Eugene flunks chocolate milk for grade-schoolers

Got chocolate milk?

If you’re an elementary school student in Eugene, the answer come Wednesday will be a definite no. Not at lunchtime, anyway.

The Eugene School District is taking away the chocolate milk option as part of a two-month trial program.

At the behest of a relatively new group called the Eugene Coalition for Better School Food (www.kidfoodmatters.com), the district made the decision to pull chocolate milk from its 20 elementary schools, said Rick Sherman, director of nutrition services.

“We’re going to continue the quest to make our meals healthier,” Sherman said.

Middle and high school students still will have a choice of nonfat chocolate milk, while elementary school students will have a choice of 1 percent or nonfat regular milk, Sherman said. They also can choose water, he said.

The district emphasizes that it is not banning chocolate milk, as parents still can pack chocolate milk with their child’s lunch. The district simply won’t offer it during the two-month trial run that it hopes will become permanent.

“Hopefully, it will become a nonissue,” said Sherman, who has spoken to people at the Boulder (Colo.) Valley School District, where chocolate milk was eliminated three years ago.

“They said they hadn’t had a request for chocolate milk in two years,” Sherman said. There were complaints there initially, he said, but it died down after about a month, he said.

During his two years of working for Sodexo, which contracts with the Eugene district to provide its food services, the top concern from parents has been the offering of chocolate milk, Sherman said.

“Chocolate milk has a lot of extra sugar,” said Ann Magee, who heads the Eugene Coalition for Better School Food’s steering committee. “So children who drink it every day get about four extra pounds of sugar a year.”

The coalition was created in spring 2010 by a group of concerned parents. Before the 2010-11 school year, the group asked the school district to completely eliminate corn syrup, high-fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated and partially hydrogenated oils, and artificial flavors, colors and preservatives from foods served to students.

The district said it would be impossible to completely eliminate those things, Magee said. But if incremental changes can be made each school year, that’s progress, she said.

The district was able to get a nonfat chocolate milk for the 2010-11 school year without corn syrup, just sugar in it, Magee said. So that was a start, she said.

But the watchdog group’s top nutritional priority for 2011-12 was to get chocolate milk off the menu entirely, Magee said.

Beverages that aren’t consumed by students are dumped into buckets, Sherman said.

Thus, food service workers will be monitoring the buckets during the first two months of school to see how much 1 percent and nonfat milk is being dumped out by elementary school students, he said.

If students aren’t drinking their milk, it’s a possibility that chocolate milk will be offered again in November so students can get some form of calcium at lunchtime, Sherman said.