Sunday’s feature on Bear Head Lake State Park

. . . and here’s the jump

Dogsledding feature page 1

Dogsledding feature page 2

A second-grader in a crisp blue dress and matching hair ribbons stands up to offer a musical greeting for the visitors from Minnesota and their translators.  “Welcome, welcome, welcome to our friends,” she sings in Kreyol, her clear, angelic voice filling the open-air classroom. It’s one of several such gifts the students of Bonne Nouvelle School in Bigonet have given us this morning.

We’re in one of two “temporary” plywood buildings with a total of nine classrooms. Some 200 students from the Bigonet area – from preschoolers to adolescents – attend the school (in the months after the quake, it welcomed nearly a hundred more pupils). On this bright, warm Friday, a billy goat bleats in the nearby graveyard as the students and teachers buckle down to study math, French, English and more.

I’m here with three other travelers from St. James on the Parkway Episcopal Church in Minneapolis; we’re in the third year of a partnership with this community that is specifically centered on helping to support the school.

Like most other buildings in this area, the epicenter of January’s earthquake, Bigonet’s school was decimated. But unlike other schools within walking distance, this one reopened – physically altered but strong as ever – within months. In a village where most residents are still living in tents or under tarps, its recovery was everyone’s top priority.

That it’s not only functioning but flourishing today, and continues to make space for more children (regardless of their parents’ ability to pay the yearly tuition of $100) is a testament to the values and commitment of this community. For a middle-class American mom whose family has always taken education – and so much more – for granted, it’s humbling.

This school’s resilience is also a testament to the love and care of many people in Minneapolis, both within and outside of St. James, whose generosity is more crucial than ever in helping these students work to realize their incredible potential.

Our translators and principal Louis Noncent are introducing us in each class. The rooms are spare and clean, with wooden desks and benches and green chalkboards. There’s a galvanized iron roof over our heads, but with open doorways and screenless windows we’re essentially outside. A tropical breeze blows, a dog sleeps next to a little boy hard at work. The Haitian flag hangs proudly outside.

Most students seem genuinely delighted to be here. We know that’s true of their teachers, many of whom attended this school themselves – and all of whom have sometimes taught without pay. Louis and his wife Kerline, a first-grade teacher, walk for miles – in and out of a river, up and down rough mountain trails – to get here each day. Today is sultry, but it’s often much hotter; other days it’s windy and rainy.

These educators are determined to not only uphold the school’s academic excellence – several young scholars here have earned top scores on government exams – but to build on it. Previously, students wanting to continue their education past sixth grade had to hike all the way to Leogane – if they could afford it, and if there was space. Now, despite this community’s myriad basic needs and lacks, Bonne Nouvelle just added a seventh grade — and will add an eighth grade next year, and a ninth grade after that, and so on. Creating a high school for all the kids here sounds impossibly ambitious, but so is what they’ve already achieved.

On the wall outside is a UNICEF poster, an illustrated list of cholera prevention tips. It reminds me of the public health song I heard my young friend Ralph singing earlier, a catchy tune about the importance of “lavez les mains.” Thankfully, Bigonet’s well water is clean, and we’re happy to see village women cooking rice-and-beans lunches outside for the students. For some children, it’s the day’s only meal.

Toward lunchtime, an animated discussion is interrupted by a deep rumbling in the floor. I notice that some women working on a nearby hillside have dropped to the ground and are laughing uproariously. La terre tremble! Louis quiets the students with a reassuring exercise – “Sit down. Stand up. Sit down.” – and the momentary chaos gives way to calm. Before last January, earthquakes were a foreign concept; now aftershocks have become a frequent, though obviously unpredictable, part of our friends’ lives.

Our conversation resumes. Louise has brought copies, translated into Kreyol, of the Ezra Jack Keats picture book “The Snowy Day.” M. Noncent reads the story as Louise passes around a bowl of make-believe “snow” and the children speculate aloud about winter in Minnesota. Losing their shyness, the students begin to ask questions and share their thoughts. “Thank you for thinking of us and helping our school; we like having you visit,” one girl says. “Please don’t forget about us.”

“Invest in children” is not an empty slogan but an economic imperative: Quality preschool has been shown to yield a whopping 16 percent return on investment. The fact that it’s increasingly available only to affluent children isn’t merely an injustice; it’s a threat to societal prosperity. We can develop our “human capital” now, or we can spend exponentially more incarcerating people 20 years down the road.

Even for a family of relative privilege – a two-parent household with a stable income – early childhood and family education is a godsend. The ECFE program was a sanity-saver and perhaps, at times, even a life-saver for Steve and me; it truly helped keep us healthy and functional as a family, and certainly helped prepare our children to enjoy and excel in school. For families on the edge, programming like this is even more critical.

We can ignore the growing and compelling body of research demonstrating the importance of early childhood education, and the costs may not be felt for several years. But once they are, they’ll be measurable, and significant.

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Last fall, I attended the first evening of a two-day school food conference: a gathering of food service directors and other “stakeholders,” convened by a Minnesota-based nutrition foundation. Among my souvenirs from the evening was a fact sheet on Solae Chicken Shreds: “A tasty, whole-muscle-like product featuring a blend of chicken and SUPRO® MAX structured vegetable protein product.” If that doesn’t whet your appetite, I don’t know what will.

The workshop’s attendees included about 20 school food service professionals, several nutrition researchers, an award-winning organic restaurateur, two interested parents (I came with a friend, another freelance writer) — and 10 or 12 representatives of corporate agribusiness, energetically hawking their employers’ latest feats of engineering. Clearly, industrial ag is concerned as ever about the health and well-being of America’s schoolchildren.

The impetus for the conference was a preliminary set of recommendations from the Institute of Medicine (IOM) for updating nutrition standards in school meals; one of the IOM’s recommendations was that at least half — or 51 percent — of grains in school lunches be from “whole grain-rich foods.” At the conference I picked up a Superkids Wholegrain Sampling Program directory, touting a host of ConAgra products — from pretzels to cookie dough to macaroni noodles — now containing exactly 51 percent whole grain.

My family is fortunate in that my husband and I are able to buy nutritious, sustainably produced food — and have the time to pack healthy home lunches for our kids. But, of course, they’d rather eat the sugary breakfast cereals, chocolate milk and nachos that many of their classmates get at school. In any case, it strikes me as unjust that millions of American kids simply don’t have access to wholesome meals. So it was with great interest that this angry mom watched Amy Kalafa and Susan Rubin’s new documentary, Two Angry Moms, a film examining “big food profits vs. children’s health.” Noting that the obesity epidemic is just one symptom of declining children’s health in the U.S., Kalafa sets to explain “what parents need to know and do to get better food in schools.”

The film opens with the image of potato strips being dunked in a deep fryer, and a barrage of alarming statistics on childhood obesity, Type II diabetes, allergies, heart disease, decreasing life expectancy and more. After addressing head-on the myth that school lunch reformers are dour, humorless “food police,” determined to take cupcakes out of children’s birthdays (Rubin is even shown savoring a cupcake — a real cupcake, made with butter and sugar and flour — outside a bakery), the filmmakers quickly move to the root of the problem.

As author, researcher and New York University nutrition professor Marion Nestle points out, the USDA, whose primary purpose is to “promote American agriculture,” has a fundamental conflict of interest in its secondary charge to feed America’s schoolchildren healthful, wholesome, balanced meals. After all, “American agriculture” is dominated by large agribusiness firms that are in business to maximize profits, and that means selling as much product as possible, regardless of its nutritional value. Chips, snack cakes, hot dogs and soft drinks: That’s what kids want to eat, big food companies tell us; we’re just meeting consumer demand. School lunch directors, constrained both by tight budgets and picky customers with deeply ingrained habits, feel pressure to offer lucrative, packaged “a la carte” items — “competitive food” that will reliably sell.

In short, this is what you call an uphill battle. But it is winnable — and worth fighting. The filmmakers exhort parents to organize, to band together; to learn about the challenges school administrators, board members, and food service directors are up against; and to take charge of writing meaningful, community-authored wellness policies that firmly articulate the school district’s needs. Widespread parent support and community buy-in are essential, they emphasize.

There are allies out there—school-food pioneers, models for improvement—and the film introduces us to some of them: Chez Panisse founder Alice Waters and rebel lunch lady Ann Cooper, who revolutionized the Berkeley United School District’s lunch program; food service director Rodney Taylor of Riverside, Cal., who brought local farmers’ bounty to urban public school salad bars; school lunch chef Tony Geraci of New Hampshire, whose own battle with diabetes prompted him to create a “prevention model” that includes healthy, kid-designed meals for students in his district. Their experiences show that American children will in fact eat wholesome, nutrient-rich meals — especially if they’re involved in growing, cooking, preparing and composting the food.

The film is informative and encouraging, but pretty coastal-centric. Real and important progress is being made here in the Midwest, too. Farm-to-school programs are connecting a growing number of school districts with food from local farms (and providing new and exciting opportunities for nutrition education). The Saint Paul, Minn., district, for instance, has attracted national attention for its farm-to-school effort; in the first six weeks of the academic year, the district purchased 110,000 pounds of locally grown produce for school lunches. The Farm to School Minnesota Toolkit for Food Service (www.mn-farmtoschool.umn.edu), which is based on materials developed in the Willmar, Minn., school district, provides guidelines for getting healthy, local foods into cafeterias.

These are not easy changes to implement; such efforts need vocal, sustained public support. “This is politics, and it’s the ugliest kind of politics, being fought over our kids’ health,” Nestle says. “If there aren’t angry moms pushing [reform], it’s not going to happen.”