Education Week - January 15, 2014 - 7

USDA Opts to Keep in Place
More-Flexible Lunch Rules
By Evie Blad
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has
made permanent its rules that eased restrictions
on the amount of grain and lean protein
that school cafeterias participating in the National
School Lunch Program are allowed to
serve their students each week.
The new rules, unveiled this month, replace
a temporary measure published in 2012. The
change was hailed as a victory by national
school organizations and by members of Congress
who have filed bills in recent years that
would have made similar changes.
The USDA originally drafted the nowamended
rules on maximum weekly servings
of meat, meat substitutes, and grains as part
of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010.
The rules were aimed at supporting a policy
designed to tackle childhood obesity by restricting
calories and mandating more whole
grains and vegetables on school lunch and
breakfast trays.
The effort to ease those requirements was
first encouraged by school food-service directors,
who complained that the serving limits
were hard to implement. Cafeterias with multiple
meal choices could exceed grain limits by
offering daily sandwich items in one of their
serving lines, they said, and a salad topped
with chicken and grated low-fat cheese would
exceed protein limits.
The now permanently relaxed rules remove
the caps on grain and protein servings. Schools
are considered compliant if they meet mini-
mum-serving requirements in those areas and
don't exceed overall calorie caps.
"While this flexibility has been available to
schools on a temporary basis since 2012, making
it permanent provides schools and industry with
needed stability for long-term planning," Janey
K. Thornton, the USDA's deputy undersecretary
for food, nutrition, and consumer services, said
in a Jan. 3 blog post announcing the changes.
Need for Latitude
Leah L. Schmidt, the president of the
School Nutrition Association and food service
director for the Hickman Mills school district
in Missouri, praised the permanent change.
"School Nutrition Association members are
pleased that USDA has provided this permanent
fix, acknowledging the need for greater
flexibility in planning well-balanced school
meals," Ms. Schmidt said in a statement posted
on the website of the 55,000-member group.
"With school nutrition professionals already
planning menus and inventory for the 201415
school year, eliminating the grain and protein
limits is a key step to providing healthy
menus that appeal to students," she said.
Members of both parties in Congress had
filed at least six bills that took aim at the
grain and protein requirements. None was
enacted.
"A one-size-fits-all approach to school lunch
left students hungry and school districts frustrated
with the additional expense, paperwork,
and nutritional research," U.S. Sen. John
Students choose from among several healthy options on the lunch line this school year in the
cafeteria at Barre Town Elementary School in Barre, Vt.
Hoeven, a North Dakota Republican, said in
a statement posted on his website.
Mr. Hoeven partnered last year with Sen.
Mark Pryor, an Arkansas Democrat, to introduce
the Sensible School Lunch Act, a bill that
would have made changes similar to those in
the new USDA rule.
Pressure to change the law stemmed from
school nutrition directors' concerns that it
did not give them the flexibility to prepare
a variety of dishes that were both nutritious
and filling for students.
Widespread Compliance
In the 2010-11 school year, 48.1 percent of
the nearly 49 million students in U.S. public
schools qualified for free or reduced-price
lunches, according to the most recent data
from the National Center for Education Sta-
tistics. Many of them rely on school meals for
much of their daily food intake.
Advocates for the federal standards created
after the passage of the Healthy, Hunger-Free
Kids Act have said school cafeterias can help
students form healthy eating habits that will
last into adulthood.
Despite some complaints, the new standards
have been widely adopted, the USDA says. A
survey released in September by the Pew
Charitable Trusts' Kids' Safe and Healthful
Foods Project found that 94 percent of 3,372
district food-service directors surveyed during
the 2012-13 school year-before officials announced
plans to permanently ease grain and
protein serving rules- expected to come into
complete compliance with the rules.
The Rules for Engagement blog tracks news and trends
on this issue. www.edweek.org/go/rulesforengagement
Federal Guidance Urges Schools to Shift From 'Zero Tolerance'
By Evie Blad
Baltimore
Newly issued discipline guidance
from the U.S. departments of Education
and Justice urges school leaders
to draft and apply rules in a way
that is fair to all racial and ethnic
groups and to ease up on zero-tolerance
policies the agencies' leaders
said have led to unnecessarily high
rates of suspensions and expulsions.
The guidance marks the first
time a presidential administration
has addressed rates of discipline
that are disproportionately high for
some racial groups and overly broad
policies that too frequently remove
students from the classroom for
nonviolent incidents, such as dresscode
violations, federal officials said.
The guidance directs school lead-
ers to honor their obligations under
Title IV and Title VI of the federal
Civil Rights Act of 1964, which
relate to nondiscriminatory treatment
by schools and recipients of
federal aid. Schools are required
under the laws to consider whether
their student discipline policies are
drafted and implemented fairly and
consistently and whether they may
have a "disparate impact" on certain
student groups, the guidance says.
Higher rates of suspensions and
expulsions among certain student
groups cannot be explained away by
assuming higher rates of misbehavior
among those students, U. S. At-
torney General Eric Holder and U.S.
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan
said as they unveiled the new
guidance here last week at Frederick
Douglass High School.
Although black students represented
15 percent of students
in national data collected by the
Education Department's office for
civil rights in 2012, they made up
35 percent of students suspended
once, 44 percent of those suspended
more than once, and 36 percent of
students expelled, Mr. Duncan said.
The agency has also found widely
varying suspension and expulsion
rates between states, he added.
"That huge disparity is not caused
by differences in children but by differences
in training, professional development,
and discipline policies,"
Mr. Duncan said. "It is adult behavior
that needs to change."
'A Strong Message'
The guidance-which includes a
"Dear Colleague" letter to educators
and a catalog of state-level discipline
policies-stems from the work
of the Supportive School Discipline
Initiative, a collaboration launched
by the two agencies in 2011.
Civil rights groups and supporters
of reworking school discipline practices
applauded the guidance.
"All children deserve access to
a quality education, but, too often,
children of color are pushed out
of the classroom through harsh
school disciplinary policies, " Judith
Browne Dianis, a co-director of the
Advancement Project, a civil rights
organization, said in a statement.
"Discrimination in school discipline
is a major problem deserving of focused
attention."
Some administration critics said
it was unfair to assume discriminatory
policies led to differing discipline
rates. They warned the new
guidance may cause some educators
to ignore bad behavior they would
have previously punished. And national
educator groups said some
schools lack the financial resources
to implement the changes suggested
by the guidance, such as preventative
school climate initiatives led by
social workers and school counselors-posts
that have been removed
from some districts' budgets.
"The federal government made
many positive suggestions, but
policies in a vacuum without actual
resources and support will not
succeed," American Federation of
Teachers President Randi Weingarten
said in a statement.
Mr. Duncan said his agency budget
proposal for the 2014 fiscal year
calls for $50 million in School Climate
Transformation Grants. But
there is no guarantee that Congress
will fund that request.
The National School Boards Association
supports "zero tolerance
for discriminatory practices in pub-
lic schools," but it is concerned the
guidance may serve as an unfunded
federal mandate. In a statement, the
group said it is studying whether
the guidance is an "expansive interpretation
of the law" that will usurp
local control.
Examining Policies
The guidance does not constitute
new federal regulations, Mr. Duncan
and Mr. Holder said. Rather,
it is designed to assist districts in
meeting existing obligations under
federal civil rights laws. The leaders
assured educators that they would
continue to investigate allegations
of Title IV and Title VI violations
triggered by complaints from parents,
students, and community
members, and that they may also
initiate investigations through regular
compliance-monitoring activities.
Schools can violate the laws if
their policies unfairly target specific
student groups in word or in
application, the guidance says. For
example, a dress-code rule might
target clothing that school officials
associate with a particular racial
group without a legitimate educational
justification for doing so.
Even disciplinary policies drafted
without discriminatory intent may
violate federal laws if they disproportionately
affect students from
certain racial groups, the guidance
says. In such cases, educators should
be ready to demonstrate that the
disciplinary measure is "necessary
to meet an important educational
goal" and that they considered alternatives,
the document says.
The guidance also suggests there
are times when schools may be
justified in meting out different
punishments for students who appear
"similarly situated" apart from
their race. For example, a Hispanic
student who fought with a non-Hispanic
peer may receive a harsher
punishment if he or she threatens
educators who try to disrupt the
fight.
But districts are also responsible
for ensuring that rules are applied
fairly, the guidance says. For example,
a district may violate the
civil rights rules if it suspends black
students for "acting in a threatening
manner" after they talk back to
an adult if it labels similar behavior
from white students as "classroom
disruption," an offense that carries
a lighter penalty, the guidance says.
Schools found to violate Title IV or
Title VI will be subject to remedies,
which could include correcting the
records of students deemed to be unfairly
punished, revising discipline
policies, training for school personnel,
and annual reviews of discipline
practices, the guidance says.
"We want to build pathways to
success rather than pipelines to
the criminal justice system," Mr.
Holder said.
EDUCATION WEEK | January 15, 2014 | www.edweek.org | 7
Toby Talbot/AP-File

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Education Week - January 15, 2014

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