A tray of homemade cinnamon rolls was one of the class projects in the DPS scratch cooking boot camp.

Chef Safa Hamze watched with consternation as a Denver Public Schools food service worker squeezed a wad of whole wheat dough in her fists, then pinched off the tops that oozed out between her thumb and forefinger, setting each tan globule on a scale to make sure it weighed the requisite 1.5 ounces.

One by one, the little dough balls filled up a baking sheet, eventually to become dinner rolls. Soon, they would go in the oven at Academia Ana Marie Sandoval in northwest Denver.

“Do the dinner rolls have to be round?” he asked. “Because, you know, you can do it a lot faster if you make them square.”

Then Hamze, a one-time middle school math teacher who is now head baker at Whole Foods Rocky Mountain Bake House, did a little calculation aloud.

“You put 70 rolls on a pan at 1.5 ounces each. But instead, you could just roll out 7.5 pounds of dough and put on the pan, then slice it in squares and make the rolls pull-aparts,” he said. “They’ll bake together in such a way that you can just pull a roll off.”

Around the kitchen, heads nodded as mental light bulbs went on. The others could immediately see how much faster Hamze’s way would be over the traditional method, dubbed the “kill-the-chicken” technique.

Later that morning, Annette Martinez, who has been cooking for Denver schoolchildren for the past 23 years, was ecstatic with this newfound knowledge.

“Oh, slicing is soooo much better than pinching,” said Martinez, a food service worker at South High School. “He’s teaching us some real time savers. And that leaves us more time to focus on what we need to do.”

Back to school early for food workers

Last week, 120 workers – about a third of total DPS lunchroom staff – started a three-week “boot camp” in which they’ll learn lots more tips and techniques about scratch cooking, a skill many of them have never developed.

Safa Hamze, head baker at Whole Foods Rocky Mountain Bakehouse, shares some tips on time-saving ways to prepare cinnamon rolls.

They’re being tutored by local professional chefs such as Hamza.

When school starts in August, 29 DPS kitchens will have abandoned most processed foods and will be regularly be turning out homemade baked goods, meats and vegetable dishes. Within three years, all DPS school lunchrooms will follow suit.

It’s the largest commitment to returning to scratch cooking in schools in the state, if not the country, said Leo Lesh, director of food and nutrition services for the district.

“I think we’re ahead of the pack,” Lesh said.

“A few districts may try this in one or two schools, but we’re taking off a pretty big chunk at one go. And I’ve not heard of  anyone having a three-week training program like this.”

Back-to-scratch a national trend

The DPS effort parallels efforts in many smaller school districts to return to scratch cooking.

LiveWell Colorado is sponsoring week-long “culinary boot camps” for school food service personnel across the state. Nationwide, a movement for schools to abandon heat-and-serve processed foods and return to the homemade meals Baby Boomers remember is gathering steam.

“I’m surprised at how quickly this movement has taken root,” said Lesh. “It seems like overnight everyone has gotten concerned about the processed foods served in schools. Before, only food service directors were concerned.”

Most school lunchroom fare was made from scratch 30 years ago, he said. Then things changed.

“Food safety standards became more prevalent, and it was just easier to buy pre-packaged stuff,” he said. “The liability was less. And in the early ’80s everybody was running to fast food restaurants, and that’s what the kids wanted. We got into a lot of branded products like Subway pizza and Taco Bell burritos.”

Some new schools were built without real kitchens, since processed foods could simply be reheated. Of 140 DPS schools, 42 have no kitchens so food must be made elsewhere and transported to them.

Concern about childhood obesity sparks change

But about five years ago, things began to change again as rumblings of concern grew about widespread childhood obesity.

DPS responded by removing all its fryers, and began baking French fries. The district started bringing in more fresh fruits and vegetables, opening more salad bars.

Sandy Grady, area supervisor for DPS Food and Nutrition Services, instructs boot camp students on how to make homemade hamburger buns of the proper weight and shape.

The district also embraced a policy of including at least one vegetarian selection daily, and of using produce from school gardens whenever possible.

“It was clear that we really wanted to go back to scratch cooking again,” Lesh said. “But then we faced the talent issue. Who could do those kind of things? People don’t cook at home anymore, and they haven’t taught their kids to cook. And there are no more home ec classes.

“We decided if we wanted to do this, we would have to develop our own training classes because we just can’t find the people who already have these skills who want to work for us.”

Back in the kitchen at Academia Ana Marie Sandoval, Katherine Culpepper is one of those people. She’s brand new to the district – doesn’t yet even know which school she’ll be assigned to in the fall.

But she’s the mother of six children and has raised seven more in addition to her own, and she knows a thing or two about cooking. “I know you can still have good quality food, made fast, if you work hard,” she said.

Martinez, the veteran with 23 years experience, remembers what school kitchens used to be like, and she’s glad to see a return to that.

“It’s back to the basic again, like we used to do,” she said. “It’ll be hard to go back to cooking again, but it’s good. It’s so much better for the children, and the food will be so much better.”

Regina Sams, who as been in the lunchroom at Denver’s Career Education Center for three years, said she used to work in a deli before getting hired by DPS. So she knows about scratch cooking.

“It’s more work but it’s better for the kids,” she said. “And DPS knows it will be more work, so they’re hiring more help. I don’t think there will be many complaints about it.”

Higher price tag for almost-home cooking

But that part about hiring more help does worry Lesh, whose job it is to make sure DPS meals are not only healthful but cost-efficient.

“I get $2.68 per child,” he said. Out of that, he pays salaries and benefits and covers utilities and equipment. The cost of the food itself accounts for less than half the costs associated with running the DPS food service program.

“It depends on the meal but we generally keep it around 42%. Roughly, our food costs are $1.12, on the high side, and we try to keep it around 90 cents,” Lesh said. “But I have to offer milk to every child and that’s 20 cents right there. So it’s a challenging business to try and make the meals for that amount of money.”

Lesh cautioned that the coming school year will be a transition year, and that not everything will be made from scratch.

“We won’t be taking feathers off of chickens,” he said. “We won’t make our own tortillas. This year will just let us know what’s possible, given the fact that it’s still a school lunch program, and we still have only 25 minutes to serve 300 kids. What CAN we get done, and more importantly, will the kids react positively?

“We think parents will,” Lesh added, “but parents aren’t in the lunchroom eating lunch every day. The kids have to like the food to bring them back every day for 173 days. I don’t know of anybody who goes to the same lunchroom for 173 straight days except  students. So we have to mix up the menus.”

Plus, he said, DPS sometimes buys products almost a year in advance, so there’s still quite a bit of processed products that must be used up — “We won’t just throw stuff away.”

Rebecca Jones can be reached at rjones@ednewscolorado.org.

Ronald Blan, 12, shows the roller coaster he designed in robotics class at Adams County Camp.

The contraption Ronald Blan designed and was proudly displaying seemed more ferris wheel than roller coaster – but when the designer is a 12-year-old from one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods, such quibbles seem insignificant.

The point is, the 2-foot tall kinetic structure, set up in a classroom at Scott Carpenter Middle School in unincorporated Adams County, works.

“I’ve learned how to build a structure and make it spin,” said Blan. “I’ve had a lot of fun. I like technology. And I like roller coasters.”

Elsewhere in the school, youngsters were dabbling in computer technology to create a podcast. Others were working on their “downward-facing dog” stretch in yoga class. And others were preparing for that greatest of all childhood summertime joys, a trip to Water World.

Fighting summer learning loss

Adams County Camp is summer camp, with a twist. It’s all fun, yes, but camp organizers believe that what happens here this summer will impact these children and this community in profound ways for years to come.

Studies indicate that about two-thirds of the “achievement gap” between disadvantaged ninth-graders and their more financially well-off classmates can be explained by what happens – or fails to happen – over summer during their elementary school years.

First-graders at Adams County Camp sing a song while they prepare to go swimming.

Educators call this “summer slide” or “summer learning loss.”

“Research shows that poor kids may outlearn rich kids during the school year,” said Beverly Kingston, director of the Adams County Youth Initiative, which sponsors the camp. “But during the summer, it disappears.”

Now in its second year, the six-week Adams County Camp is serving 550 disadvantaged children in grades one through eight at three school-based locations.

Funded in part with a five-year, $8 million federal Safe Schools/Healthy Students grant, the camp is a collaboration among three Adams County school districts, the Hyland Hills Park and Recreation District, the Adams County Sheriff’s Office and Growing Home, a local care provider for the homeless.

Cost of camp minimal for families

The cost to campers is minimal: $15, viewed as a “commitment fee” after some of the campers in last year’s smaller but free pilot program attended only sporadically.

For that small investment, campers get academic enrichment activities and adventure outings unlike anything they’re likely to experience at home. Actual cost to run the camp is approximately $530 per camper.

Campers stretch as they learn yoga poses at Adams County Camp.

Youth program providers such as Mad Science, Kids Tek and Colorado Fusion Soccer Club bring their programs to the camp sites: Westminster School District’s Carpenter and Shaw Heights middle schools, and Adams City Middle School in Commerce City.

Because the camps are located at schools with summer feeding programs, free breakfast and lunch is available to all campers and most take advantage of that perk.

Counselors, mostly college students, supervise, mentor and lead activities in the four areas the camp emphasizes: sports, arts, technology and service.

Field trips to the Denver Museum of Science and Nature, Colorado School of Mines, the Denver Zoo, Adventure Golf and a Colorado Rockies game round out the program.

“A lot of our kids never get more than four blocks away from home,” said Kingston.

Of the 550 campers this year, 78 percent are minority and 77 percent are eligible for free or reduced-price lunches, a typical measurement of poverty. Half the campers come from homes where their parents have a high school diploma or less.

Impact seen from first year

Last year, in its first year, the camp served some 185 children at Carpenter Middle School. The campers came from 26 different Adams County schools. While school officials did not evaluate campers’ later test scores, other measures seem to indicate the camp had a positive impact.

“We definitely started school on a much more positive note last year,” said Carpenter Principal Kelly Williams. “It was a very successful school year. A lot of different factors went into that, but I know the camp had something to do with it. Discipline problems were cut in half last year.”

Indeed, juvenile crime reports within a 2-mile radius of the school were down dramatically last summer — from 1,178 during the summer of 2008 to 876 in the summer of 2009.

Kingston said this year, schools will look at student test scores to see what sort of impact the summer camp experiences has had on summer learning loss.

“This is a great gem that’s happening in Adams County,” said Becky Hoffman, manager of community initiatives for ACYI.

Hoffman hopes that publicizing the camp will lead to more community backing. The camp needs books. It needs more recreational equipment. It needs donated snacks for the children. It needs donors to sponsor individual campers.

Come fall, ACYI will organize an Adams Camp Community Board to begin oversight of the camp and increase community participation, she said.

Rebecca Jones can be reached at rjones@ednewscolorado.org.

From left, Rudy Ornelas, Jirah Lawrence and Savanna Pino work in the garden at Denver's Fairview Elementary School.

The tip-off to the presence of some unwanted visitors at Denver’s Fairview Elementary School were the holes in the cabbage leaves.

Immediately, Judy Elliott had her work crew on their knees, combing through the other plants in the school garden.

“The first thing we do is find the caterpillars,” said Elliott, education and community empowerment coordinator for Denver Urban Gardens. “And if we find caterpillar eggs, what do we do? Do we use pesticides?”

“No!” came the answering chorus of young voices.

“We just brush the eggs off,” said one young gardener.

“We don’t ever use pesticides,” explained 15-year-old Rider Spangler, a volunteer who rides the bus all the way from Green Valley Ranch, on the other side of town, just to work in the Fairview garden. “So you don’t have to worry about eating stuff right out of the garden.”

And to illustrate his point, he bit into a newly-picked snap pea.

Rider Spangler works with Judy Douglas, a volunteer adult gardener, to cut back the early-season peas and prepare the bed for a new crop.

Throughout the summer, this garden – lovingly planted, tilled and harvested by Fairview students, their parents and some other volunteers – will help feed the neighborhood, providing families with fresh produce they might otherwise struggle to obtain.

Fairview, in Denver’s impoverished Sun Valley neighborhood, is in a so-called “food desert.” The nearest grocery store with a well-stocked fresh produce section is a mile and a half away, and cars are a luxury many in this part of town simply cannot afford.

“It takes an hour to get there by bus, and you have to change buses twice,” said Elliott. “And then you’re very limited in what you can carry. A lot of the Somali families in the neighborhood have five to 10 children, so imagine carrying bags of groceries with one or two little ones in tow.”

The Fairview garden is one of 35 school-based gardens in Denver Public Schools this summer, and one of four on the west side of town to host summer-long youth farmers markets. They’re the joint projects of a collaboration among DPS, Denver Urban Gardens and Slow Food Denver.

A grant from the Colorado Health Foundation and the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment helps fund the Fairview garden, allowing organizers to pay the young farmers a small stipend – between $3 and $4 an hour – for their work.

More than two dozen Fairview students applied for the 10 available summer garden jobs, which require several hours of garden labor two mornings a week, plus a two-hour shift at the farmers market each Sunday.

“The garden has gotten more and more popular,” said Fairview fifth-grade teacher Don Diehl, who has been coordinating the school’s gardening and nutrition classes for 10 years. “Now it’s a cool thing to do in the neighborhood, though it didn’t used to be.  Of the 10 (students) we selected this year, only one had worked with us before.

“It’s a competitive job,” he said. “We did interviews and they wrote essays about why they wanted to do it. What stood out about the ones we selected is their excitement about the chance to do something to give back to their community.”

Fartun Sherif, 11, works in the broccoli patch at Fairview's school garden.

Jacob Bustos, 13, regularly comes to work in the garden even though he’s not paid to do so.

“I just wanted to learn how to garden,” he said. “I want to start one for my mom at our house.

“Now that I’ve been doing this awhile, I know how to plant and harvest,” he added. “I even checked out some books to read about it.”

Jacob says his work in the garden and the cooking and nutrition classes he’s taken at Fairview have changed his eating habits.

“I’m eating a lot more peas now,” he said. “And I’m eating salads with a lot of vegetables in them. I would rather eat stuff that’s fresh, right out of the garden.”

Twelve-year-old Rudy Ornelas had never tasted spinach before sampling it in a cooking and nutrition class at school. He liked it. He also liked the red pepper.

“Now I want to learn how to plant and take care of all kinds of vegetables,” he said.

Rudy’s been given special responsibility for the basil and celery patches at the Fairview garden. It’s a job he takes seriously.

“Celery is a bog plant,” he explained, “so it loves water.”

Maureen Hearty, DUG education facilitator, said the new gardeners take quickly to their tasks.

“You see a lot of growth in these kids, even in just a single growing season,” she said. “Their knowledge of food and their pride in their garden keep growing.”

Around the city, urban youngsters are getting their hands dirty this summer as they learn about gardening in school gardens. Slow Food Denver has partnered with DPS food services for about 20 of the school-based gardens to supply food for their own school cafeterias come fall.

“We’re calling it ‘Garden-to-School’ and there will be a weekly harvest of salad-ready vegetables that the district food staff can use,” said Andy Nowak, director of Slow Food Denver. “The district has bought 85 salad bars, mostly for use in elementary schools, and we’re excited to work with them on that.

“The garden-to-cafeteria concept is relatively new,” he said. “Boulder has been doing it on a small scale with a couple of schools, but there’s nothing as formal as this on this scale.”

Come September, Slow Food and Eat Denver, a coalition of independent restaurants in the city, will partner to bring in chefs to the schools that have gardens. Their goal will be to teach the youngsters and their families fun and delicious ways to prepare the fresh produce they’re growing.

Meanwhile, DPS is also pursuing a pilot program to create “school farms” at two schools, Bradley and McGlone elementaries. Those pilot programs involve creating real working farms on larger parcels, tended by adult farmers, with the produce going to farmers markets and school cafeterias.

“It’s a pilot that could be expanded to 15 sites over 20 acres, which could produce a large amount of food,” Nowak said.

This is all part of DPS’ stated commitment to get away from serving processed foods, which typically are much higher in sodium than fresh products, and to serve healthier, low-fat, more nutritious meals to students.

This week, 110 DPS food service personnel begin a three-week scratch cooking boot camp, in which they’ll study ways to offer enticing salad bars; cook their own soups, sauces, chilis and stews; and learn about scratch baking.

By fall, 29 of the district’s schools will be concentrating on scratch cooking, and officials say they hope all the district cafeterias will be offering primarily from-scratch offerings within three years.

“There’s a lot of momentum behind this,” said Nowak. “DPS has seen the great possibilities that exist in gardens and school cafeterias. Once they got going, they really started rolling on this. I’m amazed. I’m sometimes struggling just to keep up with all they’re doing.”

Rebecca Jones can be reached at rjones@ednewscolorado.org.

Students use sticky notes and a kind of "brain mapping" system to determine what questions to ask to help local companies develop an epidemic response plan.

Stephanie Qi was just wiping her hands from a quick rinse in the bathroom sink when Brooke Garbarini accosted her.

“You call that washing your hands?” 11-year-old Brooke yelled. “You have to use soap! Was that hot water? You have to use hot water!”

There was an awkward silence from Stephanie, also 11, then Brooke continued her harangue.

“You have to wash the backs of your hands, between your fingers and your thumbs. Bacteria have a new generation every 20 minutes! You have to use soap to wash off the germs, and keep your hands under the hot water for 20 seconds.”

“And what happens if I don’t?” Stephanie shot back.

“You can get tons of diseases. You can get the flu, swine flu, SARS disease, staph infection, polio and diarrhea. There are millions of germs on your hands.”

Brooke carried on for another minute about the germs on the bathroom door handle, touched on the topic of the incubation of germs, and the threat of mutation caused by overuse of antibacterial soap.

And just in case Stephanie remained skeptical, at that point 12-year-old Shaina Levison and 12-year-old Jesse Zhang stepped out of two nearby stalls and did a little dance and sang a rap song about hand-washing.

Cut! Take five!

The “bathroom hand-washing scene” is just one scene in a movie these precocious youngsters are making to promote public health and educate other students about proper public hygiene.

Nearby, some other equally precocious youngsters are preparing for a presentation they’ll give to some Boulder businesses on coming up with an organizational response plan should an epidemic strike. What mitigation steps can the businesses take? How do they prepare for a worst-case scenario? How do they respond should an epidemic fell large numbers of employees?

The students, all rising seventh and eighth graders in Boulder-area public schools, have spent five weeks soaking up the heady academic atmosphere at a free summer enrichment program at the private Alexander Dawson School in Lafayette. The program – entitled “Epidemic, Past and Present” – ends this week. Sponsored by the Dawson Foundation Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning, it brought in 31 high-achieving middle schoolers and immersed them in a challenging curriculum that included virology, disaster preparedness, history and the economic effects of outbreaks.

“Oh my gosh,” said teacher Valerie Keeney, who normally teaches science at The Pinnacle charter school in Federal Heights but who signed on to teach the science component of the epidemic program at Dawson.

“I’ve been teaching stuff I would teach high school sophomores,” she said. “These kids latched onto it immediately. The stuff they’ve come up with is seriously impressive. It blows me away that they’ve just come out of sixth and seventh grade.”

Students work to create a model of a hand for use in a hand-washing display.

While some students were learning about DNA and RNA and the differences in bacteria and viruses in the science group, others focused on math, doing computer modeling of how epidemics spread. A humanities group focused on a study of the history of epidemics throughout the ages.

They also had the chance to talk to some high-powered experts on the subject. Guest speakers included Boulder County health officials, a medical historian from the University of Colorado, and emergency preparedness experts from Exampla Healthcare and the University of Colorado Hospital.

They also spent time with journalist Maryn McKenna, author of Superbug: The Fatal Menace of MRSA, an account of the dangers of drug-resistent staphylococcus.

“I thought she was trying to scare us a lot,” said Shaina Levison, a student at Heritage Middle School in Longmont, of McKenna’s visit. “But people need to be scared because if we’re not, we won’t learn what to do about it.”

Levison is part of the group of students now working to develop a public hygiene campaign. They’re aiming to create material appropriate for second- and third-graders. Among their projects — a movie, which they have written and will film themselves, and a hand-washing display featuring bacteria they’ve grown themselves.

Watch the students rehearse the hand-washing skit and rap song and dance they wrote.

“We’re not telling them what to do,” said Kevin Cloud, executive director of the Dawson Center. “They’ve listened to the pros, and they’ve learned that the best thing you can do is wash your hands. People already do that, but not well. They’re working on ways to present that information.”

Cloud figures that adults, too, can learn something from these super-smart kids. He’s recruited three local companies – a high tech startup, an industry group and a small manufacturer – to be guinea pigs for the students. They will study these businesses, ask them questions and put together customized response plans that the companies could initiate should an epidemic strike.

Students studying the history of epidemics created graphic representations of pandemics down through the ages.

“They’re not just a bunch of kids,” Cloud said. “They can do serious stuff. For the companies, there is no downside to this. If the resulting plan has value to them, that’s great. Or maybe they won’t want to use the document the students develop, but it may start a dialogue within the company.”

Above all, Cloud expects the students who participated in the five-week program to take what they learned back into their home schools come fall. There, they will impact the health of their classrooms by their example.

“One highly motivated student per classroom makes a big difference,” he said.

That’s something the youngsters themselves are certain they will do.

“I think we’ll take this with us wherever we go,” Levison said. “Stuff like how not to spread your diseases to other people. And I never realized before how medicines can hurt you. Did you know if you take medicines for a bug you don’t have, it can mutate?

“And if you’re taking antibiotics, and you don’t finish them all, the bug can become resistant to them,” added Qi. “This weekend, I’m going to the wilderness but I’m going to wash my hands a lot. From now on I’m going to wash my hands 10 times as much as I used to.”

Rebecca Jones can be reached at rjones@ednewscolorado.org.

Middle school students participate in team-building activities as part of Disaster READY training this week at an Aurora school. Photo/Sarah Linn.

It’s not like terrorists don’t hang out in Aurora, Colorado State Patrol Sgt. Matt Packard reminded the young disaster-readiness trainees sprawled before him on mats on the gym floor at Aurora Quest K-8, a charter school.

After all, Najibullah Zazi was arrested last September at his Aurora apartment, not a dozen miles from the school. Zazi later acknowledged being an al-Qaeda operative conspiring to blow up the New York City subway system.

“It was what he was doing right here in Aurora that tipped us off,” said Packard, who is supervisor in the Colorado Information Analysis Center, a state agency that’s a sort of early warning system for suspected terrorist attacks, natural disasters and large-scale criminal activity.

“He bought chemicals you can mix together to make a bomb. He was acquiring stuff that’s perfectly legal to have, but he was combining them to make a bomb,” Packard told his young audience. “Say you see someone with 50 boxes of cold medicine. Does that seem normal?”

The students agreed that it did not. Ditto for someone taking photos or drawing diagrams of buildings or infrastructure, or for uniformed workmen showing up without an appointment and asking for access to equipment, or for someone needlessly calling 911 then clocking how long it takes police to arrive.

“I learned terrorists could be anywhere,” 11-year-old Alex Richmond later said. “They could even be my best friend.”

“I saw a man wearing a winter coat once, when it wasn’t winter,” noted 12-year-old Jose Puente. He said if he ever spotted anything suspicious like that again, he’d know who to call.

Disasters come in many forms, both natural and human-made, but learning how to prepare for them can make the difference between living and dying. And youngsters are never too young to start thinking about what to do and what to avoid in an emergency. That’s the philosophy behind Disaster READY Training, a collaboration  of READYColorado, the Governor’s Office of Homeland Security and the City and County of Denver.

On Tuesday, nearly 40 middle school students from around the metro area got a day’s worth of instruction, not just in anti-terrorism tactics but also in first aid, CPR, family and pet preparedness, weather spotting and team building. An expanded four-day training will be offered July 20-23 to interested high school students at the Denver Police Academy. The training is free, though enrollment is limited.

“These are lifelong skills that we’re empowering them with,” said Cathy Prudhomme, Community Preparedness Program Manager for the Governor’s Office of Homeland Security. “The first aid and the safety training is stuff they can use on a day-to-day basis.”

“I think middle schoolers are wonderfully impressionable,” said Deborah Collburn, director of the Animal Emergency Management Program for the Colorado Veterinary Medical Foundation. Collburn was there to teach the youngsters how to prepare their pets in case their families were forced to evacuate from their home.

“They bring things home with them and share them with their parents. Reaching out to kids is a great way to change behaviors. Kids will nag you to death,” she said. “And kids are passionate about their animals. They may be willing to leave their brother or sister behind, but they’ll make sure they have a plan for their pets.”

The youngsters learned how to pack a “72-hour kit,” an easy-to-carry container filled with all the things they and their pets would need if they were forced to flee from their home. In it: non-perishable food, a flashlight, first aid items, medications, a battery-operated radio, some small hand tools, a change of clothing, personal hygiene items and money, among other things.

“We hope to do this in more schools next year,” said Collburn, of the pilot project. “We hope to see these kids being leaders in their schools when they go back in the fall.”

Denver Police Captain Jennifer Steck, program manager for READYColorado, said that while the middle schoolers may be too young to perform strenuous CPR, they’re not too young to prove valuable assets in an emergency.

“Thing of any disaster we’ve had, and kids were there,” she said. “Police won’t get there until after the fact. With a little bit of information and training, these kids can save people’s lives – and they do, every day.”

Rebecca Jones can be reached at rjones@ednewscolorado.org.

Poster for the new video You Are Not Alone, featuring nine Colorado Springs youth.

Krystal Brennan pulls no punches when she speaks about her mental illness, her bisexuality, the sexual violence she has suffered – and her ongoing struggle with thoughts of suicide.

“In November 2007 I was diagnosed with bipolar and depression,” said Brennan, who turns 18 in July. “It sucks. I’ve done time in a mental institution as well. I used to cut myself. It was really bad. I was at rock bottom for awhile. I don’t even know why I’m here today.”

The Colorado Springs teen-ager is one of nine young people who tell their stories on a new documentary video, You Are Not Alone, which premiered in Colorado Springs last week. The video is a joint project of the Suicide Prevention Partnership of the Pikes Peak Region and Inside/Out Youth Services, an organization to empower and advocate for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, and other sexual minority youth. Sponsors hope to use the video in presentations at schools, churches and other venues where teen suicide prevention is taught, or where teen violence is discussed.

Suicide is the second-leading cause of death among Coloradans ages 10-34, and with an average of 800 Coloradans committing suicide every year, the state had the ninth highest rate of suicide in the country in 2006, the most recent year for which national data is available. Colorado Springs has been especially hard hit by youth suicide.

“In 2009, we lost 10 youth in Colorado Springs to suicide, the youngest being 12,” said Janet Karnes, director of the Suicide Prevention Partnership.

One group that is especially at risk is teens who are anything other than straight in their sexual orientation. Karnes can’t say how many of the recorded teen suicides involved issues of sexuality – sexual status isn’t listed on death certificates – but she feels certain the number is substantial. “Other studies have shown that the LGBT community is at much higher risk of suicide attempts and completions,” she said. “The bullying, the hatred all definitely contribute to this.”

The video project grew out of a suicide prevention training project that Karnes led at Inside/Out a year ago. She learned that while the teens were reluctant to call suicide hotlines, they often did call each other when they were contemplating suicide. “A lot of them were fielding phone calls that normally professionals would handle,” she said. “So we trained them in the warning signs, the risk factors, how to know when they are in over their heads. We taught them things that normally we would teach adults.”

Out of those weekly conversations came the idea to film a video. The Suicide Prevention Partnership obtained an $8,000 grant from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment to do something around teen violence prevention in the LGBT community. The teens who volunteered to participate met weekly for six weeks.

“The first night the kids came, we spent time having them write their stories, what their experiences had been with violence. It turned out to be all different kinds of violence,” said Joy Yeakley, a graduate student in social work who did her internship at SPP. “Some of the kids were part of the LGBT population. Some were straight but had seen gay friends encounter violence. After that first night, we didn’t spend a lot of time talking about it, because it’s traumatic. We didn’t want them to have to tell it over and over and over again. Instead we got together to focus on self-care, on holistic health.”

Susan Davis, a holistic health consultant and the video’s director, fed them healthy meals and talked to them about how nutrition affects mood and behavior. She led them through guided imagery, stress reduction techniques and deep breathing exercises, as well as brainstorming about what they’d like the rest of the world to know about them. “We always made sure we closed with guided imagery because after focusing on some pretty hard stuff, a lot of the kids were wound up pretty tight,” Yeakley said. “It was helpful for them to unwind and release some of that stuff.”

Then, at the final meeting, they turned on the cameras and let the teens say whatever they wanted. “They didn’t rehearse,” Karnes said. “They didn’t script it out. It came from their hearts and not their heads. It’s not Hollywood. But that adds to the charm of it. They’re not actors.” The music in the video was written and performed by one of the teens, a transgendered youth, and the only one who chose to remain anonymous in the film.

Yeakley confesses she was shocked by some of the stories the teens told: Rape, family violence, abusive dating relationships, betrayal by friends. “It was pretty intense,” she said. “The more I heard, the more impressed I was with how much courage they had to share their stories.”

Brennan simply wants people to know that she and other sexual minority youth deal with issues just like other people. “We’re all real people. We’re not some made-up TV show,” she said. “Maybe this video will help other people get the help they need and talk to other people.”

Christine Sturgill, 20, another participant in the video, said she’s contemplated suicide, and has lost friends to suicide, but that her sexuality has actually helped her through the rough times.

“I consider myself pansexual,” said Sturgill, who recently left college and now has a sales job in Colorado Springs. “But I just say queer to make it easier. I came out just about a year ago. I was questioning for a couple of years, but it never really affected me in a negative way. So I’m lucky in that sense. Being in the queer community has actually helped me. It’s dealing with the bipolar and the ADHD and the health problems that’s really been hard.”

Brandon Brennan, Krystal’s twin brother, also participated in the making of the video, though he wasn’t present the day of the filming, so is not seen on camera. Like his sister, he too has struggled with thoughts of suicide. His most serious attempt came at 15, soon after he came out as gay.

“It was a hard time for me,” he said. “It was one of those things where people were making fun of me so bad that I thought the best way to handle it was to off myself. The way I got past that was through the help of family and friends. I realized there may not be a lot of people there for me, but there are some people who do matter. I realized they still needed me and I needed them. I realized I was happier living than making everyone else sad around me.”

Davis, the film’s director, said she initially thought it would be a 15-minute production. It wound up at 24 minutes because she just couldn’t cut any of the stories they told. “These kids are brilliant, by the way,” Davis said.

She hopes that the film will be shown to groups of teens, either in church youth groups or in school health classes. “You don’t want to just watch it and leave. There should be some type of processing with that information. Chances are, whoever you’re showing it to can related to at least one of these stories.”

Karnes said she’s already seen the film have an impact. “I showed it to some kids at an alternative school,” she said. “Before class, one boy said he didn’t like gay people. But after he watched the film, he said he couldn’t believe he had something in common with a lesbian. They were both bipolar.”

To get a copy of the video, or to arrange for a suicide prevention presentation, contact Karnes at the Suicide Prevention Partnership, 719-573-7447, or info@pikespeaksuicideprevention.org.

To call the statewide 24-hour hotline for the LGBTQ community: 1-888-557-4441.

For more information

A host of resources, reports and statistic are available at the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment’s Office of Suicide Prevention website.

To read the Colorado Office of Suicide Prevention Annual Report for 2008-09, click here.

More resources, including best practices in suicide prevention, are available at the Suicide Prevention Resource Center website.

The Second Wind Fund serves Colorado youth at risk for suicide by ensuring they have access to mental health quickly, efficiently, frequently and in their neighborhoods. Click here for more information.

Nearby, other students sharpened fine motor skills as they threw and caught balls one after another in a “group-juggling” exercise.

And in the far corner of the gym, another group of students gleefully practiced their zombie walk as they learned the steps to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” dance.

Other activities in the week’s agenda - fencing with foam noodles, hip-hop dancing, jumping jack tag, Frisbee fitness routines, building foam brick skyscrapers, jump rope routines and creepy crawler tag.

The students are all Colorado physical education teachers and the instructors are all national award-winners who’ve come from around the country to participate in the 8^th annual Denver Public Schools Physical Education and Dance Summer Institute, a three-day affair that culminates Wednesday at Metropolitan State College.

Though it looks for all the world like summer camp for adults, it’s actually a professional development course that gradually is changing the way physical education is taught in Colorado, said Eric Larson, DPS physical education coordinator and organizer of the event.

Barb Francklyn, P.E. teacher at Foothills Elementary in Colorado Springs, tries bouncing a ball with a frog-shaped beanbag atop it.

“What they’re learning at the institute, they take back to their classrooms,” he said. “Everything they’re going through is a learning situation for them, so they can go back and keep their kids as active as possible. It’s all standards-based so while it looks like a lot of fun and games, they’re actually learning how to better assess students’ progress and how to better work with their students when they get back to the classroom.”

This year’s institute drew 240 teachers, including 107 of DPS’ 169 P.E. teachers. Others came from around the state, some from as far away as Dolores, nearly eight hours west of Denver, for the chance to take part – and to earn continuing education credits.

“I just want to learn more fitness routines,” said Emily Hill, a P.E. teacher at Stuart Middle School in the Brighton School District. “My favorite instructor is Jo Dixon, from Fort Collins. She’s awesome! This absolutely will make me a better teacher.”

Dixon, P.E. teacher at Fort Collins High School, was the 2005 National Association for Sport and Physical Education’s Central District Middle School Physical Education Teacher of the Year. She led workshops in warm-ups to get youngsters smiling, sweating and having fun. “I want a warm-up to increase their heart rate, warm up their muscles for activity, allow students to socialize and get oxygen to the brain,” she said.

But face it, doing the “Thriller Dance” is just fun, no matter how old you are. Watch teachers learning to do the famous dance from the Michael Jackson video below:

Instructor Rich Cendali, who has been teaching physical education at Boulder Valley’s Douglass Elementary School for 28 years, is another former Physical Education Teacher of the Year. He, too, is  a passionate promoter of youngsters having fun in physical education class.

“You are the most important person in the school,” Cendali told his colleagues, just before inviting students to join in a game of tag. “Because what does everyone want to do? Play! Do they want to do math all day? No! But you have to be enthusiastic.”

“That’s why I’m still teaching after all these years,” he said. “Where else can you play all day and still get paid?”

Melanie Champion, a former National Middle School P.E. Teacher of the Year from North Carolina, has Colorado colleagues racing around the gym to teach them energizing games youngsters love to play.

There was one sit-down-and-listen type of class: “Unpacking the Colorado Physical Education Content Standards.” It’s the class Larson is most excited about.

“I think the word ‘unpacking’ is a good word,” he said. “We’re coming up with a curriculum road map, ideas for incorporating those new standards into the classroom instead of just having them down on a piece of paper.”

Tabatha Sisneros, physical education teacher at The Academy, a charter school in Broomfield, said she liked all the activities.

“This is very innovative,” she said. “I probably won’t do a lot of yoga with my kids but yoga bingo, that’s pretty cool!”

Instructors at the summer institute include Kathy Wagner, 2008 NASPE National Elementary P.E. Teacher of the Year, from Wichita, Kan.; Melanie Champion, 2001 NASPE National Middle School P.E. Teacher of the Year, from Holden Beach, N.C.; Debbie Buenger, 2008 NASPE National High School P.E. Teacher of the Year, from Westminster, Md.; Lisa Summers, 2009 NASPE National High School P.E. Teacher of the Year, from Olympia, Wash.; Mary Ann Laverty, 2009 National Dance Association Dance Educator of the year, from Newport News, Va.; and Dave Martinez, 2009 American Association for Physical Activity and Recreation Adaptive PE Teacher of the Year, from Jasper, Ga..

Also, Pam Powers, 2004 NASPE southwest district Elementary PE Teacher of the Year and the director of education services for Sporttime, which markets physical education equipment; Billy Gober, past coordinator of training for NASPE Teachers of the Year, from Elizabethton, Tenn.; Cindy Gober, the Tennessee Middle and High School P.E. Teacher of the Year, also from Elizabethton; and Sue Brittenham, physical education coordinator for Boulder Valley Schools.

Rebecca Jones can be reached at rjones@ednewscolorado.org.

A fourth-grader at Aurora's AXL Academy weaves his bike through cones during the school's bike rodeo to promote biking to school safely.

Ten-year-old Ammon Davis was rounding the last curve in the bicycle obstacle course set up outside Aurora’s AXL Academy recently when disaster struck. He’d taken his eyes off the path just long enough to hit a curb and take a painful tumble off his bike.

And thus are some of life’s most valuable lessons learned: while getting knocked off one’s bike, either literally or figuratively.

“I learned not to crash,” said Ammon, who manfully got up and remounted after a few moments resting on the ground. “I’ll go more carefully now.”

Riding safely was the theme of the day at AXL’s recent bike rodeo for fourth graders, which culminated two months of in-depth study on the greater issue of how to get more youngsters out of their parents’ cars and onto their bikes or onto their feet and thus burn more calories and become more fit.

AXL got a $1,000 grant to fund the project from the National Center for Safe Routes to School, a four-year-old organization funded through the Federal Highway Administration to help communities encourage pedestrian and bicycle safety. Elsewhere across the state, schools and municipalities have received federal grants, administered through the Colorado Department of Transportation, ranging from just a few thousand dollars to nearly a quarter of a million dollars to develop pedestrian and bike safety programs and to install infrastructure improvements to make walking or biking to school a safer, more attractive prospect.

It’s all part of the national Safe Routes to School initiative, a crusade in which Colorado is among the leading states.

Jay Pierce, Bicycle and Pedestrian Safety Coordinator for the city of Aurora, goes over safety techniques with a bike rodeo participant.

A generation ago, most kids walked or rode their bikes to school. Today, however, fewer than 15 percent of American schoolchildren regularly do so. While that alone doesn’t account for the current obesity epidemic among children, it may well be one of a number of contributing factors, say experts.

What’s more, as much as 30 percent of morning traffic is created by parents driving their children to school, studies show.

But don’t blame laziness or indulgent parents for the uptick in chauffeur-driven students. Rather, community design and changing travel patterns largely account for the decrease in school-bound pedestrians. Many more people live in suburbs now, and suburban schools tend to be less than pedestrian-friendly.

“If a school is built four miles away from a major housing development, kids will either have to ride a bus or be driven,” said Christine Fischer, organizer for the Colorado Safe Routes to Schools network. “And that’s the trend for a lot of reasons. The idea was, if you set a school off on its own, it’s easy to get to for cars, but not necessarily for kids.”

In fact, low-income children – particularly those in older, urban neighborhoods – are significantly more likely to walk to school than their more affluent peers, but these children have different obstacles. Poor air quality and speeding traffic may put them at risk.

“How are the streets designed?” Fischer asked. “Are there sidewalks? Are the roads so wide it gives the appearance to drivers that they can drive faster than they should because it looks like a freeway? All these things factor into walk-ability or bike-ability.”

That’s what AXL students were looking for when they fanned out over the neighborhood to assess the impediments to pedestrians headed to their school. And they put their findings in letters to policy-makers.

“Dear Gov. Ritter,” wrote 10-year-old Kira Hopkins. “Around my school there are barely any safety precautions. There are no crosswalks, school crossing signs, yield or stop signs. I think you should help solve this problem.”

Mara Wood noticed that nearby Jewell Elementary School is in a traffic safety zone, where speed limits are lower, but the safety zone ends before it reaches AXL, a newer charter school located in a more industrial area.  “If we are not part of the zone, cars will think they can speed up,” Mara complained. “Another thing I’m very concerned about is that we do not have a crosswalk at Jewell and Blackhawk. This really pushes my buttons because some kids live in those apartments and they have to cross a busy street.”

“I noticed that there were trees on the sidewalk and made it hard to walk,” pointed out Michelle Do. “I think someone should cut the long branches…My group noticed that there were some electrical boxes next to the sidewalk without fences around them.”

Leah Miller, director of community development at AXL, acknowledges that few students at the school – which currently houses 280 children grades K-6, but will expand next year to pre-K-7 – walk or bike to class. “Maybe a dozen do,” she said. “But we’re hoping that next year we can start a ‘walking school bus,’ so maybe parents will feel more comfortable letting them walk. There are some problems that we discovered on the walking route from the school to Tiera Park, but there are a lot of good things about the route too.”

“Walking school buses” involve parents who serve as designated walkers with a group of children. They walk along a designated route, similar to a school bus route, picking kids up along the way. Parents at Aurora’s Fletcher Elementary School launched just such a program last fall.

Elsewhere around Colorado, a number of school districts have launched Safe Routes to School programs with varying degrees of success.

In Boulder Valley, the Freiker (short for “frequent biker”) Program (recently renamed Boltage) uses some innovative, solar-powered technology to let students track the number of days they walk or bike to school, and wirelessly upload the data to a website. The “freikers” earn prizes based on how often they walk or ride. Proponents say the program has been so successful that at one school, Crest View Elementary, the number of bicyclists has doubled, and on any given day about 25 percent of students ride their bikes to school.

In Longmont, students get bike safety tips from cycling instructors, and stage “Walk or Wheel Thursdays,” and students who participate can participate in raffles. Eagle Crest Elementary experienced a nearly 40 percent reduction in motor vehicle traffic thanks to its “Step Out and Soar” program.

In Calhan, the school principal has started a walking club for students, and offers prizes – gift cards for new sneakers – for students who fill up a punch card with regular walks.

Superior Elementary School, in Superior, recently got a grant to create a series of educational videos to address safe walking and bicycling. The series will be designed and produced by students and parent volunteers, then will be integrated into the school’s curriculum.

Numbers of districts sponsor a “Walk to School” day, usually in the fall, but Fischer fears that single-day events don’t spark much permanent change in behavior. What’s really needed is sustained advocacy at the local policy-making level, so officials take pedestrian and bicyclist concerns into account when siting schools or developing infrastructure.

That’s where Fischer comes in. Colorado recently received funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to create a state network for Safe Routes to Schools. That network, headed by Fischer and administered through The Children’s Hospital, is working on a state action plan to address some of the underlying infrastructure and school curriculum issues that impact pedestrians.

For example, state education officials have not yet created a statewide bicycle and pedestrian safety curriculum to be taught in Colorado classrooms. Thus, schools who want to teach such programs must rely on local programs run by volunteer groups. Meanwhile, physical education teachers – the group most likely to teach such a curriculum – find their class time squeezed out and the programs scaled back.

The city of Fort Collins recently won a Safe Routes to School grant to identify and test successful curricula and to create a prototype that could be used throughout Colorado.

“Colorado is already a leader,” Fischer said. “This gives us a way to get a network created, up and running, sustainable, and really taking it to the next level. There are pockets of schools who have information on Safe Routes to Schools, because they’re applied for grants. Or there are pockets of parents who know about this. But the majority of people don’t know anything about it. Neither do town boards who make the decisions about what housing developments should look like. We have an opportunity to really advocate and explain and give the message to them, so they’ll make policy changes at the local level.”

Fischer notes that the Safe Routes to School Network is interested in recruiting members. “School board members, parents, representatives from health organizations, law enforcement – anyone is welcome,” she said. “We really want to grow. We want to cover all areas of the state.” The network meets monthly. E-mail her at Colorado@saferoutespartnership.org for information.

For more information

• Click here to read more about Safe Routes to Schools nationally.
• Click here for information about the Safe Routes to Schools Partnership in Colorado.
• Click here for information about resources available through the Colorado Department of Transportation’s Bicycle and Pedestrian Program.

Mindi Wolf, food service director for Keenesburg and Fort Lupton schools, uses a meat thermometer to check the doneness of some roasted chicken.

Wendy Blake and her two kitchen assistants turned out 56,000 meals this past school year to feed the students in Wiggins. Blake, the food services director for the school district, admits they relied on a lot of processed frozen food in order to do it.

But Blake says she learned a valuable lesson in kitchen time management this week. “I’ve learned it takes the same half hour to thaw and reheat chicken nuggets that it takes to roast a fresh chicken,” she said.

You can bet that Wiggins students are going to be seeing more roasted chicken and fewer chicken nuggets next year. More fresh produce and less frozen commodities. More scratch cooking and less reheated processed fare.

Wiggins food services director Wendy Blake gets a lesson in handling roasted chicken.

Blake was one of two dozen nutrition directors and school cafeteria staff to participate in a free five-day School Chef Culinary Boot Camp at Adams City High School in Commerce City this week. By the end of July, more than 100 school food service workers from 32 districts around the state will have been through the training, which is also scheduled for Colorado Springs, Montrose and Aurora. Last year, 11 districts participated in similar boot camps.

The boot camps, led by two New York City chefs who specialize in school lunch reform, are coordinated by LiveWell Colorado and funded by the Colorado Health Foundation and by a federal grant. The students get hands-on training in the fundamentals of scratch cooking, knife skills, kitchen time management, food safety, recipe and menu development, breakfast strategies and tips on things like commodity ordering and even promoting nutritious school lunches on Facebook.

Total investment in each student is about $3,000, said Venita Robinson-Currie, who is coordinating the boot camps for LiveWell.

“I don’t expect everything will change tomorrow,” said Chef Andrea Martin, who put the students through their paces Thursday morning barbecuing chicken, whipping up mashed potatoes and enough other dishes to serve a cafeteria-ful of visitors, there to check out the progress of the boot camp. “But we’re teaching them culinary techniques, professionalism. And there are some immediate steps they can all take. They can look at what they’re serving. They can eliminate chocolate milk and replace it with low-fat milk. They can serve cereal with little or no added sugar. They can make sauces and salad dressings from scratch.”

“Our goal is to ensure that every student in Colorado gets nourishing and delicious meals at school, which is vitally important in reducing childhood obesity,” said Maren C. Stewart, president and CEO of LiveWell Colorado. “These boot camps do not simply teach school food service personnel how to prepare healthier meals. They also arm them with the tools to build and sustain school food programs that will positively impact the health of Colorado’s children.”

And by all accounts, Colorado’s children are in dire need of some help. A 2008 study found that only 8 percent of Colorado children eat the recommended amounts of fruit and vegetables daily. More than a quarter of children ages 10-17 in Colorado are overweight or obese. In 2003, Colorado ranked third in the nation for fewest obese children. By 2007, Colorado had slipped to 23^rd.

Weight problems are particularly acute among the low income. According to a 2007 study, 24.7 percent of Colorado children who live in households where the income is less than $25,000 are obese. In households where income is greater than $75,000, just 8.8 percent are obese.

Since school lunches and breakfasts take on an especially critical role in meeting the nutritional needs of the poor, the culinary boot camps are being offered free to school districts of at least 5,000 students in which at least 40 percent of the students qualify for free or reduced lunches. In Commerce City – Adams County District 14 – 82 percent of students qualify for free or reduced lunches.

In addition to the training, each participating district will receive a grant of $1,000 to buy kitchen equipment to help in the preparation of fresh foods.

Culinary boot camp students sample the fresh mashed potatoes.

“We have a lot of equipment issues,” complained Mindi Wolf, food services director for Keenesburg and Fort Lupton schools. “We have ovens and that’s it. If we could get an immersion blender and some slicers, then we could do a lot of stuff. But we just don’t have the staff right now to be slicing vegetables. Maybe in two or three years…”

Back in the kitchen, Jeremy West, director of food services for Weld County District 6 in Greeley, marveled at the low-fat macaroni-and-cheese dish he was making. “We learned to make a sauce from butternut squash, so there’s actually very little cheese in this,” he said. “It’s very low-fat, and it’s delicious. We could do this in Greeley.”

For more information

Click here to read the 2009 Colorado Health Report Card, published by the Colorado Health Foundation

A child gets a lunch of low-fat pizza, milk and grapes at Denver's Eagleton Elementary School, one of 40 DPS schools to run a free summertime feeding program.

Children’s learning isn’t the only thing that takes a hit during the long summer vacation. For many low-income children, school may be the only place they’re assured of a good meal so summer can mean nutritional setbacks or outright hunger.

But thanks to a coalition of anti-hunger groups and the governor’s office, Colorado has launched an aggressive campaign to expand the Summer Food Service Programs offered at schools, churches and other venues around the state, and to publicize the availability of free meals in communities where the need is great.

More than 275 feeding sites have opened or will soon open for the summer, all offering free lunches and many offering free breakfasts as well for children aged 1-18. Adults are welcome to eat too, for a $3 charge. No registration or proof of income is required. The nutritionally balanced meals are funded through the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Officials hope to feed at least 25,000 children in Colorado this summer, a dramatic increase from previous years. In 2008, only 15,000 Colorado children participated in a summer feeding program. But with more than 300,000 children in the state qualifying for free or reduced-price lunches during the school year, that put Colorado 46^th in the nation in the percentage of low-income children participating in a summer program.

“Ninety-two percent of kids who qualify for food assistance don’t get it in the summer,” said Katharine Moos, program manager for the Colorado Campaign to End Childhood Hunger. “And with the economy the way it is, and one in five families experiencing food hardship, it’s safe to assume there are even more families out there who need this program.”

Connie Harlow, senior consultant and administrator of the Summer Food Program for the Colorado Department of Education, recalled an e-mail she got last summer from a woman running a day camp for children sponsored by the Salvation Army. The woman had asked one of the young campers what he liked most about the camp, which offered such amenities as trout ponds, soccer fields and paddle boats. “He said his favorite thing at camp was getting three meals a day,” Harlow said. “That just points out how lacking a lot of children are in getting the nutrition they need.”

Moos shares a story from a colleague in Texas who said one boy confessed to him that he deliberately failed his classes so he would be required to go to summer school because he knew at school he could get a meal. “That’s heartbreaking,” Moos said. “This little boy, to use wonky bureaucratic terms, was managing his food insecurity. But if that happened in Texas, where the rates of participation in summer food programs are about the same as in Colorado, then it’s happening here as well.”

Last fall, the Campaign to End Childhood Hunger was launched in partnership with Gov. Bill Ritter, Lt. Gov. O’Barbara O’Brien, the national anti-hunger organization Share Our Strength, and Hunger Free Colorado. The campaign has been working for months to recruit new sites and new partners to participate in the summer feeding program.

On June 2, Denver Public Schools – which operates more than 40 Summer Feeding Program sites – kicked off the summer by bringing in Denver Nuggets star Chauncey Billups and O’Brien to join youngsters having lunch at Eagleton Elementary School in west Denver.  On the menu: pizza with whole-wheat crust and low-fat cheese, fresh fruit, vegetable sticks and milk. Government regulations require the meals to contain a minimum of 2 ounces of protein, a serving of grain, a serving of milk and ¾-cup of two different fruits and vegetables.

“At our height last year, when all the sites were open, our high day was about 14,000 kids,” said Bob Gorman, area food service supervisor for DPS. “After July 4, the numbers really die down. But during the school year, we feed between 40,000 and 50,000.”

Many of the schools and other meal venues run day camp programs for children during the summer. But officials stress that the meals aren’t limited just to children participating in those activities. “The program is set up for kid who don’t have a place to go and need something to eat,” Gorman said. “It doesn’t matter your income or your eligibility, if you can get there, we’ll feed you.”

Hours vary from site to site but most serve lunch around 11 to noon. Those that serve breakfast generally do so around 8 a.m.

“In some areas, seniors like to go and eat too because they’re getting a balanced lunch for less than $3, and they like to interact with the children,” said Harlow. “It’s kind of a win/win situation for everybody.”

Successful as officials have been in getting more feeding sites running in urban and suburban areas, rural areas still pose problems.

“There are some areas where children just don’t have the transportation to get from their home to where a summer feeding program may be located,” Harlow said. “People don’t sponsor sites in rural areas because kids can’t get there so it’s a vicious cycle.”

For more information

For information about the Colorado Summer Food Service program, including an interactive map to locate the feeding sites nearest your home, click here.

For background information on the Summer Food Service Program, including its legislative history, reimbursement rates, and current priorities, click here.