Advocates are sounding the alarm that students are going hungry during Alberta’s teacher strike.
On a normal day, Lacombe Composite High School’s (LCHS) innovative food program helps feed many of the school’s 800 students a hot meal, and gives a healthy snack to over 200 students. Now program advisor and science teacher Steven Schultz worries students are going hungry.
While Danielle Smith’s government has offered $30 a day for parents that wish to homeschool their children during Alberta’s teacher strike, the UCP has made no offers to support the over 58,000 children across the province who need school food programs.
The teacher strike has highlighted the importance of school food programs, like the one in Lacombe, and of government support for these programs.
From solar panels to beehives
LCHS has built up a robust food program on campus. The program gives agricultural and business experience to participating students as well as fresh food to the student body and local restaurants. It also sends plants and materials to surrounding schools so they can grow their own food.
But the program didn’t start out with a food focus.
Twenty years ago, one of Steven Schultz’s students told him she wanted to do something about global warming. With the teacher’s support, she and a team of students fundraised money to install solar panels on the roof of the school.
Unfortunately, the solar panels were destroyed in a fire not long after. But out of this a movement was born. Searching for a new project, the school partnered with the Colorado Permaculture Institute to install a dome greenhouse on campus, in which they could grow tropical plants year-round. They planted bananas, figs, pineapples, and herbs.
“We quickly realized that we were growing more than we could use in our cafeteria. So we started thinking about ways of expanding this project into the community,” Schultz told TheRockies.Life in an interview.
This became a business opportunity for students. As businesses and community members latched onto the idea of local food production, the program expanded.
Today, LCHS has a food forest, greenhouse, apiary, and goat barn on campus, and offers students and Lacombe residents opportunities to learn about each of these.
The birth of a school food program
Food security, especially among children, is a growing concern in Alberta. Nearly forty per cent of Albertan kids don’t have steady access to good food, according to recent reports. While the federal government recently gave Alberta $42 million over three years, critics say this is a far cry from the amount governments need to invest to address childhood hunger.
LCHS has felt the impact of the hunger issue on campus as well. After the pandemic, Schultz partnered with a social studies teacher on campus to conduct a survey on student hunger. He’d noticed that the Costco chicken he brought to school once a week would be devoured within a day.
“Kids in our school were going hungry,” he said.
They discovered that 21 per cent of students were food insecure and four per cent were severely food insecure.
With the data to support their hypothesis that students were going hungry, they were able to convince school administration that food security was indeed an issue in the school. It led them to launch their daily snack program.
They also taught kids about how to become self-sufficient at home. “We started offering food preservation workshops which were also extremely well attended. How to make jam, how to process honey, how to pickle, how to preserve food. how to dehydrate,” Schultz said.
The program’s most recent project is learning how to maintain their food supplies even in drought. “Through our initial research we’ve discovered that plants, especially during times of drought, have too much sun. So we’re going to come up with an experimental system where you can grow food underneath a variety of different solar arrangements,” Schultz said.
These solar panels will then provide further energy for the school and its food program, completing the cycle.
Local food builds local economies, says advocate
Local food production is “an economic shot in the arm for the rural communities,” Alberta Food Matters Chair Wanda Laurin told TheRockies.Life in an interview.
Programs such as LCHS’s don’t just feed students. They provide small business opportunities for students and local farmers. They connect people to the land and build community. They teach families about healthy eating.
She’d like to see governments at all levels invest much more in food programs to address the province’s hunger issues. “Right now the spending per kid across the country is dismal,” she said.
If this food were also grown locally, as is the case in Lacombe, it would also be “a game changer for rural economics,” she said.
