Focus Area: School & After School

Strengthening the Impact of USDA’s Child Nutrition Summer Feeding Programs During and After the COVID-19 Pandemic

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To address food insecurity during the COVID-19 pandemic, utilization of the USDA child nutrition summer feeding programs has drastically increased. Given the unprecedented use of the summer feeding programs, this research brief will (1) explain the meal pattern requirements and select operational differences between the summer feeding programs and the federal meal programs typically utilized More

Special Issue on School Nutrition and Meal Cost Study-I: Findings Related to Improving Diet Quality, Weight, and Disparities in U.S. Children

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School meals are important contributors to the healthy diets of our nation’s children, especially those in food insecure households, according to new papers published in a special issue of the journal Nutrients. The papers address urgent policy challenges related to food security, childhood obesity, sugar consumption, and racial and ethnic disparities when it comes to More

Creating Policy and Practice Guidelines to Protect Students from Digital Food Marketing on Educational Devices and Platforms

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The massive shift to learning on digital devices makes the need for effective policies to address digital food marketing more urgent than ever. The proposed study aims to develop and disseminate digital food marketing (DM) policy and practice guidelines for state education agencies and school districts to limit DM to elementary and middle school students. More

Schools Find Success in Reducing Sodium in Meals

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Strong nutrition standards for school meals, consistent with evidence-based recommendations, position children for optimal health and wellbeing. Strong science supports the link between lowering sodium intake and better health. This new issue brief from Healthy Eating Research examines the recent history of sodium standards for school meals. It highlights current sodium intake among America’s children and School More

Cost-Effectiveness of Commonly Used Childhood Obesity Interventions in Schools and ECE Settings to Inform Strategic Planning

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This project will identify commonly used obesity prevention programs that have limited effectiveness for obesity prevention and are thus a suboptimal use of limited public health resources. The specific aims are to: 1) Identify two commonly implemented childhood obesity prevention interventions targeting children ages 0-8 that may lack evidence for impact; 2) Conduct a systematic More

Drinking water access in California schools: Room for improvement following implementation of school water policies

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This study aimed to investigate how access to free drinking water in California public schools changed after implementation of 2010 federal and state school water policies. Repeated cross-sectional surveys were conducted with administrators in a random sample of California public schools, stratified by school type and urban-centric geography, from 2010 to 2011 (n = 240) More

Urban School Food Infrastructure: Current Issues, Challenges, and Solutions

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In the next year, an estimated 1 in 4 children will experience food insecurity (up from 1 in 6, pre-pandemic), disproportionately impacting children in low-income households and racial/ethnic minorities. To mediate loss of school meals during closures and reduce COVID-19 exposure, Congress authorized the USDA to permit local education authorities to apply approaches from the More

Addressing Equity in Rural Schools: Opportunities and Challenges for School Meal Standards Implementation

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Few studies examine why rural public schools have weaker policies and practices related to school nutrition environments compared to their urban counterparts. It is important to understand this disparity because federal school meal standards aim for children to access health‐promoting nutrition environments. In this study, we identify challenges and opportunities for the implementation of school More

Wellness School Assessment Tool Version 3.0: An Updated Quantitative Measure of Written School Wellness Policies

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Schools play an important role in promoting student wellness. As directed by the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act, the US Department of Agriculture updated the requirements for written school wellness policies in 2016. The WellSAT (Wellness School Assessment Tool) is an online tool that provides a quantitative score for wellness policy comprehensiveness and strength. The WellSAT More