School Lunches on Chopping Block
By BARBARA MARTINEZ
The lunch menu may be getting thinner at New York City schools next year.
Schools where students have three hot-meal choices a day will begin offering two, and those where there are two hot choices will cut to one under a budget proposal being considered by the Bloomberg administration. Combined with a plan to cut the number of schools where all the students get free lunches, the proposal is projected to save the city $23.7 million a year.
The idea is leaving a bad taste in some parents' mouths.
"This is a dramatic reversal to all the inroads that parents and food activists have been trying to make with regards to school lunch," said Elizabeth Puccini, a parent of a child at Children's Workshop School in the East Village and founder of NYC Green Schools, a coalition of parents trying to make schools more environmentally friendly, in part by addressing food issues.
The Department of Education serves 870,000 meals a day among more than 1,500 schools and has worked for years to increase healthy choices for students. Among the changes: replacing white bread, whole milk and white-flour pasta with whole wheat bread, skim milk and whole-grain pasta. An extra 90 salad bars were added to the schools this year. Baked fries have replaced french fries, and the department hired a chef to help reformulate menu items with fewer calories and fat.
Ms. Puccini is concerned about the city's plan to cut 276 food-service workers at a time, she said, when many kitchens are already too understaffed to promote healthy-food choices. Ms. Puccini said she has observed a trend where activist parents at low-poverty schools have been able to affect big changes in lunch programs, while high-poverty schools' meals are generally