By Mark Wineka
mwineka@salisburypost.com
Local legislators heard Monday morning that the state’s school lunch programs ó trying to cope with outmoded laws, regulations and funding ó feed students a diet guaranteed to hurt their health later in life.
The money saved on school lunches today will be eaten up by higher heath-care bills tomorrow, said Francis Koster, who said he was making his comments on behalf of Dr. Christopher Magryta, a Salisbury pediatrician, and parents of many Rowan County children.
“The financial side of this is that feeding kids fat is cheaper than feeding them fruit,” Koster said.
Magryta was seeing patients Monday morning and could not attend the legislative briefing Rowan-Cabarrus Community College held for state Sens. Andrew Brock and Fletcher Hartsell and Reps. Fred Steen and Jeff Barnhart.
“He asked me to relay his concern and ask your help,” said Koster, a retired pediatric healthcare administrator.
The legislative briefing in the Salisbury campus’ Teaching Auditorium was open to the public.
Koster said the problem with school lunches starts at the federal level because of the way agriculture is subsidized. Between 1995 and 2004, he said, nearly 75 percent of the entire U.S. expenditure for agricultural subsidies went to feed crops and direct aid supporting meat and dairy production.
The subsidized food is often sold or donated to school lunch programs. Less than 1 percent of subsidies go toward fruit and vegetable production.
“This system makes it hard for food service directors to choose healthier foods when chicken nuggets and hot dogs are essentially free,” Koster told the legislators.
Efforts in the pediatric community to teach a healthy, wellness-based lifestyle are being thwarted by the government, Koster said. According to “the most recent report we could find,” he said, milk, pizza, ground beef, cheese and potato products (frozen and chips) are the leading food categories in school lunches.
The number one food product distributed under the school lunch programs is pizza, according to Koster.
Eighteen percent of all children 6 to 19 in the United States are obese. In North Carolina, 28 percent of adults are obese ó “walking time bombs of illness, Koster said.
“Basically,” Koster said, “those of you who serve as elected officials have a choice ó you can save on the school lunch money you send schools today but pay higher Medicaid bills tomorrow, or you can fix the school lunch program and save on Medicaid.
“Believe us when we say it is cheaper over the long run to feed the kids healthy food.”
Koster had a couple of recommendations for legislators:
– Increase the budget for lunch by 50 cents per child per day, on the condition that extra money would be spent on locally grown fruits and vegetables. “This will dramatically increase the school cooks’ ability to purchase healthy food that our children so desperately need,” Koster said.
– Help schools purchase choppers and machinery to reduce the manpower needed to prepare fruits and vegetables.
Barnhart, a Republican House member from Cabarrus County, agreed the cost of healthcare is killing the state and country, and Medicaid represents an area where the potential exists for savings, if the populace were healthier. He said the Cabarrus Health Alliance is looking at obesity as it relates to youth.
Brock said one of the problems is, what can the schools serve that kids will eat? And making it healthier will cost more, no doubt, Brock said.
“And that’s the quandary they’re in,” he said of school administrators.
Brock and Hartsell said advances in nutrition and the work that will be done at the North Carolina Research Campus in Kannapolis could ultimately change school lunches. But a problem at all levels of government always has been the lack of integrated relationships, Hartsell suggested.
Here’s a case where helping local agriculture provide fruits and vegetables to schools could help improve kids’ nutrition, which in turn could reduce their healthcare costs in the future, Hartsell said.
“We have historically looked at programs in isolation everywhere,” Hartsell said. He asked Koster for a copy of his remarks on behalf of the pediatrician.
Earlene Brown, a 20-year registered nurse who recently joined Rowan-Cabarrus Community College as a faculty member, presented another concern to the legislators.
The country already has a nursing shortage ó 8 percent of the available positions are vacant, Brown said. By 2020, half of all nurses will have reached retirement age. Some 40,000 nursing school applicants are being turned away from colleges annually because schools can’t find quality faculty members to teach new students.
Brown said she took a $20,000 pay cut to leave her nursing job and become a teacher at the community college. That kind of pay drop makes it difficult to recruit teachers and help address the nursing shortage, she said.
“You, as a legislator, can have an impact on that,” Brown said.
Before the public gathering Monday morning, legislators met with the community college leaders to talk about some of the schools’ needs and concerns, such as faculty pay.
Steen and the other lawmakers spoke Monday of the need to prioritize state spending, especially with the budget shortfalls North Carolina probably will face because of the souring economy.
Education will have to be placed at the top of any priority list, Steen said, and community colleges have to be a part of that.
Steen and Brock said they were products of the community college system. Brock took courses at Davidson County Community College as a way to save money toward his four-year degree, and Steen, an industrial engineer by training, has taken a robotics course at RCCC and said he might be roaming the halls again in the near future.
Mike McDonald, president of a cleaning company in Kannapolis, said in looking to expand his business he has been taking a welding technology class at RCCC. He said he has been amazed at the classes offered at the school and thinks public school students should be exposed at an early age to the skilled labor alternatives available to them.
“You have to continually sharpen the saw,” Brock said in describing the continuing education and training available to individuals at community colleges.