A McKinley-Brighton Elementary teacher has sent letters to federal officials, including first lady Michelle Obama, in hopes of salvaging the grant.
View full sizeBenjamin Steuerwalt, health and wellness coordinator at McKinley-Brighton School, talk to students Tiasia Kennon, Tre' Davis and Mykal Jenkins as they pick up cantaloupes during morning fruit program at the school.
Syracuse, NY -- It was his job Thursday to go get the produce for his class, so James Moore walked into the McKinley-Brighton Elementary gym with a reusable grocery bag. The 6-year-old stopped short, startled by the things in the boxes.
“Those are cantaloupes. They are orange. And they are very sweet,” health and physical education teacher Benjamin Steuerwalt explained.
So far this year, Moore and his schoolmates have experienced kiwi, cauliflower, peppers, tomatoes, 13 kinds of apples, bananas, strawberries, and lots more fresh fruit and vegetables. Earlier this week, they had blackberries, a first for many.
“They said, ‘Oh my God, they’ve got hair,’” fourth-grade teacher Carol Iwanicki-Arrigo said. And then they gobbled them up.
Every school day, all year long, McKinley students and staff received a serving of fresh fruit or vegetables through a grant obtained by Steuerwalt, 25, the school’s wellness coordinator and physical education teacher. The $35,840 grant came from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, funneled through the state Education Department.
View full sizeKindergartener Rannasai Bailey and teaching assistant Joan Shaw pick up cantaloupes at McKinley-Brighton School during morning fruit program at the school.
Now, the school might lose its grant because the area is not quite poor enough — the student poverty level is 93.67 percent. Under rules for the new grants, schools need 95 percent of the students to be from low-income families.
A spokesman for the state Education Department said the federal government changed the rules. “It is unfortunate that we cannot reach some schools that administered the program in a wonderful manner last year, as did McKinley-Brighton School. They were a model operation,” said Tom Dunn, a spokesman for the education department.
Steuerwalt is writing letters in hopes of salvaging the grant and has applied anyway, just in case. He says he wrote to the state and to U.S. Rep. Dan Maffei, D-DeWitt, and is now typing a letter to the director of the FDA. Next on the list is first lady Michelle Obama, because she’s made a cause of fighting childhood obesity.
The produce has been a hit at McKinley, located on West Newell Avenue on Syracuse’s South Side. Many McKinley students live in neighborhoods that are short on grocery stores that stock fresh fruits and vegetables. Steuerwalt saw the grant as a chance to get students and staff snacking on good food instead of junk.
Steuerwalt said the school’s partner in the project is Wegmans, which comes up with a produce menu for the school each week and delivers the food on Mondays. Teachers or students pick it up each morning and the classes eat it at some point during the day.
Teachers ask the students to try everything, even if they’ve never seen it before, and overwhelmingly, they try it and like it, Steuerwalt said. The students who came in Thursday to pick up the cantaloupe said the same.
Students tried everything, said Mykal Jenkins, 9. “But the only thing they didn’t eat was the peppers,” he said.
Unique Myers, 9, ate the peppers, even though she hadn’t had them before. Janeeka Watson, 9, did the same with kiwi. One student ate an entire pear, including the seeds and core, before the teacher got a chance to explain people don’t normally consume that part of the fruit.
Steuerwalt said he had to do some convincing at first to get all the teachers to buy in. Some said they couldn’t get their own kids to eat fresh produce, much less the kids in their classes. In end, the staff support was great, Steuerwalt said.
Special education teacher Adam Linden even ate the carrots, which he doesn’t like, to be a good role model. He probably didn’t need to go that far. “The kids were munching on carrots asking for more,” Linden said.
Contact Maureen Nolan 470-2185 or mnolan@syracuse.com.