Jun. 1—Joseph Ortega has big plans for the garden at Aspen Community School.

Ortega, an art teacher, is one of the primary caretakers of the garden, which clings to a hill at the back of the Aspen campus. He organizes the garden club, and he’ll spend part of his summer break caring for a vast assortment of plants.

By the penultimate day of the 2023-24 school year, Ortega and the garden club had planted kale, spinach, eggplant, peppers and a variety of herbs inside a small greenhouse. Artichokes, butternut squash, corn and tomatoes sprouted in the garden’s six outdoor beds. In a corner, a small compost pile of straw and food scraps was being developed to help enrich the soil.

The space is a great tool for sampling unfamiliar foods or teaching academic concepts, like photosynthesis and nutrient cycles, Ortega said.

“My experience is that they’re really open to trying new foods and really interested,” he said of Aspen’s students. “Even kids you wouldn’t expect to be interested, they seem to love it.”

The New Mexico Public Education Department has proposed new rules governing school meals that mirror some of the efforts in place at Aspen, which serves kids in prekindergarten to eighth grade. The proposal calls for on-site food preparation, local sourcing of ingredients, school gardens, studies on composting and plate waste and other changes to improve the freshness of school meals.

The rules on healthy universal school meals are not yet final. The department gathered public feedback during a hearing Wednesday and collected nearly 200 pages of submitted comments. As it is written, the proposal would take effect in July 2025, in time for the start of the 2025-26 school year.

New Mexico school officials agree free, nutritious meals are a good thing. In a letter to the Public Education Department, Sandra Kemp, executive director of Albuquerque Public Schools’ Food and Nutrition Services, likened school meals to transportation and textbooks — another essential for learning that should be free to students.

Many officials argue, however, the department’s proposal goes overboard, imposing novel, costly requirements without providing sufficient time or resources for districts and charter schools to comply.

“I’m losing sleep over this. I don’t see a way that we can implement the things that are required in this rule,” Los Alamos Public Schools Superintendent Jennifer Guy said at Wednesday’s hearing.

But Michael Chavez, director of the Public Education Department’s Student Success and Wellness Bureau, which oversees nutrition, urged school officials not to worry. The agency will have a dedicated team of staff to offer support.

“It’s going to be different for each school. … This isn’t a one-size-fits-all for the school districts,” Chavez said in an interview.

‘Make better food, better meals’

Though most people don’t realize it, determining what kind of food will be scooped onto a kid’s lunch tray is a complicated calculation — one that sits at the intersection of state and federal regulations.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture oversees nationwide school breakfast and lunch programs, including setting nutritional requirements for the food served in school cafeterias across the country. Those standards set a high bar for nutritional value — down to disqualifying a brand of tortillas because they’re short a single gram of whole grains.

Over the next few years, the USDA’s nutritional requirements will grow more stringent, with planned reductions in added sugars and sodium to encourage healthier eating.

The Public Education Department’s proposal for healthy universal school meals, however, stems from changes in New Mexico law.

In 2023, state legislators passed Senate Bill 4, an ambitious plan to provide free meals for all public school students, with the state reimbursing districts for costs not covered by the USDA. When the governor signed the bill into law at Santa Fe’s own Piñon Elementary School, New Mexico joined a small cadre of states providing all school meals at no cost to families.

It was a great idea in a state like New Mexico, Chavez said, where nearly 1 in 5 children experience food insecurity, according to data from New Mexico Voices for Children’s 2023 Kids Count Data Book.

The bill wasn’t just about providing meals; it was also intended to improve the quality of meals, placing a high priority on freshly cooked and locally grown foods.

“The main goal … was to make better food, better meals,” Chavez said. “We want to include … New Mexico farmers, New Mexico foods like beef and using the fruits and vegetables within our state.”

The latest round of rule-making is all about clarifying — and receiving feedback on — how to implement that legislation.

Santa Fe schools have head start

The department’s proposal would set a high bar for school meals in New Mexico.

At minimum, the rules would require at least 50% of meals to be “freshly prepared” at a kitchen on school grounds with at least three items per week sourced from New Mexico farms, ranches or food businesses, in addition to new requirements for in-seat time during lunch periods, student and family feedback, and collecting and donating unused food.

The proposal also requires establishing school gardens on at least 50% of campuses, developing on-site composting programs and more nutrition education for students and staff, getting middle and high school students involved in food preparation and studying food consumption. It would offer schools and districts some choice in which changes to implement.

The department will offer funding incentives for compliance — required for public schools and optional for those operated by the Bureau of Indian Education and tribes, as well as private schools.

Compliant schools will receive up to $4 more for each lunch service and up to $2 more for each breakfast than those that are out of compliance.

Santa Fe Public Schools has a leg up in meeting the proposed requirements, said Anna Farrier, executive director of the nonprofit Cooking with Kids.

Farrier’s organization provides hands-on food and nutrition education programs in 14 of the district’s 28 sites, as well as schools in Rio Arriba County. Schools offer up classroom space and time for nutrition education, Farrier said, while Cooking with Kids staff provide their expertise to introduce students to new foods and healthy eating.

During the most recent school year, Cooking with Kids ramped up its work in school gardens, helping to establish a new one at Kearny Elementary School. It’s not unusual to see garden beds or greenhouses on local campuses.

Based on Cooking with Kids’ experience in the district, Farrier said, “Santa Fe is doing a really good job already. … Santa Fe Public Schools has been embracing scratch cooking and local food procurement and has helped drive that conversation statewide for years.”

The local district is “very fortunate” to have the resources and experiences to meet many of the requirements, Superintendent Hilario “Larry” Chavez wrote in a message to The New Mexican.

But, he added, “Many of the requirements may not be realistic or attainable for many districts.”

‘Setting districts up for failure’

During Wednesday’s hearing, school officials were consistent in their criticism: It’s too much, too fast.

Los Alamos Public Schools was among the most vocal opponents.

The district is in its first year of providing free breakfast and lunch for all students, said Assistant Superintendent Mike Johnson, and it relies primarily on state funding to provide those meals.

Though well-meaning, state mandates to construct school gardens or create on-campus compost piles, plus the extra administrative duties of studying cafeteria waste, providing additional professional development to educators and soliciting feedback from students and families will take away from the educational mission, Johnson and Guy argued.

“As it’s currently written, these rules are setting districts up for failure. … This is a huge unfunded mandate. There is no mention of any additional funding to support these initiatives,” said Ellen Specter, vice president of the Los Alamos school board.

“If districts are forced to cover these costs out of operational funds, the only way to balance the budget will be laying off personnel, and this will undoubtedly mean larger class sizes and poor educational outcomes,” she added.

Others pointed out the proposal’s 2025 deadline is unattainable.

Laurie Allocca, nutrition services manager at New Mexico School for the Deaf, encouraged the Public Education Department to extend its timeline for implementation by years, using as an example the USDA’s yearslong plan to carry out nutritional requirements. Why not start with a pilot program and feasibility study first, Allocca suggested.

“I believe you have good intentions; we all want to feed children healthy food. But … even the USDA gives years and increments to allow these things to happen,” she said.

Cooking more meals on-site from scratch will be a challenge, too, said Kim Meeks, Roswell Independent School District’s director of student nutrition. Meeks estimated her district supplies prepackaged, USDA-approved breakfasts for about 8,000 students each morning through its Breakfast After the Bell program, through which students eat their first meal of the day during class time.

Freshly preparing even 50% of breakfast meals “would not be possible,” she said.

“This [proposal] should be what the legislators voted for: Free breakfast and lunch meals to all students and healthier meals,” she said.