Wendy Weyer of the Bellevue, Wash., schools and Doug Davis of the Burlington, Vt., schools tour the School Nutrition Association National Conference trade show at the Salt Palace in Salt Lake City, Utah. (Jerry Hagstrom/The Hagstrom Report)

SALT LAKE CITY — Student and parents of all income categories, school food service employees and teachers all need nutrition education, the outgoing and incoming chairs of the School Nutrition Association Public Policy and Legislation Committee said in a joint interview here last week as they toured the trade show of the association’s annual meeting.

“The missing piece is that there needs to be a more concerted effort on nutrition education K-12 [kindergarten through 12th grade],” said Wendy Weyer, former nutrition director of the Seattle Public Schools, who has just taken a job with the Bellevue, Wash., schools. And that nutrition education should not be just for kids who qualify for free and reduced-price lunches, but for middle-class kids who pay the full price (usually between $2 and $3) for school lunch, Weyer added.

Although the movement for healthier school meals – which led to the 2010 Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act – was spearheaded by middle-class parents, “we have families who are not happy” with the changes, Weyer said, referring to the slightly lower caloric count; less sodium, fat and sugar; and more lean meats and dairy; whole-grain bread and pasta; and required portions of fruits and vegetables; and sometimes slightly higher lunch prices for middle-class kids.

That dissatisfaction is reflected in middle-class kids paying full price who have taken their money elsewhere. The Seattle schools were serving 19,400 lunches per day, but that number has dropped to 17,800, Weyer said. Nationwide, more than 30 million students still eat school lunch, but more than one million have dropped out of the program in recent years. The dropouts from the program have been mostly the middle-class kids who have the money to go to convenience stores or food trucks or who decide to bring lunch from home.

Some parents, Weyer noted, want the schools to change practices but don’t change practices at home and still give their kids money for school lunch. The open campuses of high schools also make it easy for kids in some schools to buy lunch elsewhere. In Seattle, she said, food trucks cannot park close to the schools, but they park within a distance that some students walk.

Weyer also noted that school food service directors have to do a lot of work to train their staffs to “sell the foods” – that is, convincing the children to eat the healthier food.

“We can’t be the food police,” Weyer said, adding that if healthy eating is to win the war against obesity, “the whole country has to make it the norm.”

The cost of obesity is so high that the government needs to “move treatment money into prevention” through nutrition education, said Doug Davis, director of the Burlington, Vt., School Food Project, who is succeeding Weyer as chair of the committee.

Classroom teachers get continuing education, but there is rarely continuing education for school food providers, Davis added.

The effort has to involve physical education teachers, too, he said.

“Let’s Move! in the Schools has been a wonderful thing,” Davis said, speaking of First Lady Michelle Obama’s fitness initiative. He noted that he is also a big advocate of the farm-to-school movement and that, in Vermont, physical education teachers take students to run in orchards, which teaches them to connect food, farming, and exercise.

As Congress considers whether to make changes to the school meal rules as part of reauthorization of the child nutrition programs this year, Weyer and Davis said they both support SNA’s calls for flexibility in several aspects of the healthier meal rules, even though the political atmosphere in each of their districts calls for rules stricter than the Agriculture Department requires.

Weyer and Davis said they favor increased flexibility in the whole-grain requirement, sticking with current sodium levels and an end to the requirement that each child take a half-cup of fruits and vegetables, because schools around the country vary in their situations. If a child takes a small amount of jicama or cucumbers and is told to go back for more, the child may be embarrassed and just take juice instead, Weyer said.

In Vermont, Davis noted, some rural schools have a hard time getting fresh fruits and vegetables more than once a week because they don’t get deliveries more often than that.

But each said it is unfortunate that the battle in Congress over making changes to the school meal rules has become so high-pitched.

“SNA is not asking for a return to junk food,” Weyer said.

“People agree on a lot more than they disagree,” Davis added.

On the trade floor, Weyer and Davis focused mostly on finding products that would satisfy local concerns.

Weyer said she was looking for additional flavorings that could make dishes special through “speed scratch cooking”— taking a prepared product and improving it with sauces and spices or new technology.

“We are trying to find foods that appeal to the masses,” Weyer said, while still appealing to immigrant children. Children in the Seattle schools speak more than in 100 languages; in Bellevue, a majority are minority, she added.

Davis noted that in Burlington, there are Muslim immigrant children who won’t eat pork, which is a USDA-offered commodity. The Muslim children tend toward the vegetarian offerings, he said, adding that he has to make sure those offerings are nutritious and that he also has to offer a gluten-free breakfast for kids with allergies.

Davis was also looking for foods with as little packaging as possible, because parents complain about that.

“We’re green,” he said with a smile. “The custodian can be the biggest advocate or the biggest obstacle” to a food program.

Both Weyer and Davis said their programs have faced financial problems in the last few years, even though the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act provided a 6-cent increase in the reimbursement from the federal government. Under the act, schools are not supposed to charge school lunch programs with inappropriate amounts of “indirect costs” such as utilities, but that regulation hasn’t really been effective yet, Weyer said.

Part of the problem has been the reduction in the number of middle-class kids eating, but the situation is also exacerbated by the cost of food, the cost of storage and labor and health care costs, Davis said.

This year, for the first time, Davis said, his books won’t balance.

The question, he said, is how the school food service administrators mix their “focus on food” with the current “financial strains.”