Send a Letter to Board Of Education Member
[Date]
Dear Board of Education Member:
RE: School Food
My name is _______________________ and I live in the _________________________________ School District. I am writing to you as a concerned citizen about the current condition of school food in the district.
More and more federal, state and local politicians are talking about improving nutrition standards for foods which are served through the National School Lunch Program, sold out of vending machines, à la carte in the cafeteria, and in school stores. However, we cannot wait for the politicians to take action on a matter so fundamental to the health and well-being of our children.
I urge you to make school food reform a priority issue in our school district. Although I am aware that this may require additional financial resources during this difficult time of budget cuts, I feel strongly that our children’s health is of paramount importance. Children learn during the lunch period just as they do during the academic periods of the school day. As the adults in their lives, it is our responsibility to ensure that the messages we send them about what and how to eat are clearly in their best interests. As a result, I respectfully request that you, as a leader in the school community, work to provide our students with healthy, cooked-from-scratch meals in the cafeterias on a daily basis.
As you know, good nutrition is critical to children's health and ability to learn. Nonetheless, the USDA's nutrition standards for foods served within the purview of the National School Lunch Program are dangerously outdated. Under the existing federal standards, highly processed chicken nuggets, tater tots, canned fruit cocktail and chocolate milk may be – and are – regularly served to children as part of the National School Lunch Program. Over the past several decades, over-consumption of calories, saturated fat, trans fat, refined sugars, and sodium have increasingly become problems in children's diets. Those constituents are largely ignored by the USDA's school nutrition standards yet contribute to obesity, heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes, and tooth decay. As a school board member, it is within your power to help create district-wide standards that exceed the nutritional guidelines set by the federal and state governments.
Of course, a primary reason for the service of such poor quality “food” is that the federal government and the State of California seriously underfund school lunch programs. This is unconscionable when the Centers for Disease Control is predicting that one of three children born since the year 2000 may develop Type II Diabetes. I urge you to consider ways in which the school district’s General Funds budget may be able to contribute to the school lunch program to help improve school food. To continue to ignore the link between food and health is to sentence our children to a lifetime of diet-related illness.
I look forward to hearing from you about how you will work to address both the nutritional guideline and funding issues related to school food.
Sincerely,
[Name]
[Street Address]
[City] [State] [Zip]
[Phone]
[Email]