by Dennis Dalman
editor@thenewsleaders.com
Once again, the lunch programs in Sartell schools were under intensive scrutiny and review this past school year by food director Brenda Braulich and her staff.
A report by Braulich was presented at the last school-board meeting.
The scrutiny came in the form of painstaking attention to nutritional content, special-diet needs, as well as a constant striving to make a greater variety of foods offered as tasty as possible.
Constant innovation, fine-tuning and updating are the hallmarks of the Sartell-St. Stephen District’s food program.
Among the emphases this past year are these:
- Enhanced communication from food service to parents, students and staff about federal nutritional requirements in meals and special-diet accommodations.
- Expanded training hour for food-service staff.
- Breakfast and lunch menus reviewed and updated to make them new and tastier.
- More involvement of students in taste-testing of new menu offerings.
- New a la carte offerings.
Braulich shared statistics about the lunch program during the past year:
- 17.5 percent of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunches.
- 318 kindergarten students eat a free breakfast daily.
- District-wide, only 8 percent of students eat breakfasts at schools.
- The following number of meals are served daily: 1,110 meals in grades K-4; 861 regular lunches in grades 5-12; 623 “Sabre” meals (meals at extra cost).
- 68.3 percent of all students participate in the schools’ lunch programs. The others, presumably, bring their own lunches from home.
Braulich shared with the board several sample menus. One of them that adds up to 716 calories is a menu that offers ham-and-cheese sandwich, garlic bread stick, fresh melon, peach cup, low-fat milk, garden veggie bar, yogurt, peanut-butter-jelly sandwich and sour cream. Of the 716 calories for that menu, the total calories from fat are 32.4 percent, and there are 1,342 milligrams of sodium.
The following nutritional elements are constantly monitored in lunches, with the goal of reducing the less desirable ones such as fat, sugar and sodium: calories, cholesterol, sodium, fiber, iron, calcium, vitamins A and C, total fat, protein, carbohydrates and sugar.
