Â鶹´«Ã½AV

In Lavallee School’s community kitchen — in its Gaa-maamawinong, meaning gathering place — cheerful chatter fills the morning air, mingled with the smell of fresh scrambled eggs.

Students line up and wait for their turn for a fresh breakfast. This morning there’s a choice of scrambled eggs, bannock, muffins, baby carrots, yogurt, and milk.

“Ms. D’s eggs and toast is amazing,” said one student, Muiz, taking a big bite.  

With new funding for a universal nutrition program in place, this is what the start of a school day looks like for students at Lavallee School.

“I think things are going extremely well,” said Lavallee principal Nicole Mager. “We’re really excited about the initiative to have universal food programming in schools because it removes barriers and protects people’s dignity.”

Lavallee is one of four schools in the Â鶹´«Ã½AV School Division (LRSD) piloting a program offering breakfast, snack, and lunch options every day for its students. The other schools are Frontenac, St. George, and Victor Mager Schools.

As LRSD builds capacity and fine-tunes the program, we expect to expand nutrition programming at other schools around the division.

In the meantime, schools have been launching a “Grab-and-go snack program” that provides nutritious snacks, such as nutrient-dense granola bars and fresh fruit, to boost student learning throughout the school day.

Mager said, despite the program being in its early stages, the positive effect on students is already clear.

“When they go to class, they’re ready. They’ve got a full belly, and they feel good about the morning interaction. Somebody’s greeted them by their name and someone asked them how they’re doing, how their morning is going, and even if their morning wasn’t great, they have time to unwrap that and shift focus to be ready for the day,” the principal said.

Mager said starting with these simple, positive interactions ripples throughout the students’ days.

“The positivity just continues to spread and sets the stage for the type of day a student is going to have.”

“Every school in our division is on a different food journey right now. For some, this may be new; for others, they’ve been established for quite some time now; and for some, we’re working towards getting food establishment permits, so we can be serving food directly on site to our students,” said Jeremy Bender, the divisional lead on nutrition programming.

Bender said he’s also been noticing a wonderful atmosphere among the students at mealtimes, and he expects positivity and nutrition will go a long way to helping students.

“This is a positive step in the right direction… and we’ll be watching some key performance indicators to see what sort of positive impact this will have on student learning,” he said.

Bender said in a dream scenario he’d love to see kitchens in every school providing hot meals to students. While that’s not yet possible, Bender and LRSD are working hard to improve nutrition programming day by day.

Mager, the Lavalee principal, said she’s grateful to be a part of such a wonderful program.

“We have a great opportunity to take care of our students, and I think that’s what schools were intended to do,” she said.