Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, appearing alongside others as a new school year gets under way, used the moment to push for changes to what children eat at school. She framed the effort as celebrating the start of a new era in school nutrition, one that she said would bring even more real food from America's farms into America's schools.
Rollins set out the scale of the federal programs at stake. According to the secretary, the National School Lunch Program serves about 30 million students across America each school day, while the School Breakfast Program serves approximately 15 million, operating across 94,000 schools. That adds up to over 4.8 billion lunches a year and over 2.5 billion breakfasts.
She also underlined how widely the programs reach into public education and low-income households. Approximately 9 out of 10 public schools take part in the program, Rollins said, and roughly 80 percent of the breakfasts and 70 percent of the lunches provided are offered free or at a reduced price, which she described as a very important underserved community that the government can affect directly.
The push is tied to updated dietary guidance. Rollins said the updated dietary guidelines for Americans were released earlier this year, and that over 100,000 new dietary guidelines posters are now being sent to schools to promote the science-based work behind them. The posters are meant to carry the new guidance into cafeterias and classrooms as the school year begins.
At the center of the announcement was a rule still in progress. Rollins said the department is on the five-yard line, right next to the end zone, to finalize its proposed new school meals rule, which would implement the new dietary guidelines in schools across the country. She called it the most transformative action the department has taken to date for the nation's children.
According to Rollins, the rule would reshape what appears on school menus. She said it would promote whole-food breakfast options, encourage healthy cooking methods in school cafeterias, and make sure there are 100 percent whole grains, whole fruit and whole milk back in schools, aligning meals with the updated guidelines.
Beyond the rule itself, Rollins said the department is encouraging states to act on their own. She said officials are asking states to volunteer to make school meals and snack programs healthier by signing a school meals pledge and adopting the new dietary guidelines, and that several states have already signed on.