GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

The Green Cup Challenge is a national inter-school energy-conservation competition designed to reduce schools’ electricity use. Nationally, 161 schools competed in this year’s competition, and the winner was PS 166, a public elementary school on New York’s Upper West Side.

In just four weeks (Jan. 15-Feb. 12, at peak winter energy use), PS 166 reduced its energy consumption by 17.75 percent.  ”The school saved $1,845 on its electricity bill (15,380 kilowatt hours) and prevented 20,609 pounds of carbon dioxide (CO2) from being released into the environment,” according to Ozgem Omektekin, the Department of Education’s director of sustainability. Katy Perry, the competition’s program director, used a carbon calculator to assess PS 166′s impact, and she found that PS 166′s energy saving was equal to taking two cars off the road for one year, planting 10 trees or replacing 374 incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescent ones. And the school accomplished all this in just four weeks!

What extreme measures did PS 166 take to win? As it turns out, none. They posted signs reminding everyone to turn off unnecessary lights, to set thermostats to 68 degrees Fahrenheit, to power down computers, and to close windows and doors. Custodial staff turned off heat and boilers at night. (more…)

Although Debby Lee Cohen asked her children every day what they ate for lunch, it never occurred to her to ask them what their school lunch was served on, and so, like most New York City parents, she remained blissfully ignorant. A trip last spring to the Climate Change exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History, however, changed all that.

Cohen’s 7-year old daughter stood staring at a diorama of a life-size polar bear standing on a melted island covered with trash. Then she turned around and announced that she would no longer buy school lunch in order “to save the polar bears.” And that’s how Debby Lee Cohen discovered that in New York City school lunches are served on Styrofoam trays.

We interviewed Debby Lee, a teacher at Parsons The New School for Design, to find out the health and environmental hazards of using Styrofoam and what parents and educators can do to get rid of the Styrofoam trays at their schools.

Why are you so determined to get rid of the Styrofoam trays in our schools?

Styrofoam (polystyrene) trays are the worst kept secret in NYC schools. NYC schools use 850,000 trays per day, which amounts to 153 million trays a year! They are terrible for our children’s health and for the environment. Some children eat three meals a day directly off of these trays, which are made up of the chemicals benzene and styrene. Styrene, a possible carcinogen, leaches into hot foods and has been linked to central nervous system disorders such as headaches, fatigue, depression, and hearing loss. New York State passed legislation banning toxic cleaning products in all schools. Parents should demand toxic-free school lunches as well. We should not be taking risks with our children’s health. (more…)

Congress has a unique opportunity right now to help combat child hunger.

Right now, Congress is considering the Child Nutrition Act, which is renewed every five years and sets the rules and funding levels for federal nutrition programs, including school lunch and breakfast programs. President Obama, who has set the goal of ending child hunger by 2015, is calling for $1 billion a year in funding for the act over the next 10 years.

That sounds like a lot — but according to Joel Burger, executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, it will take $4 billion a year to get healthy, nutritious meals to the 13 million children in the United States living in the more than one in 10 households that experience hunger or the risk of hunger. And unfortunately, the bill that emerged from the Senate Agricultural Committee allocated just $450 million a year to the cause, not even half of what President Obama recommended.

As the House of Representatives drafts its bill, which is expected to be released later this month, we are urging all New Yorkers to sign the City Council’s online petition urging Congress to support President Obama’s call for $1 billion a year in funding. Although it’s not the $4 billion a year NYC Green Schools and groups that fight child hunger support, $1 billion a year would help cover a much-needed increase in reimbursements for healthier meals. (more…)

When retired military officers are advocating for food reform in our schools, you know there’s a serious problem. Recently a group of retired generals, admirals, and other U.S. Armed Forces called Mission: Readiness released a report, titled “Too Fat to Fight,” that argues that junk food and sugary drinks that are sold in school vending machines are a major reason why the military is having a hard time finding fit recruits.

That’s not surprising, knowing what’s available in vending machines in New York City schools:

• Brown-Sugar Cinnamon Pop-Tarts: 200 calories, calories from Fat 60, 12 grams of sugar, ingredients include polydextrose, dextrose, high-fructose corn syrup, and corn syrup solids.
• Cheerios Cereal Bar Strawberry: 150 calories, calories from fat 30, 10 grams of sugar, ingredients include fructose, corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup, gelatin, Red 40, maltodextrin, natural and artificial flavor. (more…)

In our quest to bring Meatless Mondays to more city cafeterias, we recently interviewed one of the people who’s helping that happen, Chris Elam. Elam is the program director of Meatless Monday, an organization dedicated to getting the word out about the environmental and health effects of reducing meat consumption.

Here’s what Elam had to say about the benefits of going meatless, how schools are making the change, and why it would be a big deal if New York City signed on.

EP & AR: When did Meatless Monday start, and what is its mission? 

CE: Meatless Monday, an initiative of the The Monday Campaigns, launched in 2003 in association with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Our mission is simple: to reduce saturated fat intake worldwide by encouraging people to cut meat one day a week. As a nonprofit public health initiative, we are dedicated to bringing Meatless Monday to homes, schools, campuses, offices and communities at large.

Why meatless? 

A broad range of studies suggests that excessive meat consumption may result in higher risks of the four primary chronic preventable diseases killing Americans today: heart disease, cancer, diabetes and stroke.

Why Monday? 

It’s the start of the week. Research shows that Monday is the very best time for people to start and sustain behavior change.

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Schools, non-profit organizations, and businesses all came out to demonstrate their wares and share their efforts Saturday at the city’s first-ever Green Schools Alliance conference, titled “Visioning the Future.” We were there with our group, NYC Green Schools, and we were impressed by what we learned about initiatives —from vertical gardens to trayless Tuesdays to electronic waste reduction — that are making public and private schools in the city more green.

We were there to promote our Meatless Monday campaign, because, as we wrote last week, animal production for food consumption contributes more to global climate change than all forms of transportation combined.

Here’s a glimpse at what other people are doing to make our schools more sustainable:

SOSnyc.org is responsible for bringing Trayless Tuesdays to all of the city’s public schools earlier this year. Find out how to eliminate Styrofoam trays from your school during the rest of the week.

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When we entered the New York City public school system back in September and first took a look at our schools’ lunch menu, we saw chicken nuggets, sweet and sour pork, hamburger, mozzarella sticks, and pizza. Every meal on the menu was either meat- or cheese-based.

We found this troubling because animal products like meat and cheese are the main source of the saturated fats that raise cholesterol levels and thereby increase the risk of heart disease. We also knew that animal production for food consumption contributes more to global climate change than all forms of transportation combined. With half of children already showing fatty streaks in their arteries, what we saw was a menu that was making our children and planet sick.

Fortunately, our schools — The Children’s Workshop School, The East Village Community School and PS 94, which share a building and a cafeteria — already had a wellness committee, and we joined. The committee brought its concern about the preponderance of meat and cheese dishes to Shawn Chambers, the Department of Education SchoolFood manager responsible for our building, and asked if we could jettison meat from the menu on Mondays. To our delight, he said yes. After we got permission from our principals, our schools in October became the first in New York City to have Meatless Mondays. (more…)

Mayor Bloomberg made the landmark decision to ban trans fats from city restaurants to protect the public’s health. He should take the same bold step of banning corn syrup from foods in our schools that don’t need to be sweetened.

If a student chooses a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich with chocolate milk for lunch (an option that is offered every day in our schools), he’ll essentially be eating corn syrup disguised as a meal. That’s because the wheat bread and buns served in our schools contain high-fructose corn syrup; the second ingredient in the peanut butter is dextrose (another form of corn syrup); the first ingredient in the jelly is corn syrup, not what you might expect, fruit; and the second ingredient in the chocolate milk is high-fructose corn syrup.

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Childhood obesity, which is caused by a sedentary lifestyle and poor daily diet, is a serious health crisis in our country. Forty-three percent of the city’s schoolchildren are overweight or obese. Between 30 and 40 percent of all children born in the United States in 2000 are expected to develop Type 2 diabetes. These statistics call for action.

If the city’s Department of Education genuinely wants to address what some health experts are describing as an epidemic, it needs to act quickly to improve the quality of the food that is offered every day to children in our public schools. The city also needs to make sure our children are getting the physical exercise they need and that New York State Law requires.

As parents on the Wellness Committee at our schools, we have suggestions for how the DOE can combat childhood obesity — without banning homemade baked goods from school fundraisers.

• Remove the vending machines from our middle and high schools. These machines sell highly-processed foods such as Doritos, Frito Lays chips, and Pop-Tarts. Marketing these foods and making them available every day to our children is not only filling our children with empty calories they don’t need, it’s also developing in them a lifetime of bad eating habits. (more…)

The bake-in rally that we organized last Thursday outside City Hall to protest the new chancellor’s regulation banning the sale of home-cooked foods at schools while allowing highly processed foods to be sold instead wasn’t simply a contest between Mommy’s oatmeal raisin cookies and a bag of cool-ranch Doritos. It was about restoring the democratic process and curbing the corporate takeover of our schools.

Officials at the Department of Education consistently fail to engage parents on policy involving their children, and in this instance they have experienced a serious backlash. Parents don’t want the city mandating what to buy and feed their children if they want to raise money for their underfunded schools. Many administrators and teachers aren’t happy about the regulation, but the regulation (included at the end of this post) states that “failure to follow this regulation … may result in adverse impact on the principal’s compliance performance rating.” They’re scared to speak out. Parents, administrators and teachers are being held hostage by a policy they don’t want, and the Department of Education still believes it’s doing the right thing.

We believe we have shown broad opposition to the regulation, with our robust event, coverage by national media, and an online petition with more than 1,500 signatures. But why should it be the responsibility of mothers, juggling careers and families, to demonstrate broad opposition? When opposition is so clear and strong, should it not be the responsibility of DOE officials to hold a public forum where they can hear from parents and students directly? (more…)