** Someone just mentioned this article to me and I had to share. It talks about how nutritionists are plugging coke as a healthy snack choice!
It’s really too bad that sometimes the words “fight” and “wellness” show up synonymously in dialogue surrounding healthy kids. As purveyors of positive, we as advocates for children’s health are here to plant the seeds of positivity, embrace what’s good and right for our kids, and grow the support base for our cause. This of course assumes that there are no big corporate monsters getting in our way by claiming their stake and offering cash strapped districts money in exchange for branding rights. These corporations end up creating battlefields out of OUR schools.
Up until 2 years ago our district’s monster was Coke. We happily accepted A LOT of money from them and the district viewed it as a real win-win situation. Those funds went towards yearbook costs and prom and were a really useful source of revenue. I’m not sure if any of that money went towards health and wellness for our kids but it would be interesting to find out. Imagine! Coke in all its sugary glory promoting healthy lifestyles! A match made in heaven!
Let Me Rethink That
The thing is that some of us wellness advocates didn’t feel quite right about this relationship. We started questioning the support of this company and their presence in our schools in general. Here we were as a nation that had recently adopted the push towards mandated wellness policies for our schools, and we had started to require districts to make healthy changes to foods being offered in the cafeteria, yet we allowed our kids to grab sugary beverages during the school day.
Our district had an answer to the wellness advocate rumblings. Put the machines on lock down. The machines were only allowed visiting rights with the kids at certain times of the day. The thinking was less access would lead to less consumption of sugary beverages.Well, that still didn’t sit quite right with us. How were we supposed to be teaching our kids about healthy lifestyles when our district didn’t even support it?
The Monster is Slain, or is it?
So, after a very long and arduous battle with administrators (how would we replace that lost revenue?), we prevailed. How did we do it? We didn’t let up. We constantly brought it up in committee nutrition meetings, at board meetings, and in the community. It helped too that Coke really didn’t offer many products that met the new federal guidelines and they realized that the few products they could put in the machines would drastically reduce their revenue. However, around this time I found out that Coke had begun to work on a new product, a healthy fortified milk, and I wondered if this would be their opportunity to reinsert themselves in our schools.
The Solution- Healthy Vending
We as advocates had had enough. We didn’t want to have to revisit the battlefield year after year as big corporations launched more and more “healthy products” that met the federal guidelines. And so the race was on. How do we fill the void of hungry stomachs and the soon to be dried up stream of lost revenue? How do we get those empty Coke machines out of our schools once and for all?
So we started to research. We found that healthy and vending could be synonymous in the form of the offerings from companies such as BuffaloStrive (www.buffalostrive.com), Venducation (www.venducation.com), and H.U.M.A.N.(www.healthyvending.com) These companies had access to all sorts of healthy options that met the federal guidelines! Dried apple chips with no added ingredients, unsalted pistachios, naturally seasoned rice chips, Kind bars, apple sauce squeezes, waters, unsweetened tea and naturally flavored fruit beverages, they offered it all! One company even offered a Farm to School program where fresh items like carrots and apples or hummus and whole-wheat chips could be offered. How cool is that!!
Vending as Education
My first meeting with a district purchasing agent was met with real opposition. It began like this, “I hate vending and I think there is no place for it in our schools”. I kicked the wellness coordinator that had accompanied me to the meeting under the table. I proceeded to look him in the eye and explain what the new face of vending meant to me. It meant filling a void with whole, healthy items that anyone would find acceptable for a kid. It meant an opportunity to replace a dried up revenue stream. It also meant the opportunity to create an educational component where the kids would run the machines like a small business. They would assign school groups (student council, yearbook club, gardening club, etc.) and create the roles of CEO, CFO, book keeper, marketing person, etc. in an effort to learn what it’s like to act as entrepreneurs and run their own business. It took about 10 minutes to win the purchasing agent over and now he serves on our task force to create the RFP to identify the company that will serve our district.
What We’re Doing Now
We currently have a pilot program set up for healthy vending because we were fortunate enough to find a local company that was just starting out in this arena. They agreed to put machines in two district schools to test the waters. We selected schools with different study body make up: One is a criteria based school with a highly engaged student population, the other is a school that struggles with attendance, test scores, and lack of resources.
So far our results have been impressive and have beaten the expectations of many who thought the kids wouldn’t be interested in healthy products in vending machines. At the criteria based school there is a line that forms each day at the machine and items regularly sell out. The company decided to put 3 machines in that school alone to keep up with demand. The other school had a slower start but robust nonetheless. We tweaked their product offerings to give them healthy but more brand identifiable products and this change made a difference.
Under the pilot the company is running the machines but once we launch district wide we will switch to the business model plan. We are considering so many fantastic opportunities as we move forward. One is to partner with private companies and community organizations and get them to sponsor the machines at any given school. The revenue that comes out of partnerships such as these could go towards funding current and future site based wellness initiatives, and also showcase these businesses as leaders in the movement towards whole child, whole school, whole community.
On a quick side note, I asked the purchasing agent how much revenue was generated with Coke in a month. It wasn’t a bad number but at more than double the amount for the same period of time, I think I’d prefer to stick with our healthy vending machines.
I’m guessing, but I’m not certain, that my daughters will have sex at some point in their lives, but two years ago I didn’t believe that. My oldest daughter was in 5th grade when the YRBS or Youth Risk Behavior Survey came out. It’s a national survey that is given out every two years to assess risk behaviors on a number of different “sensitive” topics. It runs the gamut from questions about dental health and nutrition to sexual health, drug use and suicidal tendencies. As a parent you have the option to opt out and the grumblings began immediately when I started asking parents about what they were going to do. I heard a lot of “not my kid” and “great that the schools have taken it upon themselves to introduce our kids to risky behaviors they know nothing about.” One parent even called the District and said the tooth fairy still came to their house not the crack fairy. Many of us had difficulty imagining our ten year olds engaging in drug use, struggling with depression, or having sex. But were we right to opt out? The results of the survey that year showed that many kids were engaging in unprotected sex with multiple partners. In our school district we have over 200 pregnancies each year. Last year we had 2 6th grade girls give birth. The survey also showed that many of our students have high rates of suicidal tendencies and depression and many are experimenting with prescription drugs. I don’t know if my child is one of them because I opted out. Not my kid. But do I really know this? Because of this survey I sat down with my daughter and discussed the sensitive subject matter of the YRBS survey. I told her I had made a mistake in not allowing her to participate but I was happy that it had opened up a dialogue between her and I and that we could talk openly in a safe home environment. And guess what I found? My 10 year old knew a heck of a lot more than I could have ever imagined. She might not have been participating in the behaviors but she certainly knew about them. YRBS has been an important tool for me as a parent because it has forced me to wake up and be aware of the issues and behaviors our kids are faced with. 10 is not too young. There is a reason this survey is administered to kids starting in 5th grade and the results prove it. With the data that we’ve collected in our district we were able to provide dental health care to more than 1500 students who were missing school because of dental health issues. We were also able to bring more guidance counselors into a school that had a high rate of depression and suicidal tendencies. You can read more about it in the article below. Finally, based on the number of students district wide who responded that they are having unprotected sex on a regular basis, we were able surmise that a “condoms in the classroom” program was a necessity. Not as a means of promoting sexual activity rather as a protection and an opportunity to educate. In our district YRBS is going to be offered again in October of 2015. This is exciting news in that we will then have collected “trend data” over the course of a 5 year period. We will be able to see if our efforts are paying off and if we are doing better at giving students the resources they clearly need to inform and educate about risk behaviors. I know that at least one seat that had been empty two years ago will now be filled and I hope other parents nation wide will follow. 
atomiclunches.com 