With $600,000 food service budget a year for 2,000 elementary and 350 high school students, Minister of Education Masaaki Emesiochel said, “We all want to give students nutritious lunch everyday, it’s just a matter of what we have and what we don’t have.”
During a Public Health convention a couple of months ago, one of the activities of the participants was to visit all the public schools to see what kind of meals were being served to the children. And they found out that most of them consisted of canned goods and rice.
According to Minister Masaaki Emesiochel of MOE, “We cannot avoid using canned food because local fresh are sometimes not enough for schools. Farmers can’t provide sufficient supply on a daily basis for that number of students.”
Veronica Kazuo, Food Service Program Manager of MOE, prepares the daily menu for all public schools. “We’re trying our best to provide nutritious meals to the schools but we cannot accommodate them with the budget,” she said.Kazuo added that they also compare the prices, and canned food is cheaper than fresh ones.
According to Kazuo, before they used to serve local food to students, but the children didn’t like them. “The trash of the leftover food were all full,” she said.
Berry Moon Watson, Administrator for Family Health from Public Health, said in a separate interview that they have offered a to provide a nutritionist to work with the MOE, just like they do with the Head Start.
But the Minister said that would mean additional money for the nutritionist and for the nutritious food. “We have no money for those. If you bring in a nutritionist without the nutritious food, then she cannot provide the nutrition,” he said.
According to Director of Education Emery Wenty, when the food service program of MOE was under the federal grants, they were able to provide nutritious food to the students.
“During those times, we also had our nutritionist. But when the government of Palau took over the program, money came down. So we barely provide enough for lunch,” Wenty said. He added that during the peak of the program, they had over a million dollar budget. They even used to serve breakfast and lunch.
MOE has a proposal for increase of funding for food. They also continue to ask help from parents for the payment of 25 cents parents’ subsidized meal.
MOE also proposes to consolidate schools, from 10 schools down to four, that way they will be paying less expenses to maintain schools. “There will be fewer schools to support. That means money will be sufficient to provide nutritious and variety of food to students,” said Director Wenty.
Wenty added that the intention of the lunch food was just for students to have energy to continue two classes in the afternoon. “They’re not meant for students to have a full meal. They just need it to carry them on to complete the next period in the afternoon, because by 2:30 p.m. they go home and eat whatever they want.”
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