Healthy school lunches aren’t cheap

November 18, 11:42 AMColorado Education ExaminerTodd Engdahl

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Increasing attention is being paid to the nutritional quality of school lunches and snacks, as more and more parents and educators worry about childhood obesity and diabetes.

The State Board of Education is preparing to issue new regulations that essentially will ban most soda from school vending machines.

Some board members aren’t too happy with the idea, although a law passed last spring gives them little flexibility. Those board members think nutritional decisions should be left to individual schools districts. (Research on the impact of soda bans also is mixed.)

Many districts already have purged vending machines of unhealthy snacks, and now the Boulder Valley School District is taking a hard look at what’s sold in lunchrooms.

A consultant recently finished studying Boulder’s lunch programs, and the report was fairly critical. “Middle and high school food programs are dominated by a la carte offerings that resemble mini-marts more than high school cafeterias,” was one of the study’s conclusions. (Slim Jims anyone?)

Consultant Ann Cooper also runs lunch programs for the Berkeley, Calif., schools, and that district’s experience also provides another hard-to-swallow lesson about improving school nutrition – Berkeley had to spend $2 million to improve its meal programs. That's a big investment in a time of tight budgets.

Want to know what’s on the menu in Berkeley? Check out their nutrition services page (menus are toward the bottom).