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School
lunch
legacy
Smelser brought
healthier food
to students
By Linda Lemmon
Town Crier Editor
PUTNAM --- She's seen it all. From pale white bread and rice to the healthier brown hues. From ghostly white high-fat pizza to low fat mozzarella on whole wheat crust.
Virginia Smelser, Putnam schools' food service director, is retiring. She served as director in Putnam for six years, backed up by 35 years total in child nutrition.
She grew up in Lisbon and coincidentally, her grandmother worked in the school lunchroom. "She was the type of woman who could open the cabinets, see what she had and them create something wonderful," Smelser said. But that wasn't her motivation to get into the school lunch business. When her children were in school, the school lunch program was closed, a victim of red-ink. She and her sister --- who had done church suppers and catering --- jumped right in to run the program.
Smelser worked 25 years in the Lisbon school system, seven in Arizona and then came back to Connecticut.
For her the challenge, working with 18 mostly part-time helpers, is to "make it all happen." The team has to keep it creative, popular and healthy and meet the budget.
In the six years she's headed the Putnam school lunch program, she's pushed the dial on the menu to "healthier." Out went the junk food. She moved to the healthy certified district school, Connecticut health guidelines and now serves only baked snacks, 100 percent fruit juice, low-fat milk and water.
There might still be pizza on the menu but now it's made with whole wheat crust and low-fat mozzarella. She makes as much use as possible of the federal USDA's commodities program, keeping it creative. She uses every state program she can and tries to buy locally whenever possible.
She's introduced salad bars, luaus complete with grass skirts, more more more servings of fruit and vegetables. In her career, she gets an instant reward: "I watch the kids faces as they through the lunch line and I know right away if I have a hit," she said.
The first whole-wheat peanut butter and jelly was "a challenge," she laughed. The younger the student, the easier the change goes over, she found.
The system serves 900 lunches a day: 450 to the young ones; 200 to middle school students and about 250 lunches per day to the high schoolers.
The students on the high school level balked. When she arrived high schoolers were buying $300 worth of a la carte foods. Now it's at $100 and the meals purchased has gone way up. It took three years, she said, to get high school students to get used to whole grains, she said.
She's worked to change a child's perceptions of what a snack is, for example. With at least five servings of fruit/vegetables possible throughout the day, students may go home thinking now that an apple is a snack, not snack cake. "I hope they are changing their way of life," she said. "This has been a rewarding career," she said. "The work I've done made good changes in kids lives." She added, "When you get right down to it, it's all about the kids."
She believes that school systems all work toward success. There's sharing and camaraderie in schools, she said, nowhere to be found in the commercial world. Everyone helps, from top to bottom, in any way possible.
Smiling, she recalls the first time she put bananas on the line. A little boy leaving the lunchroom stepped into Smelser's office and said: "Thanks for the banana. We don't have these at home."