Celebrate World Food Day as Dave shares the correlation between improving nutrition and improving education.
Although dated, this infograph — provided by the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) — shines a spotlight on “World Food Day’ on October 16th. GAIN is an independent, non-profit foundation based in Geneva, Switzerland and was developed at the United Nations 2002 Special Session of the General Assembly on Children. The founder of GAIN is the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and its focus is mobilizing public-private partnerships and providing financial and technical support to deliver nutritious foods to those people most at risk of malnutrition.
The top, left statement on this infograph was true in 2014 and is still true today:
“More Children are in Education Than Ever Before
Education has a significant effect on global nutrition
— a child born to a mother who can read has a 50% better survival rate.”
From what we have seen in our small corner of the world (the Southeast US), the LEAN Frog team of professionals appreciates and supports GAIN’s celebratory statement about education and its significant effect on nutrition. However, we also see this declaration from a reversed point of view as well — nutrition has a significant effect on education! LEAN Frog, a ublic education software and service provider, has seen that Students who have proper and regular nutrition in school perform better academically. This statement is supported by numerous research articles and we have seen it first hand with the enhanced academic achievements school systems have recorded after allowing LEAN Frog to assess and improve their school nutrition programs (e.g., STAR Math scores increased by 15%; STAR Reading scores increased by 20%)
LEAN Frog has provided nutrition support services for large, urban school systems to small, rural school systems and everything size and type of school system in between. We have helped them develop and implement improvement plans that increased the effectiveness, efficiency, and sustainability of their school nutrition programs. Partnering with these school systems has generated great results such as
- Increased Meals Per Labor Hour (MPLH);
- Increased student participation rates;
- Optimized work flows for strategic sourcing, ordering, planning, and warehousing;
- Documented standard operating procedures for sustainability;
- Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to track departmental and system performance over time;
- Cost savings for reinvestment back into the classroom –millions of dollars to date across many school system!
These accomplishments noted above are exemplary, but the thing we at LEAN Frog are most proud of is that many Students– tens of thousands — are now regularly and properly fed at school and that these meals result in a higher level of documented academic achievement.
Could your school system’s nutrition department support your students better in their academic achievements? Would you benefit from the professional assistance of LEAN Frog? If your answer is YES, please contact Dave Knowles at: [email protected].