With school set to resume in B.C. this week, parents making back-to-school lists should still include sandwich containers and lunch boxes — at least for this coming school year.
September is the start of the Education Ministry’s three-year, $214-million program to expand meals in classrooms, billed in February’s budget as the largest spending on school food programs in the province’s history.
But parents shouldn’t expect every school to be serving subsidized sandwiches and sushi when kids return to class. Experts say the time required to hire staff, buy equipment and find the space necessary to prepare more food will be closer to crock-pot speed, rather than Instant Pot.
“It really depends where you are across the province. There’s some districts that are able to hit the ground running and there will be quite a few new food programs launched in September,” said Samantha Gambling, the Victoria-based co-ordinator of the B.C. chapter of the Coalition for Healthy School Food.
“But in other parts of the province they’re still figuring out what is happening on the ground and there will need to be a lot of consultation and organizing before anything new is started up.”
Schools need time to gear up to use this new money if they don’t already have gardens or indoor eating areas or kitchens to prepare food.
“Our schools haven’t been made for food programs. So we really are kind of starting from scratch in a lot of spaces,” Gambling said.
The coalition represents 260 non-profit groups that have lobbied provinces and the federal government for years to develop a universal school food program that would not only feed students but teach them about growing food, healthy eating, and diverse food cultures.
Canada is the only G7 country, and the only member of the 38-nation Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development without a national school food program.
While Gambling applauds the spending by the province, the federal Liberal government is taking much longer to make good on a 2019 promise to launch such a program.
The provincial funding of $71 million a year for three years, divided among the 60 school districts, is not enough to address the needs of every student in every school.
“It’s not enough to have universally free meal programs across B.C., but it is a substantial amount to get this process started. And I believe that the ministry is expecting this funding to support 20 per cent of students within a district,” Gambling said.
With additional support from community groups and some parents “paying what they can,” many districts should be able to feed more than the one-fifth of students, she added.
“It is a significant start and an exciting step toward what we hope to see: a universal school food program for B.C.,” Gambling said.
The universal concept is important, she argued, because giving free food only to low-income students is stigmatizing, and some would be too embarrassed to take it. So, without funding to cover all students, new meal programs may need to be offered in some schools in a district but not all, or on some days of the week but not all, Gambling said.
Smaller communities get more money per student
Last year, about 200,000 B.C. elementary and secondary students received free food through an ad hoc patchwork of food programs in schools, many supported by community groups and some buffered by a one-time $60-million government fund for districts to help needy families.
In an email, the Education Ministry did not answer Postmedia’s query about how many more kids will be fed in 2023-24 as a result of the new funding.
This will be a founding year for the program, the email explained. The first batch of money will give districts the flexibility to ensure hungry students are fed and to reduce costs for families being squeezed by high inflation, but gave no specific timelines.
The ministry said the money will be used to buy food, expand school kitchens and hire staff to co-ordinate the meals, adding that districts have said the biggest barriers to school meal programs was a lack of consistent funding and dedicated staff.
How the new or expanded programs will operate — serving breakfast or lunch, cooking in the school or bringing in catered food — will be up to individual schools or districts. Each district has been allotted a portion of this year’s $71 million based on enrolment, student demographics including special needs and Indigenous children, and whether schools are rural or geographically spread out.
Surrey, B.C.’s largest district by enrolment, will get the most annual funding at $8.7 million, while Vancouver, the second-biggest district, will receive the next-highest pot at $5.6 million. One-third of districts will receive less than $500,000 annually, all of them outside the province’s cities.
However, those smaller communities are getting much more money per student to develop new meal programs, an analysis by Postmedia data journalist Nathan Griffiths has found. The annual funding-per-student in the tiny Stikine District in northern B.C. is nearly $3,000, and for the Central Coast district in the Bella Coola Valley, it’s $2,300.
In Metro Vancouver and Greater Victoria — where schools are closer together and can share cooking resources, where there are more community support programs, and where parents typically earn higher salaries — the annual funding is about $125 or less for each student. West Vancouver, one of the wealthiest cities in B.C., receives the lowest amount for each student at $110.
Yet the need is expanding rapidly in many neighbourhoods due to the ever-growing costs of groceries, gas, mortgages and rent.
“There’s so many more people that are ‘working poverty’ now. The cost of living has gone up so much that we can’t afford to live anywhere, really, unless you have a really good job,” said Leona Brown, a single mother of three children in Vancouver.
Her daughter Jessica, 13, and son Jackson, 10, attend school in Vancouver’s Mount Pleasant, where they receive breakfast and lunch daily, plus non-perishable food is sent home on some weekends. While she appreciates this support, Brown argues these types of programs could be improved and expanded.
Brown was the Indigenous co-ordinator for a report — called A Universal School Food System for B.C. — that found low-income parents believe a universal program could eliminate shame for poor children, and be a huge time and money saver for all families. The report was released last year by the Centre for Family Equity, formerly known as the Single Mothers’ Alliance.
Brown receives disability benefits from the government and supplements her tiny income with honorariums from organizations that pay her for work on these types of reports. In May, she had to turn down jobs while two of her children were ill, which left her without enough money to feed her family.
“The cost of living is so extreme that even though I’m in social housing, I had to choose between rent or buy more food for them. And I chose to buy more food and I ended up with an eviction notice,” Brown said.
She was able to borrow money to cover her rent arrears, but says it is an example of the precarious state of low-income families’ finances, and how they could benefit from a better social safety net that includes sustained and nutritional food offered through schools.
Brown would like schools to use part of the new money to teach students how to garden, including growing Indigenous food and medicines. “Putting it in as part of the curriculum breaks down barriers of racism and hate and bullying, from kindergarten through high school, and it just teaches kids to learn from each other,” she added.
Within the Vancouver school district, two-thirds of schools have free-meal programs providing breakfast to 700 students and lunch to 3,100 students, and it could not tell Postmedia this week by how much those numbers may grow this year.
Of the $5.6 million in annual funding the Vancouver district will receive from the provincial program, nearly $3 million will be used this year to replace other sources of income for school meal programs, so that freed-up money can be diverted to other areas of need, according to a school board report.
The rest of the cash is to be used for new spending that includes $1 million to add a third oven at Britannia Secondary, and paying for increased food prices and staff time, which will result in providing meals for 800 more students at various schools starting this September.
A district report on the recommendations says taking care of students’ basic nutritional needs will let them participate more in class, and also provides an opportunity to address systemic racism against Black and Indigenous students, people of colour and newcomers to the country.
In its email, the ministry said stable funding for three years will allow districts to enter into long-term agreements with food service management companies, not-for-profit organizations, local catering companies, and food suppliers.
More families asking for help
Fatima Da Silva co-founded a non-profit in the Cowichan Valley that is heralded as one of the best examples in B.C. of how community partnerships can help school boards get meals to students. Nourish Cowichan began serving breakfast in 2017, and has now expanded to 20 schools and offers lunches and snacks, as well as sending food home with some children on weekends.
And demand just keeps growing. Nourish Cowichan was feeding 950 students two years ago, 1,300 last year, and in 2023-24 is planning meals for 1,500, which is one fifth of the student population in the Cowichan Valley school district.
“We’re seeing more families … asking for extra help,” said Da Silva, Nourish Cowichan’s executive director. “Last year was when things were getting a little bit scary because of the number of children we’re taking into the program and trying to figure out what do we do.”
The organization has about 50 volunteers who work a combined 50 hours a week to cook the meals, receives food donated from farmers and money from local organizations, and has built a commercial kitchen in space provided by the school district.
It received some financial aid last year from the government’s $60-million pilot project. It anticipates it will spend more than $1 million this school year feeding students, and estimates about 60 per cent of that will be covered by the new provincial fund.
“I can’t even tell you how much that lifts off of our shoulders,” Da Silva said. “That’s funding that’s going to be there for three consecutive years and allows us to plan better for the future without having to be so stressed.”
Why has feeding the kids in her neighbourhood become such a passion for Da Silva, a former restaurant owner with no children of her own? Because she was born in Mozambique in East Africa, where there was a strong sense that the community looked after all children, especially during difficult times.
“I grew up in a war zone. And I never went without a meal, even in the school. So it never made sense to me that we couldn’t care for our children” in Canada, she said.
“This is good for all kids”
The Education Ministry offers resources online to help schools plan how to “build a school food program,” and highlights some success stories in nine school districts across B.C.
One of those districts is Vancouver, where teacher Brent Mansfield has taught edible education for five years at Lord Roberts elementary, which now has 28 garden beds. Every student in the West End school learns how to plant and care for a big garden, and how to cook with those vegetables, fruit and herbs.
He also runs the school’s LunchLAB program, with help from charities Growing Chefs and Fresh Roots, several professional chefs who volunteer their time, and donations from philanthropists. About 80 Grade 6 and 7 volunteers cook meals every Tuesday and Thursday for about 200 students in the school, while the Grade 5s are on the “cleaning team.”
The culturally diverse meals cost $5 a student or they are asked to pay what they can. Students who come from families identified by the district as low-income get their meals free.
“The real goal is that it is accessible to anyone, but also it’s something that everyone contributes to,” he said, “and actually makes lunch about learning about food and health, learning about self and community.”
Mansfield, who is a member of the Coalition for Healthy School Food, is considering how to expand LunchLAB to more than two days a week. He also hopes the Feeding Futures funding will allow other schools to develop programs similar to his, and has recently had teams from two schools visit Lord Roberts to learn about how it works.
“How do we increase the amount of food literacy education that’s happening, not just for certain students but all students? I’m hoping we can ride some of this momentum to see some of those things improved in B.C. and Canada,” he said.
“Ultimately this is not just for hungry kids. This is good for all kids.”
