From access to action: Public schools revive home ec class with new goals

By JoVona Taylor

Mia Berrios, 30, grew up in the tight-knit Bedford Stuyvesant community in Brooklyn. She attended P.S. 81 Thaddeus Stevens Elementary School, the school that her son, who is in third grade, and daughter, who is in kindergarten, now attend. The major difference between then and now: The student curriculum includes nutrition lessons through the Food Bank For New York City’s CookShop program.

“We try to eat healthy, but sometimes a lot of it’s fried food or something fast, but now we’re engaging different kinds of vegetables and ways to make food faster and healthier,” said Berrios, who attends a monthly Thursday morning workshop where she learns recipes based on what her children are being taught.

P.S. 81 is at the corner of Dekalb Street and Stuyvesant Avenue, across the street from the NYCHA Eleanor Roosevelt Houses. Students there now learn about nutrition and participate in cooking demonstrations, during class time, for up to 18 weeks.

Bedford Stuyvesant has the highest percent of families living on a budget of $15,000 to $24,999, and 35.3 percent of its residents receive benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, according to census data for Stuyvesant Heights. The neighborhood of 64,752 residents had a meal gap of more than 4.5 million meals for 2015 as part of assembly district 56, according to Food Bank For New York City’s official measure of the meals missed in households with food insecurity.

Zac Hall, the associate director of school- and community-based initiatives for Food Bank For New York City, said the major goal of the 22-year-old initiative is to provide children and parents in low-income communities with the resources they need to make healthy food choices.

“A common conception is that eating healthy costs a lot; I don’t have enough to go to the Whole Foods or the organics section,” he said. “It just takes a little bit of planning around budgets, and building out what folks still have the opportunities to purchase that’s still healthy. It’s quality and quantity. It’s both sides of the hunger issue.”

Hall, who has been apart of CookShop for eight years in various roles, from working directly with schools as a liaison to now overseeing the operation, added that another target group is families who are eligible for SNAP. CookShop chooses recipes that make sense on a SNAP budget.

Since the program began in 1994, it has expanded from a partnership with the Columbia Teachers College and two schools in Harlem to more than 200 sites citywide, but budget limitations have kept CookShop from growing further. Currently the program is in only 15 percent of the 80 percent of schools.  Still, Hall said that CookShop is one of the largest school-based programs for nutrition education in the city, alongside other programs through GrowNYC’S Greenmarket and Cornell Cooperative Extension.  The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene also has curriculum programs like Eat Well Play Hard, aimed at pre-K through first grade nutrition education.

In order to administer the lessons, P.S. 81 teachers and staff have to train every fall, along with 800 to 1,000 others, in a two-day training conference at United Federation of Teachers in Manhattan.

Judith Daniels, the parent program coordinator, was initially the instructor for the parent classes, but when she went on medical leave almost two years ago, school guidance counselor Timisha Harvell took on the extra responsibility, along with her work as a student counselor. She said the cooking workshops for parents can be as large as 20 participants, but are usually comprised of a group of seven very involved moms.

“We really have to look into how [students] are being fed and how they’re eating,” she said. “Yes, you might change the menu in the school cafeteria, but what about when they get home?”

Student demographics at P.S. 81  are black and Hispanic, or both — like Berrios, who is black and Puerto Rican — according to the school’s 2014-15 quality snapshot for the New York City Department of Education. The report also showed high levels for rigorous instruction, collaborative students, supportive environment, effective school leadership, strong family-community ties and trust at the school.

Berrios believes that the CookShop program has had an impact on the school community; she has tried some CookShop recipes at home and started to include new vegetables, like various types of squash, in the dishes she makes.  Still, she would like to see recipes that cater to the diverse backgrounds of school parents.

Hall said that the extensive recipe options were made by trained chefs and nutritionists with healthiness, ease and low cost as major considerations. He realizes that every person will not like every option — he admits that not all of the recipes are his favorites —  but that the options should simply be a starting point, an inspiration for healthier meals.

Hall noted that the parent classes are designed with a concluding discussion portion, so that parents can critique recipes and talk about how to improve them and make them their own. Also, the discussion portion poses questions that allow families to share their knowledge.

“You may have a parent who has a limited income, but they’re really savvy about how they spend that money,” he said. “So, letting that parent share their experience with other parents is really important.”

The program is centered around not only the question of who has access and who doesn’t, but on medical issues connected to diet, Hall said.

“We’ve seen over time, in the health world, that diet-related disease is paired with income, or lack of income.” he said. “And oftentimes, those are communities of color around the city. We want to make sure the community is not left out in the cold, and so, find some opportunity to build back the health in terms of nutrition within those communities.”

JoVona Taylor