The program helps school districts serve fresher, healthier, made-from-scratch meals.

BOULDER, COLORADO / ACCESSWIRE / December 17, 2024 / The Chef Ann Foundation announced today it has selected six K-12 school districts in five states to participate in the sixth cohort of its flagship program, Get Schools Cooking. Over the next three years, the Chef Ann Foundation will offer comprehensive support to help the districts make changes that enable them to transition from serving students ultra-processed, pre-packaged meals to serving fresher, healthier, and more appetizing meals cooked from scratch.

Selected districts include Yuma Union High School District, AZ; Durham Public Schools, NC; Fairfield City Schools, AL; Cleveland Metropolitan School District, OH; Santa Fe Public School District, NM; Elida Municipal Schools, NM. Collectively, more than 96,600 students enrolled in these districts will have access to healthier meals as a result of their district participating in the Get Schools Cooking program.

"Many of the meals we offer our children are the only real meal they have for the day. They deserve the best, and we here at Cleveland Hill are striving for that," said Bob Gorman, Executive Director of Nutrition Services at Cleveland Metropolitan School District. "The Chef Ann Foundation focuses on giving our kids excellence. Our goals are mirrored together, and we cannot fail. The desire to bring out the best for our kids inspires me the most."

Planning, preparing, and serving meals to hundreds or thousands of students each day is a massive undertaking. Schools must adhere to complex USDA nutritional requirements, strict food safety standards, and extremely tight budgets. On top of this, school food teams are often understaffed, possess limited production-scale culinary skills, and must operate their school food programs in outdated facilities with inadequate equipment. These systemic challenges have caused most districts nationwide to rely on serving students convenient, processed, heat-and-serve meals, known to have detrimental health effects.

Since its launch in 2016, the Get Schools Cooking program has helped 27 districts in 21 states serve more scratch-cooked school meals to approximately 180,000 students. Across the first four cohorts, the Chef Ann Foundation provided over 1,100 recommendations to districts within the five key areas of systems change related to scratch cooking (food, finance, facilities, human resources, and marketing,) resulting in an 81% completion rate. The program has proved that, with sufficient training, guidance, and funding, schools can overcome the obstacles they face, showcasing what is possible for other school food programs nationwide.

"We're so excited to kick off the sixth cohort of Get Schools Cooking and work closely with these districts over the next three years to transform their meal programs," said Lori Nelson, Executive Director of School Food Operations at the Chef Ann Foundation. "Not only will we provide healthier school meals to over 96,600 students, but we'll also be driving long-term sustainable change in school food systems nationwide."

Get Schools Cooking is made possible by the generous support of Whole Kids, a program of Whole Foods Markets Foundation; The Rachael Ray Foundation; Waverley Street Foundation; and other donors.

Contact Information

Jessica Christopher
Public Relations Supervisor
jessica.christopher@curatorpr.com
(610) 945-8615

SOURCE: Chef Ann Foundation