I'm a Good Neighbor

Smith Mountain Lake, Virginia is a prime destination spot for any city dweller wishing to experience the calming atmosphere of fresh water and crisp mountain air. In fact, many affluent DC residents choose to retire in this lake side community only four hours from the city, where traveling by boat is quicker than driving around the nearly 500 mile shoreline. However, the picturesque nature of this vacation spot grows dim mere miles inland from the shore. In the nearby schools, over 70% of the students are on free or reduced lunches and rural poverty can be seen within miles of a lakeside mansion. In 2009, during the summer of my sophomore year in college, I interned for a start-up non-profit initially created to remedy the summer feeding gap for local children. Through the summers, this simple idea grew and expanded into a summer enrichment program serving hundreds of children and bonding together two fiscally diverse populations into a symbiotic community.

Since living in D.C. and working with DCAYA on issues such as expanded learning and summer programming, I have realized that rural and urban poverty may look different on the surface, but in reality share many attributes. One of the most ambitious and successful programs of the SML Good Neighbors Day Camp is Reading Buddies, where a member of the community sits and reads with a child every day for 30 minutes. In the 2010 Assessment Report, SML Good Neighbors found that 88% of the children who participated in the summer enrichment program either maintained or improved their reading scores over the summer. The District has many non-profits that utilize a similar strategy to prevent the summer slide, which researchers have proven most negatively affects low income children. D.C. is also ranked number one in the country for best summer feeding program. Showing summer programming enriches both the minds and bodies of our neighborhood children.

The three summers I spent interning for SML Good Neighbors reinforces my passionate stance for quality summer programming. Just because school lets out for the summer does not mean children’s brains should shut down for three long months. At the same time, summer should be fun. Summer enrichment programs are the best way to provide necessary services such as nutritional meals and educational programming to children in a positive, socially enriching and engaging way so they may grow into productive adults.

The slogan “I’m a Good Neighbor” is displayed on the back of each campers t-shirt. All children need quality, year round supports no matter their family’s income level or geographic location. With summer around the corner, we can all be Good Neighbors by supporting our local summer enrichment programs.

To learn more about SML Good neighbors visit their website or watch this short video about the day camp.

Find a summer enrichment program in D.C. through The Bridge Project DC website. To find a summer feeding program in the District, DC Hunger Solutions provides an easy to use Google map.

Angela Massino is the communications associate at DCAYA. If you would like to stay current on youth issues in the District FOLLOW us on Twitter, LIKE us on Facebook and check out our website www.dc-aya.org. 

Milk Friendly City

This morning Washington Post columnist Petula Dvorak came out with an article exclaiming that she “just couldn’t swallow the anti-chocolate milk argument.” The “argument” she references is centered on D.C. schools removal of chocolate milk from their lunch menus for SY 2010-2011. Ms. Dvorak writes that “removing the junk from kids’ lunches is smart. We all get that.” Yet she rails on various local school districts that are striving to do just that?

Ms. Dvorak makes a few separate cases in support of her lack of buy-in: 1) There are plenty of other foods that are worse for kids than chocolate- laced dairy products, 2) the chocolate in milk can serve as an inducement for kids that otherwise would not be consuming dairy, and 3) parents should be the ones deciding what their kids eat, not DCPS.

Granted, these points bear some merit, however given the District’s overwhelming problem with childhood obesity these seem moot. To put this in perspective, consider that according to the Healthy School’s Act of 2010 (that Ward 3 Councilmember Mary Cheh introduced last year) more than 55% of District residents are either overweight or obese – this figure includes nearly half of all children in DC and in some wards, the rate of overweight and obese individuals exceeds 70%. Further, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, the rate of adolescent obesity in the District is the highest in the nation. Ouch.

So yes, maybe there are worse culprits out there, but getting sugar out of schools has to start somewhere. And the argument that parents should be able to decide if their kids can drink chocolate milk? Parents you CAN decide this by allowing your kids to drink chocolate milk at home. What’s more is at home you get to control the amount of sugary chocolate goodness that goes into their milk. Maybe teach them a little something about different forms of measurement while you are at it and kill two birds with one stone.

The point is schoolchildren do not need the option of having flavored milk. School food should be about providing a baseline nutritional value to school kids so they have the energy they need to make it through their school day. Chocolate milk tastes good; thus it should not be at all surprising that when given the choice most kids prefer it to regular milk. But, at the end of the day, nutritionally it just is not the same.

Any individual that is given the choice between something that tastes relatively bland and something that tastes like chocolate or strawberry is going to pick the flavored version. This is especially true for individuals that do not take things like overall calorie or sugar intake into account. Dvorak writes that chocolate milk is the ‘spoonful of sugar (that) helps the medicine go down,” but what are schools risking by telling their students that extra sugar and calories are fine as long as what they are being added to is healthy?

Chocolate milk is tasty. DCAYA staff (and ESPECIALLY THIS BLOGGER) are not so old that we don’t remember enjoying a nice carton of it during the many milk breaks of years past. However, years past were just that, years past. Fast forward to present day where schoolchildren and youth in the District are living the childhood obesity epidemic and all of a sudden taking away the sweet stuff doesn’t seem like such a terrible option.

For more information on the National School Lunch Program:

http://www.fns.usda.gov/cnd/lunch/AboutLunch/NSLPFactSheet.pdf

For more information on the Healthy Schools Act of 2010:

http://www.marycheh.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=98&catid=39&Itemid=61

To visit the original article from the Washington Post by Petula Dvorak:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/16/AR2010091606463.html?hpid=talkbox1

To watch the video of Jamie Oliver that Dvorak references:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fet-5oYwus0