Green Holly School is located on Millstone Landing Road in California. ST. MARY’S TODAY photo

By Kenneth C. Rossignol

ST. MARY’S TODAY

LEONARDTOWN — While Montgomery and other Maryland counties are behind the curve when it comes to serving nutritional lunches, St. Mary’s is well on its way to dishing out healthy meals for the students of the public schools.

While pizza, chicken nuggets, corn dogs and bread sticks are on the school lunch menus, they are made with low fat cheese, whole grain breading and grain fed chicken, says Lisa Brubacher, the Supervisor of Food and Nutrition Services for the public schools.

"What a lot of people don’t realize about the pizza on the menu is that is has low fat cheese," said Brubacher. "We are moving to whole grain products and we are making every effort to bring healthy wheat products to the menus."

"We have converted all of our a la carte items to nutritional items, we have juices which are at least 50% real juice and we still sell cookies, but they are a lot different, they have been changed to low fat and whole grain and we changed the portion sizes," said Brubacher.

The schools offer fresh fruit daily and stopped using the school system fryers two years ago, and in fact, are going to sell the fryers and get them out of the schools completely. They instead have switched to baked foods and are working at getting out all the trans fats.

"We started well before the school system adopted the wellness policy and we started with the vending machines," she said.

Each of the county’s public schools only serves food at breakfast and lunch that is prepared in each of the school’s cafeteria kitchens. A system of using satellite kitchens and shipping food to various schools was ended about 7 years ago.

Vending machines have been changed to have chips which are baked and sodas are not sold in machines in the cafeterias, however the school system’s nutritional director does not have control over soda machines placed in other areas of the secondary schools. These machines are turned off during school hours.

Some sixty to seventy percent of the school system’s students buy lunches and breakfast each day with more than 2 million meals served in St. Mary’s schools last year, which works out to be about 8700 meals each day.

The price of lunch in the elementary schools is $1.90 and $2.05 in secondary schools with an 8 oz. serving of milk going for .35. Breakfast goes for $1.

Students who bring their lunch also can purchase a la carte items as well as milk and juice, or bottled water.

Last year about 34% of the meals were served free or reduced price, amounted to 733,666 such meals.

Staff of the schools pay $3 for lunch and $1.75 for breakfast.

The secondary schools have salad bars which Brubacher says are very popular.

"We operate a wonderful meal program and the wellness program to be a high priority," said Brubacher.

As for using dangerous food products from China, Brubacher said that the public schools are required to use only products made in America in the 27 kitchens of St. Mary’s.

There currently is not a pre-hiring requirement for testing kitchen staffs for hepatitis or tuberculosis, although Brubacher said she feels it is important and they are looking at doing so.

"Any sign of illness and the employee is instructed to not report to work," said Brubacher.

While many Maryland counties are still serving up junk food in the schools, St. Mary’s began to transition to a healthy menu plan several years ago.