Photos from Michelle Welch, LPS Menus and the LPS Wellness Facebook page

Since 2011, Lincoln Public Schools Wellness has been making strides to keep students healthy and focused in the classroom.   

Over the past 12 years, Michelle Welch has furthered nutrition education efforts as Lincoln Public Schools (LPS) wellness coordinator. A registered dietitian, Welch serves 43,000 students and 8,000 staff at 70 sites throughout the Lincoln community. In her role, she focuses on educating students and staff on nutrition, activity and social/emotional wellness. 

As LPS wellness coordinator, Welch works with various local organizations, including community centers, the Nebraska Department of Education’s Nutrition Services program and the Lincoln Lancaster County Health Department. She also partners with school cafeteria staff and Midwest Dairy to market programs such as Fuel Up to Play 60 and Friends Breakfast Together, a new program that promotes healthy school breakfast options for students.

“Breakfast is a piece that we’re really working on with schools and families because it’s just such a huge issue,” Welch says. “If kids don’t eat breakfast, they feel lousy and they just don’t do as well as students. We’re in a lot better place if we get kids eating breakfast. When school breakfast and lunch was free in the past two years, it made a big difference. Our concern is that kids would stop eating breakfast now. We’re really focusing on doing everything we can to keep kids eating breakfast and enjoying that with each other.” 

With the Friends Breakfast Together program, Welch says LPS Wellness is encouraging nutrition and social wellness, with a focus on students taking time to eat with their friends. The campaign also encourages dairy consumption in the form of smoothies that LPS offers in school cafeterias. 

During the pandemic, LPS Wellness worked with Nutrition Services to offer smoothie kit taste tests to students. As part of the campaign, LPS Wellness shared information and resources, inviting families to make smoothies at home as a way to spend time together and achieve proper nutrition. Welch says this campaign has carried over into LPS’ current meal offerings. 

“This year, I’m really excited to report that we have smoothies available two to three times a week now in all of our high schools, which was a real win for us,” she says. “That’s where we’re starting with it, and then that will work its way down into middle schools and hopefully elementaries also.” 

To market Friends Breakfast Together, LPS Wellness is also placing flags at school entrances and media centers. The media center signage, which are all wellness-based, are made possible with support and funding from Midwest Dairy. By positioning the flags in front of schools, Welch says the objective is to promote the benefits of healthy nutrition to students and parents. 

When students make healthy breakfast choices, Welch says she hopes they will recognize the correlation between proper nutrition, health and performance in school. Through Friends Breakfast Together, LPS Wellness encourages students to utilize grab-and-go school breakfast options as opposed to buying fast food, which is more expensive and less nutritious by comparison. 

Welch says she also seeks to provide meals that are accessible and convenient to everyone. Whether high schoolers are on free and reduced lunch, or if they are athletes heading to early morning practices, she hopes students will take advantage of school breakfasts. 

“For some kids, we’re providing them with most of their nutrients that they have in the day,” Welch says. “It’s amazing how much nutrition impact we can have by offering them healthier choices, but it’s not healthy if it goes in the trash. We have to make sure things are appealing to kids. If you have students with braces, which is a lot of kids in high school, a smoothie is a great option for them versus grabbing a whole apple. By having the dairy product format, that’s a plus, too.” 

In the Lincoln Public Schools, Welch says about 47 percent of students are on free and reduced lunch. For those students, LPS Wellness aims to offer healthy, nutrient-dense meals, partnering with the Lincoln Food Bank to provide food backpack programs for the weekend. In addition, the department works with Nutrition Services to ensure lunch lines run quickly and smoothly.

Along with nutrition education, LPS Wellness supports sustainability efforts by using compostable cups and partnering with dairy farmers who compost. Welch says those partnerships have been invaluable.

“I’m just so proud of all of our partners and everything that they do to be able to really help our community be healthier,” she says. “It’s just been such a joy to be able to make those connections. What we’ve done over time to be able to get resources in place to make things a reality for schools has been really powerful.”

During COVID-19, LPS also did virtual dairy tours with its middle school and high school students. In partnership with Midwest Dairy and Lincoln Health Channel, LPS Wellness created a video series on sustainability and nutrition for use in the community and school classrooms. 

Through working with Midwest Dairy, Welch says she has benefited from opportunities to educate students about dairy. 

“I just think it’s made such an impact for our schools because it gave us those resources that really weren’t present in public schools to be able to support different incentives and different engagements in wellness,” Welch says. “As a dairy communicator for Midwest Dairy, I have just seen so much growth in schools and there are so many great stories to tell. There are so many things I’ve learned about as a representative, and I’ve just been so thankful for the education. The continuing education has been just irreplaceable for me as far as being able to feel like I can speak very knowledgeably about dairy and to be able to move forward with what we’re doing.”

To learn more about Lincoln Public Schools Wellness, visit the program’s website and Facebook page.