St-Clement Holds 4th Nutrition Month

Throughout North America, the month of March is widely known as Nutrition Month. Its aim is to highlight nutrition as a key component of health and motivate people to make informed food choices to improve their health. Locally, the École St-Clement has encouraged healthy eating by installing fruit kiosks every Tuesday and Thursday for three weeks in March for the fourth straight year. (Spring break usually takes up the first week of the month).

The initiative started when a student’s parent, Guy St-Jacques, read an article about schools in France and Italy that offered fruit and vegetable kiosks to the schoolchildren at recess time, recalled school committee president Lisa Marcovici, and wanted to introduce the concept here.

However, since St-Clement is much larger than the schools in Europe, that idea wasn’t too feasible since it has over 600 children at its eastern pavillon and 350 at its western building (the former Algonquin School). The vast majority come from TMR.

“We came up with the basket-per-class idea because we could make sure that all of the kids have a chance to get a portion of food,” Marcovici explained. Along with school nutritionist Helene Laurendeau, who stars in that capacity at the TVA television network, and the school committee, they managed to put the project together.

Through the school committee, parent-volunteers contacted various food companies to donate about a thousand samples of their fruity snacks. In some cases, it’s quite easy when a parent like Lynda Shamie have their own food company! All week, the kids were given fruit smoothies, small bags of sliced apples and maple-flavoured dried cranberries.

Parents do all of the work, including picking up, delivering, sorting, and serving the one thousand samples. The snacks are a “big hit” with the schoolchildren, said Marcovici, especially those who would never touch a piece of fruit. “Somehow they manage to love it when everybody’s eating it.”

Since snacks are an important part of recess, the school is offering them something that’s tasty and healthy at the same time, said St-Clement principal Gaetane Marquis. “We want to basically show them what a good snack could be.” It’s the kind of habit that they want the children to take up slowly, but surely, over the years.

The school committee’s end-goal doesn’t stop at only a few weeks. They ambitiously would like this project to take place all-year long. “We haven’t yet managed to realize that goal, but maybe one day we’ll get there.”