Each month, our staff reads hundreds of media reports on the subject of school nutrition. We curate our favorites in a monthly blog post we call, “In the News.” Highlighting positive stories about the great things going on in school cafeterias helps us in many ways: providing inspiration, connecting school nutrition professionals from across the country, and promoting those programs and individuals who are taking the extra step to make their school nutrition program the very best it can be.
It’s hard to believe that Thanksgiving is just around the corner, but here we are—it’s November, y’all! We love taking this time each month to review and reflect on the great things happening in breakfast-in-the-classroom all over the country. October 2015 was a super busy month, so let’s get started and take a look at some of the best school breakfast stories that came across our desks.
One of the most popular stories we ran across in October was this recent piece on breakfast-in-the-classroom in Lynchburg, Virginia. When we shared this on the School Nutrition Foundation Facebook page, our audience went wild! With twenty four shares (so far) and almost 3000 views, this was one of our most popular posts ever! And it’s not hard to see why: not only did BIC help boost breakfast participation in Lynchburg by forty three percent but behavior referrals are down thirty two percent in the first month after the program was implemented! We challenge even the biggest breakfast-in-the-classroom skeptic to argue with numbers like those.
Right here at Beyond Breakfast we had the opportunity to shine a spotlight on one of our Partners for Breakfast in the Classroom schools. In Franklin City Schools in Virginia, Lawrence Whiting is sharing the lessons he learned during the planning and implementation process. One of our favorite excerpts is below, where Whiting describes how he overcame the learning curve when he took over the district’s nutrition services department.
“One of the managers had twenty years of experience, and the other two had over thirty of experience here in the district,” said Whiting. “I came in and said, ‘Listen–y’all are going to have to teach me what I need to know, and we’re going to have to work together’ and I don’t know if they felt sorry for me or what, but they took me under their wing and taught me everything I needed to know from their perspective.”
October was also chock-full of school breakfast and breakfast-in-the-classroom webinars! We love having the opportunity to connect with experts who can teach us something new about making breakfast-in-the-classroom a smashing success. If you missed out on these October webinars, you may be able to access the archives online:
- On Wednesday, October 14, the School Nutrition Association hosted the webinar “Operating a Breakfast in the Classroom Program: Everything You Want to Know About Implementation”; SNA members can access the archived version of this webinar online.
- FRAC presented “School Board Champions for School Breakfast Expansion” on Thursday, October 8—you can find the archive for that webinar, and all of FRAC’s Breakfast Matters webinars—on the FRAC website.
Finally—and time is getting short!—we are sending out a call for applications for breakfast-in-the-classroom grants in our eligible states:
There is still time to apply for a Partners for Breakfast in the Classroom grant! If you live in one of our eligible states—Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Pennsylvania, and Virginia—visit the Partners for BIC website or NEA Healthy Futures to learn more!
Do you have a great breakfast-in-the-classroom story to share? Email our blogger Christina at c.e.uticone@gmail.com to be featured at Beyond Breakfast!