October’s School Board Meeting highlighted the district’s nutrition program and welcomed a change in leadership: Michelle Valdez, the new director of child nutrition for the La Mesa Spring Valley School District.
The district’s Child Nutrition Services department offers meals to students through a variety of federal programs. All students in the district are eligible to receive free breakfast and lunch. Additionally, those who attend Extended Student Services (ESS), the after school extended care program, receive a snack.
Half the district’s schools receive a complete meal at 3 p.m., or about thirty minutes after school ends.
“If a student goes home to a family that might not have enough food for the whole family,” Valdez said, “we know that that student received that meal on our campus, it was a complete meal.”
The department served more than 104,000 meals in August alone. It is self-funded, and then receives reimbursement through federal programs like Universal Free Meals.
Valdez says that one of her goals as director is to increase the number of students receiving meals at school. Currently, only half of students district wide, including middle school, are served lunch and breakfast at school. They also track numbers to see which meals are more popular than others to help guide retention.
Since the district gets reimbursed federally, there are some requirements that the meals must meet in a day, as well as over time.
“Within a given week, we have to offer the different subgroups of vegetables that are dark green, red, orange, beans, peas and lentils, starchy and ‘other,’” Valdez said, “so we can’t just serve baby carrots all week long.”
Still, the district offers several options each day to give students some choice.
“At lunch, elementary students are offered one hot entrée and about to three cold entrées, whereas our middle school students have a little bit more variety,” Valdez said. “We’re giving anywhere from three-to-four hot entrées as well as two-to-three cold entrées. Across the district, we’re offering a variety of fruits and vegetables on our salad bars, an assortment of 100 percent juice, white milk and fat-free chocolate milk.”
The district employs a chef who is able to provide other school sites with guidance toward being more creative with the items that they receive, known as speed scratch cooking. For example, a school might assembling a seasonal parfait or add jack-o-lantern cheese to a burger for lunch.
The district is also working to follow federal guidelines to reduce sodium by 10 percent and sugar by 15 percent by 2027.