School nutrition policy hungry for implementation

Nearly a year after the National School Nutrition policy was approved by the Senate, and its implementation officially launched, advocates are raising concerns over the pace of its roll-out.

“Our Government will write policies, but the implementation is where the challenge happens,” Shannique Bowden, executive director of the Jamaica Youth Advocacy Network (JYAN), asserted yesterday during a panel discussion at a forum on ‘Healthy Food Policies and Consumer Rights’ hosted by JYAN.

While commending the Government for approving the long-awaited policy that is aimed at combating childhood obesity and non-communicable diseases by banning unhealthy food sales and improving nutrition in schools, she contends that “there is not enough momentum around the implementation aspect”.

“We really do need to see very strong visible enforcement. Something like a dashboard on the ministry’s website that tells us where we are in the implementation phase, what schools are compliant, what the gaps are, and how civil society and other stakeholders are able to fill those gaps,” Bowden said.

Meanwhile, Timar Stephenson, senior education officer in the Ministry of Education, Skills, Youth and Information, the ministry that is primarily responsible for enacting the policy, said Hurricane Melissa caused some delay in its execution.

However, noting that the school nutrition policy is being implemented in phases, Stephenson, who was also a speaker on the panel, said it was launched in September, a month before the country faced the devastating impact of the Category 5 storm.

He said an oversight committee has been established to coordinate the policy implementation.

“We have been doing our public education with the different regions, we have also been working with our principals, school administrators and our parents to sensitise them. A number of our schools start their school gardens - some of them have been decimated by the hurricane - and we want to continue that process,” he said.

GAPS IN POLICY

Stephenson told The Gleaner that the committee is focused on a comprehensive and targeted approach to policy implementation, with emphasis on equitable support for schools.

But legal researcher Sherieka Mills highlighted gaps within the policy, which she said may lead to its uneven implementation.

“The policy does say that it is to be implemented according to the social and economic resource context of each school, which we know that schools in Jamaica are very diverse,” she said.

She also raised concern that the policy is effectively unenforceable, as it operates within Jamaica’s decentralised education system, where the Ministry of Education has limited oversight and significant authority rests with school boards.

“It is really school boards that are in charge of the daily administration of schools, and especially for setting policies that are in accordance with the social and resource context of each school. It is also these school boards that are having, for example, the considerations around what this will cost and how this will affect students’ health generally in the context of each school,” she said.

“There is an issue with that because we have so many schools around Jamaica, each school board will have to make this decision internally; and so we can already see, with an unenforceable policy, how that creates issues across the board, in the context of this decentralised framework,” she added.

In the meantime, Rosanna Pike, policy officer at The Heart Foundation of Jamaica, emphasised the importance of school nutrition in shaping long-term health of children.

“Early intervention is absolutely critical, because we can acknowledge that it’s one of the most significant and effective that we can make,” she said. “During childhood is where dietary changes are formed, and they often carry them into adulthood. And we also can acknowledge that at that stage they are amendable, so we can mould those habits.”

In 2017, more than 30,000 Jamaican children were diagnosed with high blood pressure. A further 20 per cent of boys, and 26.4 per cent of girls age 12-17 are overweight.

More than three-quarters of students get at least one meal a day at school.

Pike noted that schools are powerful entry points in adjusting the diets of children.

“When we implement a school nutrition policy, we are not just improving what children eat, we are also shaping their preferences, the knowledge, the lifelong behaviour,” she said.

sashana.small@gleanerjm.com