Vermont Business Magazine Shelburne Farms and NOFA-VT are offering a year-long professional learning program through their Vermont FEEDpartnership: the Northeast Farm to School Institute. This important initiative supports selected schools in designing and implementing effective, school-wide Farm to School (FTS) programs— that have proven more important than ever through the COVID-19 pandemic.
“After sixteen months of reimagining learning during the pandemic, some changes are proving to be more than simply a bandaid to ride out a tumultuous year,” explains Betsy Rosenbluth, Vermont FEED Project Director, “Shifts we came to rely on include: utilizing more outdoor learning spaces, increasing access to school meals, investing in a more resilient local food system that withstood pandemic-fueled infrastructure crises, and appreciating the power of community to effect change.”
The programs resulting from the Northeast Farm to School Institute seek to create a culture of wellness, improve food quality and access, engage students in agriculture and nutrition education, and strengthen local food systems. Vermont FEED is excited to announce the ten teams selected for the 2021-22 Northeast Farm to School Institute:
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Bennington Early Childhood Center, Bennington, VT
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Central Elementary, Bellows Falls, VT
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Danville School, Danville, VT
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Eustis RSU Stratton School, Eustis, ME
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Flood Brook School, Londonderry, VT
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Macdongough STEM Academy, Middletown, CT
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Orange County Parent Child Center, Tunbridge, VT
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Peacham School, Peacham, VT
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RSU 19 Somerset Elementary School, Hartland, ME
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West Springfield High School, West Springfield, MA
In its twelfth year, the Institute has supported the programs of well over 100 schools and districts, impacting tens of thousands of students by embedding Farm to School into school communities.
"It feels great to be in the garden. Our garden is beautiful. We need Farm to School because it is important for us to have access to healthy food so we can have a healthy life. The taste tests are awesome and wonderful!" –3rd grade student, Floodbrook School.
According to Maggie Rubick, Teacher, Northshire Day School, Manchester, VT and 2020/21 participant, “Our participation in the Northeast FTS Institute helped us to continue growing our Farm to Early Childhood program at a time when it would’ve been much easier to set aside our FTS work and return to it post-pandemic. We learned that FTS & FTEC programs can function as a protective factor, by connecting young children and families to needed resources, building community, and providing educators valuable resources and support to engage children in safe outdoor learning.”
Here is how Farm to School showed up during the pandemic, and how the movement will continue to nurture children’s health, cultivate viable farms, and build vibrant communities:
Outdoor Classrooms
Onsite gardens have been a mainstay of farm to school programming, and during the pandemic were a safe alternative to indoor learning spaces. At the Parent Child Center of Rutland, staff devoted non-work hours to organize raised bed building days, planting days, and worked to ensure an equitable classroom schedule so all children could gain access to the garden space. Community Impact Director Beth Miller shared: “In early spring of 2020, we excitedly began planning our gardens… All was going well until March when Vermont went into lockdown due to the coronavirus. Our plans for the gardens were dashed, and the hands-on Harvest of the Month curriculum shifted to online learning. But RCPCC was not wholly discouraged! By July 1, with masks and social distance, we built our raised beds. And with attention to social distance, the children planted the seeds and the root-bound plant starts. Nothing could stop the plants from growing and bearing fruit! The children anxiously wait for each vegetable to be ready for picking. Harvest of the Month is back to hands-on learning.”
Strengthening Local Food System
“Our approach has always been systemic local purchasing. Buying local once in a while is nice. But nice is not systemic. And our systemic purchasing was very resilient. It's apples, it's beef, it's corn, it's maple syrup — these are the strategic, big ticket items we buy regularly from local sources,“ Harley Sterling, Food Service Director, Windham Northeast Supervisory Union. “We don't rely on going to the farmstand and getting zucchini when it's in season. We do that, and that's great, but our real impact comes from regularly purchasing items we use all the time, like the frozen local beef we get from the Food Connects food hub. So when national supply chains were breaking down last spring, our local meat purchases continued like normal.”
Power of Community
The High School for Environmental Sciences and 1Freedom in New York created a youth brigade that engaged young people throughout New York City to create mutual aid programs in their immediate neighborhoods. Students from the HSES and other high schools set up “Solidarity Fridges” stocked with free food for the taking in their neighborhoods to address food insecurity and food apartheid. These paid positions are part of 1Freedom’s work to integrate food systems education and activism in a real-world setting. This project was an outcome from the team’s action planning process during their time as 2020-21 Institute participants.
Vermont FEED is a Farm to School partnership project of Shelburne Farms and Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont (NOFA-VT). Their “3C Model” catalyzes change through the Cafeteria, Classroom, and Community to improve knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors toward healthy eating, local purchasing, and our food system. This year’s Northeast Farm to School Institute is being presented in partnership with the New York Farm to School Institute, hosted by American Farmland Trust's initiative Farm to Institution New York State (FINYS). Nine New York teams spanning from Brooklyn to Upstate New York will participate through the 2020-2021 school year. Adapted from Vermont FEED’s Institute model, the New York Farm to School Institute aligns the holistic 3C’s approach with specific needs and interests of New York school communities across the state.
Shelburne Farms is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to cultivate and inspire learning for a sustainable future. That means learning that links knowledge, inquiry, and action to help students build a healthy future for their communities and the planet. Shelburne Farms’ campus is a 1,400-acre working farm and forest.
NOFA-VT (the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont) is an association of farmers, gardeners, and consumers, promoting an economically viable, ecologically sound, and socially just Vermont agricultural system that benefits all living things.
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65.4% of school food authorities reported participating in Farm to School activities in the 2018–2019 school year.
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42.8M students attended school food authorities that participated in Farm to School activities in the 2018–2019
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67,369 schools are featuring local foods on the menu or educating students.
The 2019 Farm to School Census results come from 12,634 responding school food authorities (SFAs) in all 50 states, Guam, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana islands, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, and Washington D.C. The school food authority is the entity responsible for school food service operations and may or may not correspond to a school district.