MAHA-KY task force hears about school meals, farm-to-school challenges and physical education
By Melissa Patrick
Kentucky Health News
The Make America Healthy Again Kentucky Task Force met for the fourth time on Wednesday, Sept. 16, continuing with its focus on nutrition.
“For this period of time, from June to December, we’re going to make nutrition our number one priority,” Co-chair Sen. Shelley Funke Frommeyer, R-Alexandria, said after the meeting, recognizing that there are many other factors that also impact the health of Kentucky’s children.
The task force heard from experts from the Kentucky Department of Education who are involved with the school nutrition program and the Kentucky Department of Agriculture and its role in providing local products to schools, along with the challenges to do so, such as limited availability, higher cost, procurement and distribution barriers.
Funke Frommeyer told Kentucky Health News that one of her key takeaways from the meeting was the challenges schools face when it comes to getting local food in their cafeterias, pointing to the 17 inches of printed federal expectations that were shown at the meeting and the nine federal guidelines that schools must address before any purchases can be made.
“Those aren’t even state guidelines,” she said.
Asked how Kentucky can increase farm-to-school programs when the Trump administration is making such huge cuts to the programs that support this initiative, she said: “I recognize that we may need to do more with one dollar. We may need to find a way, and what I’m identifying is siloed activities. And perhaps it’s not great to silo those,” adding that Kentucky could combine the efforts of agencies that are working toward the same effort and provide them “shoulder to shoulder, hand to hand, because these are all federal and state dollars that are being divided up, but when you chop them up in that many silos, then we might be diluting their effort, their result. So, we will need to do more with that same dollar.”
In April, more than $1 billion in funding was cut from the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement program. In Kentucky, that amounted to $11 million in cuts. Also, $2.3 million has been cut from the Local Foods for Schools Program.
Funke Frommeyer also suggested that a community approach is needed, one that involves students actively engaged in the preparation of fresh food at school while learning about their nutritional value. Or, having community members engaged in growing food for individual schools.
The task force also learned about school physical activity programs from Jamie Sparks, executive director of Kentucky SHAPE, who said in a letter to the task force that “Kentucky lacks consistent statewide requirements for physical education and recess, resulting in wide variability across schools.” These activity requirements are determined locally, through a school’s wellness policy.
“If we leave it up to wellness policies, we’re going to be in the same place we’ve been for 20 years; that bar has not moved,” Sparks said. “There have to be legislative requirements,” along with funding to support it.
He later added, “The thing with health and PE that is really cool… when you improve health and PE, guess what else happens? Academic achievement increases, attendance increases, behavior decreases, everybody wins.”
Funke Frommeyer said a discussion with HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s team, which leads the federal MAHA initiative, revealed that they are “very interested in having the kids have activity requirements” and the need to amplify successful K-12 school nutrition education curricula.
Funke Frommeyer said the task force will wrap up in December and, at that time, will determine what items they will take action on.
“I think you may see each of the members of the task force file a bill or two, and there could be a fiscal impact,” she said.
One of those will come from Rep. Steve Doan, R-Erlanger, who told the task force that he plans to file a bill when the General Assembly convenes in January that would eliminate ultra-processed foods from school cafeterias. He said the bill will be similar to a bill he filed during the last legislative session, which was assigned to a committee but not heard.
The bill would ban 11 chemical additives from being served in Kentucky school cafeterias, vending machines, school stores and canteens.
“I think it’s certainly something that we can do better, to make sure that we’re getting more of that fresh and locally grown food in there,” he said.
Funke Frommeyer noted that the federal government is working to create a uniform definition of ultra-processed foods to allow for consistency in research and policy.
The federal MAHA strategy report was released Sept. 9. Critics of the report say that while it raises important issues, it misses the mark for real change when it comes to ultra-processed foods.
For example, The Hill reports that Priya Fielding-Singh, director of policy and programs at the George Washington University Global Food Institute, said, “While the commission’s first report directly called out sugar and ultra-processed foods, this one mentions each only once. For ultra-processed foods, the most it offers is that government agencies will ‘continue to try’ to define them, which isn’t the serious step many of us were hoping for to keep them out of schools or children’s diets.”