Delaware’s Healthy Foods for Healthy Kids (HFHK) celebrates School Lunch Hero Day after being awarded a USDA grant to expand programming.
Congresswoman Lisa Blunt Rochester and U.S. Deputy Secretary of Agriculture Xochitl Torres Small visited Lewes Elementary School Friday to see the success of Delaware’s HFHK program.
HFHK is a Delaware non-profit that is currently partnered with 30% — around 52 — of the state’s public elementary schools to help implement an Education Cultivation Program.
The initiative helps schools build their own gardens in which students are the hands-on cultivators, providing school nutrition services with vegetables they can use in student meals.
Each grade level has their own designated part in the process, with kindergartners and first graders planting the seeds all the way up to the fourth and fifth graders, who harvest the produce.
“In most of our schools, we partner with nutrition services that then the students take the vegetables to nutrition services that prepares them for the entire student body to enjoy in the cafeteria the next day," says HFHK Executive Director Lydia Sarson.
She explains the program aims to bridge the gap between what students are learning in science classes and where they believe their food comes from.
"Every student has a special job that fits with Next Generation Science Standards. The garden program is broken up that way — more hands make a little bit lighter work too because there's a lot that goes into a garden," Sarson adds.
Nutrition service specialists say preparing the harvested vegetables can lead to extra work and late nights, but they don’t mind the additional workload when it provides better nutrition and education for students.
Blunt Rochester notes according to national non-profit organization Feeding America, 1 in 7 Delaware children face hunger, and she commends the programs intentions, as well as the nutrition service specialists who help execute it.
“Sometimes the school meal is the only substantial meal a child may have, and so to be able to make sure that it's healthy, and then to also include them in the education of where your food comes from – that lettuce doesn't come from a bag, that it comes from the ground," she says.
HFHK received a $97,000 USDA grant in 2023 that helped the nonprofit put on their first Garden Coordinator workshop for staff professional development and they added three new partner schools in 2024.
Torres Small says she's seen other success stories like HFHK across the nation.
"What's so exciting about the Specialty Crop Block Grant Program is that it provides funding to states that then identifies best ways to support nonprofit organizations and others to get schools connected to healthy food and experience the joy of growing that healthy food."
Sarson says she's received requests to expand HFHK into New Jersey, Maryland and Pennsylvania, but she's focused on putting Education Cultivation Programs in all Delaware public elementary schools first.
"The only thing that's keeping us back from that now [are] the traditional nonprofit issues of staffing and funding," she says.
Blunt Rochester and Torres Small both noted Delaware is now participating in the Summer EBT program for Children, which provides $30 per month per child in grocery-buying benefits for low-income families.
The Delaware General Assembly is also considering a bill that would require all public schools to offer students who qualify for a reduced-price meal, under the federal School Breakfast Program and National School Lunch Program, a free breakfast and lunch every school day.
