GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

I have written extensively about improving the food served in our schools, but what if your school doesn’t have a fully equipped kitchen, which is the case for most New York City schools? What do you do then? Below, Helen Martineau, a parent serving on the Wellness Committee at the Neighborhood School in the East Village, describes the steps her school community has taken to improve school lunch, despite not having a stovetop and exhaust system.

Guest post by Helen Martineau

In the cafeteria kitchen of the Neighborhood School and P.S. 63, our Ansul system (a fire suppression system typically found in restaurants and food-service kitchens) broke more than 10 years ago — so long ago that no one who presently works in the cafeteria remembers a time when the kitchen staff was able to actually cook. In the meantime, the remnants of our Ansul system and our exhaust system have become so obsolete that fixing them is a massive job.

The first step in undertaking the huge task of getting a working kitchen is having a feasibility study done. The Department of Education is presently giving priority to problems that pose a danger to students, so they weren’t likely to pay for our study ($35,000!) any time soon. We applied for and received public money from the City Council for the study. Next, we have to try and get our kitchen on the DOE’s Five-Year Capital Plan. Again, updating our cafeteria to a working kitchen is a low-priority project for the city. The project didn’t make it onto the city’s current plan, which goes through 2014, and there’s no guarantee that it will make it onto the next one either, especially with the budget cuts we’re seeing.

We are working on a request to the City Council for money for our new kitchen in an attempt to speed up the process, but even if that funding comes through, we’ll still have to rely on the School Construction Authority to do the work, and they are notorious for working at a glacial pace. So who knows when, if ever, our schools will have a full, working kitchen.

In the meantime, we have explored other options to facilitate cooking in our kitchen. One of the families in our school owns a restaurant (Ciao for Now), and they have an induction burner, which doesn’t require an Ansul or exhaust system. We repeatedly tried to get permission from the DOE’s Office of SchoolFood to purchase one — it costs $2,500, which we planned on financing ourselves somehow — but were denied. (more…)

With Earth Day just over a week away on April 22, I invited environmental writer and PS 166 parent Emily Fano to share ideas for what schools can do to celebrate. While Earth Day falls during New York City’s school recess this year, schools can still make a difference by taking on one or two of the fun green initiatives Fano describes — from helping birds to shredding paper, there are many options.

Guest post by Emily Alix Fano

April 22 will mark the 41st celebration of Earth Day. This year, “in recognition of the power of millions of individual actions,” Earth Day will be organized around “A Billion Acts of Green®.” The campaign is asking individuals, corporations, and governments to measurably reduce carbon emissions and support sustainability. More than 78 million actions have already been pledged around the world.

Schools are the perfect place to initiate Acts of Green; in fact, pledges are being registered on the campaign’s “Green Schools and Education” page. There’s no shortage of ideas for fun activities that kids, parents and teachers can do to celebrate Earth Day in New York City schools and beyond. Many of these can become permanent programs. Here are just a few ideas.

Host a Communal Paper-Shredding Event: For Earth Day 2010, PS 166 in Manhattan partnered with EcoPlum and CodeShred to host a communal paper-shredding event. Families appreciated being able — around tax season — shred and recycle piles of old documents. The school also joined in and unloaded bins full of old papers that had been clogging storage rooms for years. (more…)

Last July I wrote about Dennis Kitchen’s amazing non-profit organization, Getting Tools to City Schools, which provides free school supplies to low-income New York City students by selling recycled, reusable binders to schools.  I thought I’d check in with Dennis to see how sales of his eco-friendly binders were going and to learn more about the free educational component of his work.

Since last year donations to Getting Tools to City Schools have risen threefold due to an increase in corporate grants and in sales of the binders to schools. The response to GTCS’ eco-friendly binders has been so positive that Dennis is considering expanding his line of products to include 100 percent recycled tabbed pocket folder/dividers as well as custom-printed, eco-friendly binder labels of school logos. Although most schools don’t commit to buy binders until the summer, over the last few months Dennis has met with over a dozen public school principals who have verbally committed to buying the binders, which, if all goes according to plan, would result in the sale of about 10,000 binders. With that money Dennis anticipates providing over 3,000 public school students this coming September with free school supplies; last year his organization served 1,000 kids. (more…)

I met James Subudhi, the environmental policy and advocacy coordinator at WE ACT for Environmental Justice in Harlem, last month at the City Council hearing on the Department of Education’s school food policies. I was shocked to learn during James’ testimony that through a simple Google search he had accessed a portion of the Office of SchoolFood’s website not normally available to the public — a directory that contains the ingredients of nearly all the food products served in city schools.

You may be wondering, as James and I did, why the DOE didn’t made this webpage accessible to the general public from SchoolFood’s main site, particularly to the parents and students who are the consumers of school food. Because NYC Green Schools believes strongly that parents and students have a right to know the ingredients of the food served in our city’s schools —  that this transparency is a must to ensure the food in our schools is safe and nutritious — we invited James to write about his discovery.

Information The DOE Is Not Sharing With You About School Food

By James Subudhi

Have you ever wondered what’s in the “wheat” bread of the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches served in New York City public schools, or where the tuna in our schools comes from? As the environmental policy and advocacy coordinator at WE ACT, I began looking for answers to these questions while conducting research on the corporate supply chain for the food purchased by the New York City Department of Education. I couldn’t find anything online beyond the basic nutritional information provided on the DOE’s SchoolFood website. Weeks later, however, while trying to figure out the manufacturing locations of the suppliers of the schools’ hamburger meats, I stumbled on a portion of the SchoolFood site through a simple Google search that, surprisingly enough, provides the ingredients for all their food products.

I thought at the time, “This is weird. How come I’ve never seen this page before?” But the page is not meant to be available to the public. If you try to enter it from the SchoolFood site, you would be prompted for a password and official credentials. (more…)

PS 276, also known as the Battery Park City School, opened in 2009 to alleviate overcrowding in its Lower Manhattan neighborhood and serves children in prekindergarten through eighth grade. It is also the first public school in New York City specifically designed and built to be a green school.

Entering PS 276

The discreet glass solar panels that extend over the entrance of the building, which will soon be collecting solar energy for the school, are the first indication that this public school is in a league of its own when it comes to sustainable education. Immediately confirming this impression is the high-tech video monitor in the lobby, which will receive data from the school’s solar panels and other energy sources to show students how much energy the school is generating and how much it’s consuming. To help students better understand the amount of energy the school is saving, the figure will be illustrated by showing its equivalent in planted trees or removed-from-the-road cars.

Video monitoring energy savings

The school, which was designed by Dattner Architects and built under the New York City School Construction Authority’s Green Schools Guide, is reported to have cost $80 million. Of that, $37 million came from the Battery Park City Authority, which paid for all the “green” details of the school such as the solar panels, sustainable building materials, and low-flow plumbing fixtures. The school’s “roof-mounted photovoltaic cells alone generate 50 kilowatts of energy, roughly one-third of the energy needed to light the school,” according to Dattner Architects’ website. The firm estimates that the school’s high-efficiency boilers, extra insulation, and photovoltaic solar panels will reduce the school’s energy costs by 25 percent.

One reigning feature of green architecture is lots of windows to reduce the need for overhead lighting, and PS 276 has no shortage of those in its classrooms with views overlooking the Hudson River. To further ensure the least amount of overhead light is used, light sensors in each classroom respond to the amount of daylight coming in and automatically dim should the sun suddenly peak out from a patch of clouds. The light sensors also respond to motion: If the sensors detect no motion in the classroom, the lights will automatically turn off. Principal Terri Ruyter admits this can be a problem when students are quietly working at their desks. (more…)

So many parents and activists showed up for a City Council hearing on school food last week that the hearing room overflowed.

The hearing, called by Robert Jackson, chair of the council’s Education Committee, and Darlene Mealy, chair of The Contracts Committee, specifically focused on the policies and contracts of the Department of Education’s Office of SchoolFood. First, council members questioned Deputy Chancellor Kathleen Grimm, SchoolFood director Eric Goldstein, and Executive Chef Jorge Callazo. The bulk of the questions focused on the collection of lunch fees from reduced and full paying students, on the universal free breakfast program, and on the procurement of more local produce for school meals.

This is what I learned:

• Five hundred of the city’s 1,600 schools participate in the universal free meals program, meaning all the students at those schools receive free lunch. For the rest, parents must fill out forms requiring them to reveal their income (it is the only time the DOE asks families to do so) to determine whether they qualify for free or reduced lunch. As the New York Times reported earlier this week, a family of four earning $28,665 or less qualifies for free lunch; for reduced lunch the cutoff is $40,793.Reduced-fee students pay 25 cents a meal and full lunch students pay $1.50 a meal. Schools often don’t collect these small lunch fees. Many parents who qualify for free or reduced school lunch haven’t filled out the forms for a variety of reasons, while other parents simply aren’t paying for the lunch their children are eating. In fact, some schools already owe as much as $30,000 for lunches not paid. At this rate, the DOE stands to lose as much as $8 million by the end of the school year.Chancellor Black is threatening principals that if they don’t collect the money that is owed, the money will be deducted from their schools’ budgets. (more…)

If you take a close look at your school’s lunch menu this month, you’ll see a few entrees marked with a curious little “v,” such as Black Bean Casserole and North African Gumbo.

The “v” stands for “vegetarian,” and these two options are plant-based meals that have been developed by a non-profit organization, the New York Coalition for Healthy School Food, in partnership with the Department of Education’s Office of SchoolFood. Under the leadership of its executive director Amie Hamlin, NYCHSF has been actively working with SchoolFood to introduce more plant-based meals into city school cafeterias. Plant-based entrees contain no cholesterol, are low in saturated fat, and are high in fiber, making them an obvious choice in the city’s efforts to curb childhood obesity and improve overall health.

Founded in 2004, NYCHSF is a statewide organization now working in New York City, the southern region of upstate New York, and Long Island. Amie works out of her home in Ithaca, but she is frequently on the road to oversee projects and give presentations around the state. Currently in 18 city schools, Project Cool School Food is NYCHSF’s largest project. Working with Candle Café and Candle 79 Restaurants, the James Beard Foundation, Manhattan’s Food and Finance High School, and Henry’s Restaurant, NYCHSF develops and tests plant-based entrees that students will enjoy. SchoolFood kitchens develop the recipes before introducing them into the Project Cool School Food pilot program and making them available to other schools as well.

Creating recipes is only one aspect of the Project Cool School Food program. (more…)

Last year we wrote about Debby Lee Cohen, a public school parent and founder of the organization Styrofoam Out of Schools (SOS) who worked tirelessly with the Department of Education to bring Trayless Tuesday to city schools. Because of her, every Tuesday all city schools are served lunch on paper “boats,” thereby eliminating the use of 850,000 Styrofoam trays each week (the amount used each day for lunch) — which if stacked on top of each other would be 2 miles high or 8.5 times the height of the Empire State Building.

One could easily argue that Trayless Tuesday has been the most significant environmental victory for NYC schools. But here’s even better news. Schools can also use the paper boats on Pizza Friday and every morning for breakfast, further cutting down on waste. All principals, parents, and teachers need to do is ask!

I know, given the extraordinary bureaucracy of the New York City public school system, this news may sound too good and simple to be true, but as a parent serving on the wellness committee at my son’s school, I can tell you that all three schools in our building now serve breakfast each day and pizza on Friday on paper boats, in addition to enjoying the paper boats on Trayless Tuesday. Many parents have asked whether the paper boats can be recycled even when stained. And the answer, I’m happy to report, is yes! (more…)

We’re all guilty of it — leaving lights on in a room we’re not using, tossing the plastic water bottle we bought into a non-recyclable-trash bin. No matter how many books, articles, and documentaries are made about the environmental crisis facing our planet, we still frequently fail to do what would be in the best interest of our planet and, consequently, ourselves.

I used to think the problem lay with our behavior, our inability, as Gandhi so elegantly put it, “to be the change we want to see in the world.” But after attending a workshop by the Cloud Institute for Sustainability Education, organized by parent Michele Israel of PS 107 in Brooklyn, I learned that the source of the problem is not our behavior but our thinking, and that’s what the institute is trying to change with children in grades K-12.

Aleidria Lichau, the lead sustainability educator at the Cloud Institute, illustrated how our thinking was at the heart of the problem by making the parents and educators attending the workshop play a form of musical chairs. As the chairs became more scarce, each of us developed strategies to cope. Some shared a chair, others found other places to sit; but none of us thought, as the institute would say, “upstream,” to actually solve the dilemma we were in, for example, not letting the music play in the first place. The institute conducts similar games with students to help them understand how their thinking is driving their behavior and to demonstrate that the significant environmental problems we face cannot be solved with the same level of thinking we’ve used to create them. (more…)

Last week we spent a morning at Validus Preparatory Academy in the Bronx speaking with student leaders at the school about the health crisis that exists among today’s youth and how eating more plant-based foods can decrease their risk for obesity and other chronic diseases.

The visit was part of NYC Green Schools’ official launch of our Meatless Monday campaign, in partnership with the national non-profit Meatless Monday. Our objective is to bring more plant-based foods into city schools to improve our children’s health and the health of our planet.

When preparing our talk, we decided not to downplay the horrifying statistics facing today’s youth. Instead, we decided that the students have a right to know more than anyone the toll our food system was taking on their health. When we told them the staggering prediction that young people today will be the first generation of Americans to live shorter lives than their parents as a direct result of the food they eat, they became extremely attentive. The school’s PTA president, who happens to be a nurse, brought home our statistics when she described her work in an intensive care unit. Five years ago, she said, the vast majority of patients in the ICU were elderly people approaching the end of their lives. In recent years, though, more and more people in their 30s and 40s show up in the ICU with complications from diabetes and hypertension as a direct result of being obese, she said.

The students did not become defensive when hearing the news or when we proposed that they try to reduce their consumption of saturated fat by eating only plant-based meals on Monday. No one asked, “But what about my meat?” On the contrary, they were eager to give healthy, cholesterol-free foods, like vegetarian chili and pasta with tomato sauce and garbanzo beans, a try. They understood what was at stake. (more…)