Fairfield food services director lobbies for students at nation’s capital

FAIRFIELD – Fairfield Food Services Director Stephanie Hawkins recently traveled to Washington, D.C. to speak to federal lawmakers about school nutrition.

Hawkins is president of the School Nutrition Association of Iowa, and members of the organization joined her on the visit that lasted from March 8-12. While there, Hawkins and her team spoke to Sens. Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst, and Reps. Mariannette Miller-Meeks and Zach Nunn, and staff members of Rep. Ashley Hinson.

“Eight hundred and fifty school food professionals came together in D.C. to talk to our representatives about school meals and to advocate for our students,” Hawkins said. “I was so privileged to be a part of that and grateful for the conversations we had.”

Hawkins said one of the topics her team touched on with the legislators was nutritional guidelines schools must abide by and the challenge they present to food service directors like her.

“It’s so highly regulated,” Hawkins said about school meals. “The new guidelines lower sodium 15 percent, and lowering added sugars so now we can only have 10 percent of calories come from added sugars.”

These requirements affect the taste of the food and how many students want to eat it. Hawkins noted that, before the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, she served school meals to 94 percent of her students. Now, 15 years later, she said she’s fortunate if the percentage who eat school lunch is in the high 60s or low 70s.

“I’ve been doing this for 17 years, and our team strives to provide the students of Fairfield with the best quality food we can,” she said. “I just feel like some flexibility could help us, and that’s something I asked the representatives for when we were in D.C.”

On her trip, Hawkins was joined by four other Iowans plus three people from the food industry who specialize in serving K-12 students. She said nutritional guidelines affect the food industry as well, and that the industry has stopped making 437 items it once offered, partly because of the new nutritional rules.

Hawkins said she joined the School Nutrition Association of Iowa because she wanted to advocate for Fairfield students. She said the experience has been great and that she’s received training and networking opportunities because of it.

Another area Hawkins is worried about is federal funding. The USDA was slated to give Iowa schools $8.3 million through a grant called Local Food for Schools, which school districts can use to buy food from local growers. The Associated Press reported on March 12 that the USDA had ended that program, and another program that provided money to food banks.

“That Local Food for Schools grant allowed us to purchase a lot of produce and protein, and with that funding being cut, it will impact what we can provide to our students,” Hawkins said.

Hawkins said there are programs at the state level that do some of the same things, like Iowa Department of Agriculture’s Choose Iowa program, but the dollar amounts are much smaller. For instance, Choose Iowa’s school pilot program has a budget of $70,000 for the whole state, and allows school districts to apply for $1,000 in matching grants for each school building. Hawkins said it’s a great program, but it’s not going to make up for the $8.3 million lost from the Local Food for Schools.

In the first year of the LFS program, Hawkins got $2,000 for produce and $2,000 for protein, and in the second year got $4,500 for produce and $4,500 for protein.

“There was not as much funding left for this year, so while I did do some local food purchases, I did not do the volume I had done with the grant,” she said. “Without the LFS grant, it’s a minimal amount that goes to local producers.”

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Call Andy Hallman at 641-575-0135 or email him at andy.hallman@southeastiowaunion.com

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