Free Lunch for High School Students
By Kathryn Scharf

"He came here for the food. Inadvertently he graduated. Now he's a diesel mechanic." Streetworker and youth counsellor Jerzy Dymny tells the story of how the promise of a good meal lured one bright, disenchanted kid living in a squat in Kensington Market back to school when nothing else could. Dymny works at Contact School, a Toronto alternative high school whose long-running meal program staff say is a crucial practical support to students, many of whom are single parents, living on their own or on very low incomes.

Every day, breakfast and a hot lunch are served at Contact to approximately 40 of the 190 students. The meals are prepared by students in the "Learning Strategies" class, a kind of hybrid of communications, life skills and home economics in which all Contact students are enrolled.

Meals are extra-hearty on Fridays and Mondays, because experience has taught staff to take account of the fact that, for some students, school meals are the only complete nutritious meals that they get.80% of the students at Contact live below the poverty line, and 35% report that they or their families use food banks.

Each week, on a rotating basis, one of the nine home room classes takes responsibility for a week's worth of meals, from the planning, ordering, cooking and serving of the food right up to the clean-up. "It's really an opportunity for students to develop skills like working under pressure, meeting deadlines, budgeting and nutrition-- or to show other areas in which they have competence," says Wendy Peebles, a Contact youth counsellor.

Peebles remembers one student who was so hyperactive that he had trouble with schoolwork and social interaction. In the kitchen, where he regularly worked as one of the students paid to supervise clean up and maintain lunchroom decorum, he was able to put his high energy and restaurant experience to good use. "No one worked faster than he did."

The Contact program started 25 years ago, at a time when a new generation of educators was dreaming of radicalizing the curriculum, and when the school system was open to new ideas, such as alternative schools to teach kids who didn't fit in anywhere else. A visiting poet noticed that students in the audience were falling asleep, and pointed out that what they needed was food, not poetry.

In the early days, teachers funded the program out of their own pockets. In years since, the program's $12,000 annual budget has been funded by the Toronto Foundation for Student Success, provincial government money streamed through the Canadian Living Foundation and occasional funding from sources like the United Way. Recent cuts to staff have meant a scaling back of the program- youth counsellors no longer go shopping with the students to buy the food-- and funding cuts mean that the school must take $5,000 from its core budget to ensure that the program keeps running. School coordinator, Vivian Meyer, isn't happy about having to take money from other vital areas to support the food program, but says they'll do whatever is necessary to keep the program going.

Though student nutrition programs in elementary schools are a growing phenomenon, with over 300 operating in Toronto today, there are only fifteen programs operating in high schools. Ulla Knowles of the Toronto Community Partners for Student Nutrition, an organization that works to support child nutrition programs, wonders why that is.

"I guess high school kids aren't as cute and helpless as little kids" she says. "Perhaps people feel that teenagers can take care of themselves, or that they won't eat anything but french fries anyway. But the fact is, high school is the time when crazy eating patterns are taking hold, and kids-- rich or poor-- need to have some healthy options available at school." The privately-operated lunchrooms that serve fries and cinnamon buns just don't cut it says Knowles. "They may as well go eat at MacDonalds."

Knowles says that experience shows that programs are well-used by teens when they serve good food, aim for broad participation and do not require students to effectively proclaim that they are poor. She is also impressed by the educational benefits of programs like the one at Contact, pointing out that since the widespread demise of the traditional home economics class, "students haven't got a clue about cooking or nutrition-no wonder we've got an obesity epidemic in our society."

To find out more about starting a student nutrition program, contact the Toronto Communitay Partners for Child Nutrition at csn@foodshare.net

Or for more details on Contact's program, email, Wendy Peebles: wendy.peebles@tel.tdsb.on.ca, or Contact's Website: http://schools.tdsb.on.ca/contact