BVSD parents advocate for longer elementary lunches

Dec. 31—Tiffany Gengelbach, who has two elementary children and a third in preschool, has watched them bring home most of the food she packed in their lunches and listened to complaints about hunger after school.

So she visited them at lunch, timing them to see how long they had to eat. In the 20 minutes allotted for lunch, she said, they only ended up with eight to 13 minutes of seated eating time. She also saw classmates throwing away food or skipping eating altogether to get to recess faster.

"Hungry children can't learn," she said.

Gengelbach in August started a Facebook group for parents who share her concern that the the 20-minute lunch at most Boulder Valley elementary schools isn't long enough. With the Facebook group up to 200 members and a change.org petition with more than 1,000 signatures, she spoke at a recent school board meeting to advocate for longer lunches.

"We want to do something to change this," she said.

The shortness of elementary lunches is a perennial complaint. While Boulder Valley has made changes to elementary schedules in recent years — first equalizing elementary art, music and physical education time and then standardizing the elementary school day — lunch times remain largely unchanged.

Robbyn Fernandez, Boulder Valley assistant superintendent of school leadership, said extending lunch times is a more complicated request than it might appear and largely comes down to cafeteria size.

"There's a direct correlation between the size of a cafeteria in a school and the amount of time they have for lunch," she said. "You can only can fit a certain number of students."

She said giving students extra time to eat could push school lunch times too late in the day. Some schools already start lunches before 11 a.m. and continue as late as 1 p.m. to get all their students through lunch, she said.

"It's a balance," she said. "The vast majority of kids are able to eat in the allotted time now."

To help to keep the lunch lines moving in the fall, she added, cafeteria staff members paid extra attention to supporting students as they learned or remembered lunch numbers. Some schools also brought in parent volunteers to help.

"It's more of a challenge at the beginning of the year," she said. "Our school staff try to help kids get their food quickly and eat in a relaxed way."

The Centers for Disease Control recommends 20 minutes of seated lunchtime for elementary students. Schools need a total lunchtime of about 30 minutes to give students enough time to walk to the cafeteria, get through the lunch line, clear their tables and still have 20 minutes to eat and socialize, advocates say. Boulder Valley also offers salad bars, which can take extra time.

Gengelbach noted the district worked hard to create a lunch program with healthy, scratch cooked food, but then doesn't give students enough time to eat it. She said research also shows that children often eat fruits and vegetables last and so are more likely to throw them away when rushed.

Some parents told Gengelbach they only send packed lunches, avoiding hot lunch because it takes too long for their children to get through the lines. For low-income students who depend on school lunches, advocates say, giving students enough time to eat is especially important because that may be their main source of nutrition.

Jane Reagan, a dietician and parent who has volunteered in Boulder Valley schools, spoke at December's school board meeting to share her concerns about the 20-minute lunches.

"It's not only the food that matters, but the time that matters," she said.

Gengelbach said the barriers raised by school — cafeteria space issues and a desire to protect limited instructional time — aren't insurmountable, pointing to other school districts that provide 30 minute lunches within a similar seven-hour elementary school day. She said her research shows about half the schools in the country provide at least 30 minutes.

One of her suggestions is to stagger start times so the lunch lines don't get so long, with each grade starting lunch every 15 minutes. And if schools aren't willing to give up an extra 10 minutes of instructional time, she said, they can tack 10 minutes to the end of the day, releasing students at 3 p.m. instead of 2:50 p.m.

While students may adapt to short lunches by learning to eat fast, that's not teaching them healthy eating habits, she said.

"Kids are being trained to wolf their food down as quickly as possible so that they can't learn to listen to their bodies," she said.