Students at Stephen Decatur High School in Berlin, Maryland, were excited to see Chinese food and a wide array of choices in the lunch line last week, as the food service in Worcester County Public Schools redesigned the lunch menu, The Dispatch in Ocean City reports.
“The biggest thing the kids are really excited about today,” the paper quoted Odtis Collins, coordinator of food services for Worcester County Public Schools, as saying, “is having ‘Lunch My Way.’ Students can actually go in and put together their own meal.”
The plan, according to Mr Collins, is to feature a different my way choice each week: “This week is an Asian theme. Next week we will be doing a Mexican theme. We will also do breakfast themes, American themes and other types of cuisines,” he said.
There’s even an informal contest, run by the school’s principal, to name the new grab’n’go café. Suggestions are welcome.
This, as H.R. 610 stalls in the US House of Representatives. This resolution, which would have decimated healthy school lunches for students, is co-sponsored by Rep Andy Harris, a Republican from Maryland’s first Congressional district, which includes Berlin and the region around Decatur High School.
The rule prescribed by the Food and Nutrition Service of the Department of Agriculture relating to nutrition standards in the national school lunch and school breakfast programs published on January 26, 2012 (77 Fed. Reg. 4088 et seq.), and revising parts 210 and 220 of title 7, Code of Federal Regulations, shall have no force or effect.
The resolution was introduced on January 23 in the House by Rep Steve King, Republican of Iowa, and appears to be going nowhere in this Republican-controlled Congress. Schoolchildren are likely to be happy about it, too, since if passed and signed by President Donald Trump, this legislation would have completely repealed the No Hungry Kids Act, which Congress passed in an effort to guarantee kids had a healthy breakfast and lunch in school.
The stalling means either (a) it’s a bad bill, (b) Congress is ineffective, or (c) both (a) and (b).
The bill would have done other things as well, vis-à-vis school choice, but anyway, it appears to be at a dead end.
