determined, and extremely hard-working. By contracting with the Keene summer program, he nourished more students with high-quality food andsecured more funding to pay respectable wages and pay for high-quality ingredients. 

Food Connects is honored to work with Harley, and we are inspired by his work. Many school food professionals are doing amazing work in Vermont. But his steps towards increasing access to high-quality food, decreasing stigma, and elevating his team prove he is an exceptional innovator and a true School Nutrition Hero. 

Joey Jacques Wins Jr. Iron Chef Competition!

In our March Newsletter, we wrote about Bellows Falls Union High School students competing at Junior Iron Chef VT. Due to a winter storm, the competition was postponed and was rescheduled for April 2nd. Due to rescheduling, teammate Kevin Patterson could not compete, so Joey Jacques had to cook solo—a rarity at Jr Iron Chef, where teams are usually three or more students.  

However, cooking solo did not damper the team's abilities. In fact, Joey won the Mise en Place award cooking by himself! Quite a remarkable achievement! 

Coach Jake Gallogly remarked that “watching Joey cook was pretty awesome. I don't know if he noticed or not, but all of the judges and many of the coaches kept coming up to me and asking if he was really competing alone. They were really impressed.”

So Jake wasn’t completely surprised when they announced Joey’s name as the winner. But the extra reward came when the captain of the judges told Jake, “his dish was by far the best, and they’d pay for it in a restaurant!” I had felt exactly the same when I tasted it during a practice session.

Jr. Iron Chef helps build confidence in students and offers them a unique opportunity. Jake reflects, “Jr. Iron Chef is a great program. All three times that I have had the opportunity to coach a team, I feel that the kids walked away with more confidence in the kitchen. Cooking aside, I think some of the students that participate in the program aren't always involved in competitive sports, so showing up to the expo center with all the energy and the big crowd of people there has to be exciting. Everyone needs a few butterflies in their stomach once in a while!”

We’ll be waiting with anticipation to see if Joey competes again next year.