Renee DeWindt
At Platte River Elementary School in Benzie County, MI, 65 percent of the children qualify for free or reduced-price meals. And thanks to a farm-to-school program, children are also able to take fresh fruits and vegetables home with them.
The farm-to-school program also helps keep the school salad bars stocked. Twelve-year-old Alex Reed loves the salad bar at school. Fresh vegetables are rarely available at home for him and his five siblings because the family has trouble affording them. The family receives SNAP benefits to help pay for food. “A family of eight, you buy fresh fruits and vegetables and it is gone in a day and a half,” says Alex’s mother, Shannon Reed.1
Renee DeWindt (pictured below) came on board as food service director for Benzie County schools (and for two other districts in northwest Michigan) in 2005. Students at one of the middle schools had just gone on strike to protest the low quality of the meals served there. On the day of the strike, not a single student went through the lunch line.
When the school superintendent hired DeWindt, he asked her to look into a new farm-to-school program. He’d learned about the fledgling effort from the Michigan Land Use Institute, which links local farms with cafeterias. There are two objectives: helping schoolchildren gain access to healthier food, and supporting local farmers and ranchers and their communities. Renee DeWindt was the right person for the assignment.
“The first thing people assume is [that] serving healthy, higher quality food costs more than schools can afford,” she says. But it turned out to be the exact opposite. When she took over the management of the school food services budget in Benzie County, it was more than $100,000 in the red. DeWindt has turned it into a profit-generating enterprise—and the foods she serves are higher quality. Students and their parents are more satisfied, and the lunch lines aren’t empty.
DeWindt’s recipe for success comes down to cultivating strong partnerships with the children, their parents, and the local farmers she purchases food from. For example, a local dairy farmer had no market for some of his milk; he asked DeWindt if she could use it at a reduced cost since he would otherwise have to dump it. They worked out a deal: he provided her with a dispenser, and she now buys milk from him regularly. The milk is fresher than what she had been purchasing, and the children think it tastes better. In fact, the farmer told DeWindt that his customer base has grown because parents are buying it from him to give their kids at home.
Issues
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