Whole and 2% milk will return to public school lunchrooms soon

Like most school children, dairy cows love to eat.
(Adobe Stock photo)

After more than a decade of advocacy, whole and 2% milk will be served in public school cafeterias. "Congress has approved the Whole Milk for Healthy Kids Act, marking a major shift in federal school nutrition policy," reports Taylor Leach of Dairy Herd Management. "The bill now awaits the president’s signature, with implementation expected as early as the next school year."

The new legislation reverses rules from the 2012 Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, which aimed to reduce childhood obesity and lower kids' saturated fat intake by restricting school milk options to fat-free and 1%. The bill aimed for students to get the nutrition milk provides without the fat. 

And while the 2012 change was meant to improve children's health, it kept running into a major obstacle. "At home, many kids drink 2% or whole milk. And when the milk at school tastes different, the kids don’t drink it," reports Hannah Barthels of Farm Journal. "And they miss out on the nutrients dairy provides."

Multiple studies on whole milk's impact on childhood obesity have consistently shown that "milk fat has a neutral or even positive effect on health outcomes," Leach explains. "That evolving science, combined with changing consumer preferences, helped build bipartisan support for restoring flexibility in school milk offerings."

The addition of whole and 2% milk offerings in schools is also a big win for American dairy farmers. "School meal programs account for nearly 8% of all fluid milk sales," Leach reports. "The bill’s passage represents the culmination of more than a decade of effort by dairy advocates, lawmakers and industry stakeholders."

Missouri's rural teachers are among the lowest paid in the country; lack of state tax revenue is partially to blame

 Missouri's rural teachers are 'second-worst paid' in the
U.S. (Photo by Tristen Rouse, St. Louis Public Radio)

American teacher salaries have not kept pace with other college graduate professions, and for rural areas, the wage disparities continue to grow. In Missouri, a new report on rural education found that the "state's rural teachers are paid better only than those in Arkansas," reports Kate Grumke of St. Louis Public Radio. "Missouri also has one of the lowest rates of state tax revenue, meaning the burden for funding schools falls heavily on local taxpayers."

The study "collected salary expenses in rural school districts across the country and divided those by the number of teachers in the district to calculate teacher pay, "Grumke explains. "They found Missouri's rural school districts spend less on each teacher than every state except Arkansas. The researchers used a cost-of-living adjustment to more accurately compare compensation."

Nationally, Missouri falls lower on teacher pay, but "this report highlights the acute issues in rural parts of the state," Grumke writes. "Low salaries in rural districts often lead to high turnover, as teachers move to nearby suburban districts that often pay significantly more, said Phil Murray, president of the Missouri National Education Association and a former teacher."

Like many rural schools searching for low-cost teacher retention fixes, some Missouri schools have implemented a 4-day school week. Jon Turner, an associate professor at Missouri State University who studies rural schools, told Grumpke: "We've now passed the 30% mark of the number of schools that are on the four-day school week, and almost all of them are rural schools. One of the primary factors of that is because rural schools struggle to hire and retain high-quality teachers."

Grumpke reports,"Missouri also had one of the lowest rates of state tax revenue compared to local revenue; the state contributes about 75 cents for every dollar of local funding. This heavy reliance on local property taxes creates significant challenges in rural school districts and other districts where property values are low.

"Missouri is really an outlier here in that we put all the burden of operating rural schools on the local taxpayer," Turner told Grumpke. "And sometimes the teachers and the kids pay the price because there's not as much tax revenue coming in at the end of the year to support those rural schools." 

Home schooling is America's fastest-growing form of education, but some are concerned about the results

The Washington Post graph

Amid school shootings, political polarization, controversial mask mandates, teacher strikes and student-to-student bullying, the U.S. educational system has been under tremendous pressure in recent years. In response, many parents are opting for an unconventional approach. "Home schooling has become — by a wide margin — America's fastest-growing form of education," report Peter Jamison, Laura Meckler, Prayag Gordy, Clara Ence Morse and Chris Alcantara of The Washington Post. "As families from Upper Manhattan to Eastern Kentucky embrace a largely unregulated practice once confined to the ideological fringe, a Washington Post analysis shows. . . . It is a remarkable expansion for a form of instruction that 40 years ago was still considered illegal in much of the country."

"The analysis — based on data The Post collected for thousands of school districts across the country — reveals that a dramatic rise in home schooling at the onset of the pandemic has largely sustained itself through the 2022-23 academic year, defying predictions that most families would return to schools that have dispensed with mask mandates and other covid-19 restrictions," the Post reports. "The growth demonstrates home schooling's arrival as a mainstay of the American educational system, with its impact — on society, on public schools and, above all, on hundreds of thousands of children now learning outside a conventional academic setting — only beginning to be felt."

The Post "estimates that there are now between 1.9 million and 2.7 million home-schooled children in the United States, depending on the rate of increase in areas without reliable data."

The Washington Post graph

The sheer number of home schooled children has left some citizens worried. The Post reports, "Many of America's new home-schooled children have entered a world where no government official will ever check on what, or how well, they are being taught." Elizabeth Bartholet, an emeritus professor at Harvard Law School and child welfare advocate, told reporters: "Policymakers should think, 'Wow — this is a lot of kids.' We should worry about whether they're learning anything."

"If there is a capital of American home schooling, it may be Hillsborough County, Fla," the Post reports. "There were 10,680 children being home-schooled at the beginning of the 2022 academic year within Hillsborough County's school district, the biggest total in The Post's home-schooling database." Corey McKeown, a home schooling advocate and teacher in Hillsborough, told the Post: "Home-schoolers in Hillsborough County do not lack for anything. We have come such a long way."

But Hillsborough County School Board member Lynn Gray, a former public school teacher who taught history part-time for several years at a Catholic home-schooling co-op, told the Post, "I can tell you right now: Many of these parents don't have any understanding of education. The price will be very big to us and to society. But that won't show up for a few years."