NORTHAMPTON — It’s been a year since the Universal Free School Meals Act passed in Massachusetts, making lunch and breakfast free across the state for K-12 students.
In Northampton, many parents feel the program is a huge success.
“The system itself, I think, is great. I applaud the state for making the decision to have free lunches,” says parent Charlotte Capogna-Amias. “There’s so much research in terms of nutrition and food insecurity, and so I think it’s wonderful.”
Despite the successful launch of the free school meal program, however, some parents have grown worried about the nutritional content of the school cafeteria’s offerings — or the lack of it.
“It’s appalling to me,” says parent Adam Greef, who began researching school lunch nutrition after his son started receiving meals at his kindergarten. “The Academy of American Pediatrics says that you should only have 25 grams of sugar in your whole day, and these kids are getting it before 8:30 [a.m].”
Greef submitted his concerns as part of a collaboration between the Gazette and Smith College journalism students, which invited community members to contribute potential news topics of interest to them. The reporting team then reached out to other parents for their perspectives.
“It [free meals] offers us some ease, and it does, of course, help financially. Groceries are so expensive these days,” says Capogna-Amias. “But I worry a little bit. What is the food that [my son is] taking in Monday through Friday?”
All public school-provided meals in the United States must follow the Guidelines for Healthy Americans laid out by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In 2023, a series of updates were proposed to the USDA’s school lunch requirements to address nutritional concerns, but only some of them passed. Limits on sodium content, flavored milks, and what counts as grain-based foods were scrapped.
But the USDA’s guidelines are not the only constraint a school nutritionist has to work with. Northampton school meals have a strict federal reimbursement cap for every student, says school nutritionist Mistelle Hannah. That cost, in accordance with the National School Nutrition Programs reimbursement rates for fiscal year 2025, is limited $4.57 per meal, which includes administrative and labor costs for serving the food. The school district must fund any amount above this total.
To keep the cost of each lunch under the cap, much of the menus for school lunches consist of pre-made products and brands that are catered specifically to school meals.
Pediatric dentist Joseph Deschene is the parent of two children, both of whom attend public school in Florence.
In his dental practice, “it’s a constant stream of complaints from parents who discover, day by day, that their children are eating foods that they typically do not consume at home,” Deschene says. “Just the other day, a client, incredulous, told me that his kid loves chocolate milk, a processed drink never present in their home and particularly high in added sugars.”
The brands that produce the beverages and snacks on Northampton cafeteria lines work within USDA guidelines for school nutrition. However, to maximize their profit within the school meal market, these brands have an incentive not to be any healthier than USDA guidelines require, Hannah suggests.
According to the American Heart Association, children should not consume more than 25 grams of added sugar in a single day, but USDA guidelines differ. The USDA recommends that no more than 10% of a child’s weekly calories come from added sugar. When students are choosing which items go onto their plate, these restrictions are difficult to enforce.
On a school morning, a Northampton student could choose to eat a slice of pre-packaged “Super Banana Bread,” developed specifically to be sold to school cafeterias, containing 23 grams of added sugar. If that student elected to get chocolate milk with lunch, she’d drink another 22 grams of total sugar, according to the carton.
As of this school year, the USDA has implemented limits on added sugars in “flavored milks,” including chocolate milk; there can be no more than 10 grams of added sugar per 8-ounce box. While added sugars are not noted on the chocolate milk label from Northampton schools obtained by the Gazette, a serving of regular milk contains just 12 grams of total sugar.
Even though the package appears to contain only the USDA-sanctioned 10 added grams, the student would still be well over her daily added sugar limit — and that’s not counting the rest of her meal.
“Yeah, everybody chooses the chocolate milk. Wouldn’t you choose that too if you were 7?” asks Capogna-Amias. “It’s just those things that I’m kind of cringing about, and kicking myself a little bit as a parent.”
Fats and sodium are also a problem. Saturated fats, for instance, should be limited to 7% of daily calories, according to the American Heart Association. Since a kindergarten-age girl should take in 1,200 calories per day, 84 of her calories should come from saturated fat. With a gram of fat containing 9 calories, her daily limit would be 9.3 grams of fat. If she ate the “Cheesy Bottom Pizza” provided by Northampton schools, she would have 8 grams of saturated fat, contributing 85% of her daily limit if she ate the whole thing.
Public schools are often unable to pick anything but the best of the worst options: menu items cheap enough to provide full meals, but barely scraping by health standards.
“I often get asked, ‘How do we change that? How do we make things better?’” Hannah says. “And my answer is always just make sure your kids are having school meals, because the more reimbursement that comes in, the better we can do.”
For every student who gets a school lunch — provided that the lunch meets the USDA standards — that money is reimbursable by the national school lunch program and goes back into the Northampton schools’ food budget. The reimbursement gets added to their total budget and allows them a larger food budget for each student than the standard $4.57.
Within their stringent price requirements, Northampton schools are still trying to introduce nutritious, locally grown food into local schools through the Farm to School Programs initiative.
Brian Jersky, Northampton’s Farm to School coordinator, explains that Northampton elementary schools do a monthly “Harvest of the Month” promoted by Massachusetts Farm to School. Jersky works with Hannah to come up with a new menu item using that month’s chosen crop, then holds a taste test, letting the students vote on whether they’d like to include it in their menus going forward. Ideally, the program gets students more excited about nutritional, sustainable, and tasty school lunches.
In October, the harvest was apples, and Hannah and Jersky came up with a ham-spinach-apple wrap the students loved. But handcrafted meals cannot be a daily reality with a cafeteria’s limited budget and labor.
“When you have a school kitchen with two or three employees that’s feeding 300 students and they have about an hour to make all of their lunches, rolling all of those wraps and slicing all of those apples isn’t really feasible,” Jersky said.
The district has also sought to explore vegetarian options. They offer veggie burgers, house-made hummus, and salads. This January, they partnered with Lightlife Foods to taste-test plant-based chicken parmesan at JFK middle school and tempeh BLTs at the high school.
On a daily basis, students get what the school can afford.
Certain items, Deschene explains, like mozzarella sticks with sauce, are an example of a pre-packaged, processed food that is high in sodium and saturated fat but still considered by the USDA to have a vegetable component due to the dip. He also points out that much of the food in question is fried — ranging from potatoes to chicken tenders.
Other parents have taken notice, too.
“It was green beans one day, and then another day they had broccoli and carrots. So that’s great,” says Copogna-Amias. “But then a couple other days it was like, the ‘vegetable,’ in quotes, was fries.”
However, Deschene is careful not to criticize the local schools. With programs like Farm to School, they’re likely doing more than what is required to adhere to the USDA minimum standards. Yet he questions the choices made at the federal level and the motivations behind maintaining such unbalanced nutritional values.
“The school system has made progress in terms of meals in public schools, but there is still much work to be done,” Deschene says. “On the other hand, this is certainly not a project that can be realized overnight; it requires sustained effort. In my small way, I focus heavily on educating parents about healthy eating and good habits for their children.”
For now, many parents are celebrating the wins they can see.
“I had thought that I shouldn’t get school lunch, because we can afford lunch,” says Sarit Shatken-Stern, a midwife with two children in Northampton public schools. “That was before we even tried. Now I would certainly pay for it because the kids love it.”
Shatken-Stern’s fourth grade daughter is a stubborn, picky eater. But through her school lunch program, she’s found new meals that she’ll try, or even get excited about seeing in the cafeteria line.
“My oldest really loves it: She loves the ritual of getting school lunch, she really loves the lunch ladies. She likes almost everything that they serve,” Shatken-Stern says. “I am aware that it’s probably not nutritionally the best, or what I would choose, but I’m feeding them the other meals, and it provides a lot more variety. So I’m grateful, and also not one to complain, because it’s free.”
This article was written by Smith College students in a journalism course taught by Naila Moreira, in collaboration with the Gazette and with guidance from journalist Lauren Katz. The students engaged in a local crowdsourced-reporting project asking Gazette readers and the 29,000-member Northampton, MA Facebook group what topic areas residents would like to see reported in the media. Students voted on and reported selected ideas as teams.
