Community Funded Reporting
Spot Us  |  24 Mar 2009

Sustainable School: What's for lunch?



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We want to identify a specific school in the SF Bay Area and examine what food they are serving. Our analysis won't be an attempt at "gotcha" journalism, but rather a look at what the realities are within the school cafeterias and the challenges they face. We want to make recommendations for improvement by looking at other succesful school lunch programs.

We are sure every school wants to offer healthy alternatives to their students, but all too often the only options they can scrape together are high in sugar or fats.

The focus will be on a specific school not to scold them, but to find out the constraints, difficulties and potential solutions to this problem.

How will it help?

This piece will:

  • Raise awareness about the problem of healthy food in schools by highlighting where a given school fails to provide healthy food.
  • Bring to light the difficultites a school faces in addressing this problem. What bureaucratic or budgetary constraits do they face?
  • We will highlight potential solutions by comparing a troubled school with schools that have succesfully implemented alternative programs.

The reporter who is hired will produce a step-by-step breakdown of a school's food options. The reporter will track this story for a minimum of two weeks - if not longer.




The reporter is the resident blogger Spot.Us. You can see her work samples by clicking on her profile.
The reporter, Serena Renner, is going to produce a 1,500 word article comparing at least two (maybe more) schools in Santa Cruz and what they offer.
Picture_3_thumb Author
Spot Us
Peer review: Serena Renner
This story has been published:

Sustainable School: What's for lunch?

by Spot Us | 07 Aug 2009 | sfbay
This story was produced with Santa Cruz Weekly and has been published in full on their site. Written by Serena Renner Read the full story here. Inside the central kitchen at Pajaro Valley Unified School District in Watsonville, food service workers arrive at 6am to prepare the daily lunch shipment. Donning aprons and hair nets, the lunch ladies stand in assembly-line fashion as they remove individually-wrapped frozen chicken patties from cardboard boxes, sandwich them between two buns and place them…
Read the published story
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Organizational Support

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Public Support

$500.00 donated by 9 people

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Digidave Cohn
$25.00
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Jody Casey
$25.00
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Phillip Doe
$20.00
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Tori Tuncan
$10.00
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Ariel Vardi
$20.00
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Gordon Becker
$13.50