Who doesn’t love a good lunch? In schools, not only do lunches provide nutrition, improve focus, and impact test scores, they might also be the only things some students in Milwaukee eat that day.
At Milwaukee Public Schools there’s been a long fight for better school lunches for years. It’s also an issue that students have been organizing around, making their voices heard.
"How was school lunch at Hamilton?," WUWM's Jimmy Gutierrez asked sophomore Lisbella Leen.
"Gross," she says, "Literally today I had breadsticks. They were hard as a rock."
Aamira Mister, a sophomore at Golda Meir, another MPS school, says something similar. "I tend to bring my friends food so that they don't have to subject themselves to the school lunch because it's that bad."
Their beef is with school lunch. They say it’s so bad that there was a fantasy football league among teachers. The loser had to eat the school lunch.
"The meat always looks like mystery meat to me," says Mister. "We call it mystery meat a lot because you never know what you're actually eating."
It might be hard to believe, but school lunch at MPS has actually gotten better over the past few years. John Fleissner is an art teacher at Hamilton High School. He says lunch hit rock bottom after COVID. Schools at the time transitioned to preparing almost all the school lunches at two big central kitchens. The pre-packaged foods were unappetizing.
"When we came back, students were interested in organizing and, you know, a first step to organizing, I think anywhere but especially in the school is issuing a survey," he says. "Overwhelmingly, by a huge margin, the thing that students wrote down the most was improvements to school lunch."
The students leading this charge were from YES! (Youth Empowered in the Struggle), the youth arm of Voces de la Frontera. Thousands of students from across the district filled out the survey. YES! students gathered the data and formulated a list of six demands based on the feedback.
Students wanted things like fresh on-site cooking, no more central kitchens, more options, larger portions, and fair pay for kitchen staff.
"They went public and they did a press conference and they announced this," says Fleissner. "They did petitions and so they're continuing to sort of agitate around the issues in schools."
It’s been almost five years since those student demands came out. School lunch is still a work in progress. But students and faculty say things have improved, including having a seat at the table with the district.
"What they have provided [is] just great input," says Michael Turza, MPS chief operating officer, "telling us whether or not the food is good, whether that is bad, what we could do better."
Turza says a big issue, both then and now, in order to provide the kind of meals that students want, is a lack of staffing. Across 140 sites, MPS has roughly 680 kitchen staff and over 80 vacancies.
"Finding the people who want to work, I mean, we have job fairs constantly," he says. "We try to, you know, recruit people constantly."
And that directly impacts school lunch. "Sometimes we have to go instead of a more elaborate meal...we go to a not so elaborate meal that we could serve," Turza says.
Hamilton’s John Fleissner thinks a lot of these problems are self-imposed.
"One thing is like, maybe the wages are relatively similar, but sometimes with MPS it can take a really long time to get hired," Fleissner says. "And this is a known thing [among] people that apply to MPS. HR can take a really long time."
If you want to hire people, move more quickly to get them into meaningful jobs. And pay them more than the floor. If you want people to take the job seriously, you have to take them seriously. Show them that what they do matters.
Jennifer Gaddis is a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has been researching and writing about school lunch since before COVID. She thinks there should be more focus on the labor of lunch workers.
"I think school food workers and programs are so used to being just honestly critiqued, sometimes attacked, sometimes misrepresented in the media," she says.
Gaddis says it’s hard to look at school lunch in a vacuum. MPS is what’s called a community-eligible program site, which means every student has the ability to have a free breakfast and lunch that's paid for by the government and is determined by a district’s poverty rate.
But besides this money, and a little state aid, that’s all the funding coming in to provide food for students. Is this enough to provide food that’s nutritious and also tasty and something students would eat?
And is it enough to serve a USDA-compliant school meal that meets the needs that students say would be good for themselves and their peers and their schools? Students say "no."
Aamira Mister wants to see more pride, and money put into school lunches. She says today, half a dozen students she knows skipped lunch because it was so unappealing. She says that's no way to learn.
"School lunch is important, even to students who aren't always eating it just because I feel like it provides a lot to the environment as a whole," she says. "If you're seeing [bad food] and...I have no choice but to eat this kind of food, it puts a damper on all of us for like, dang."
School lunch has come a long way from those first demands. There are more options. But ultimately, professor Gaddis says the fight for lunch is a fight for how we see and value young people.
"That we're still not quite sure, as a society, whether we view children as a public good or whether we view them as a private responsibility that families should be taking care of themselves," Gaddis says. "And so I think we need to really reimagine what it looks like for us to be investing in a more caring economy and a more caring state, and I think schools and school food is a really great place to start doing that."
Meetings between the district and YES! students are still happening. Mike Turza from MPS says the goal of the working committee is that school meals will one day be the reason students come to school. If nothing else, they’ll come for the food. But there’s still work to be done.
Support for Seeking Solutions: Food Access in Milwaukee is provided by Jon E. Sorenson, Christine Symchych and Jim McNulty, Forage Kitchen, Capuchin Community Services and Antonia Foundation.
