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DECEMBER 11, 2014
NUMBER 26
Educa t io n
VOLUME 8
Danielle Nadler
“Let’s get this into more schools,” Sheridan said. Following the committee’s recommendation, the full School Board is expected to vote next month to give the green light to expand the program. “This is what we hoped for,” Rona Scott said when she heard the board wanted to see more schools participate. She sits on the Loudoun Hunger Committee that helped launch the Food Recovery Program. “All of us who were part of this planning process believed that once everyone could see how much food was recovered, and going to feed the food insecure in the county, that this would take off.” etting the Food Recovery Program into motion was a long time in the making. A major hurdle was a federal law that did not allow schools to donate excess food. Rep. Frank Wolf (VA-10) spearheaded the effort to change that in 2009 when he introduced the School Food Recovery Act to allow schools to donate leftover food and to protect them from any liability. The bill was ultimately rolled into the FY12 appropriations bill that was signed into law in November 2011.
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Joe Johnson, a third-grader at Frances Hazel Reid Elementary School, does his part to reduce waste and hunger in Loudoun County. His school is one of six participating in the Food Recovery Program, and administrators want to expand the program to more schools.
t the end of the busy lunch hour in the Frances Hazel Reid Elementary cafeteria Monday, students made their way to a trio of trashcans to dump their half-eaten quesadillas, carrots and grapes from their trays. Then they made one more stop before heading back to the classroom, at a table lined with three bins labeled with a sign that seemed to almost shout: “Save Our Food!” “This goes to people who maybe need help and are hungry,” Joe Johnson, a thirdgrader, explained as he tossed an unopened bag of chips into one of the bins. Since September, six Loudoun County elementary schools have asked their students to drop what food they don’t eat— including unopened packages of yogurt, bagels, cheese sticks, cereal and milk— into designated bins. Volunteers deliver the items to food pantries around the county, and within 48 hours the perfectly good food that would have ended up in the landfill is instead in the hands of Loudoun families who need it most. “It has been such a huge win-win,”
said Jennifer Montgomery, executive director of Loudoun Interfaith Relief, which takes food from Frances Hazel Reid and John W. Tolbert elementary schools. “Otherwise, all this food goes in the trash. It’d be a wasted resource at a time when there is such a need.” After a successful few months, school leaders want to expand the initiative. Loudoun County School Board members last week got a brief update on the program, which was first launched as a small pilot to make sure it did not demand too much school staff time. Becky Domokos-Bays, the school system’s new director of School Nutrition Services, told board members during a Health, Safety and Transportation Committee meeting the program was run completely by volunteers and then rattled off a few statistics: 1,200 pounds of food has been recovered so far this year and, by the end of the school year, the program will have fed an estimated 300 families of four. “That’s just from these six schools,” Domokos-Bays said. Before she could get out all of her statistics, School Board members Brenda Sheridan (Sterling) and Debbie Rose (Algonkian) interjected.
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Giving Leftovers New Life
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oudoun supervisors agreed last week to allow the developers of One Loudoun to scrap a phasing plan aimed at balancing the impacts of residential development with the pace of commercial growth on the Ashburn property. Under previous rules for the 360-acre development, 1,040 homes and more than 4.2 million square feet of commercial space were scheduled to be built in three phases. But the developers could have built only 450 homes until they finished constructing 1 million
square feet of commercial space. Then the project would have been completed in two more phases and considered built out with 590 more homes and more than 3 million more square feet of commercial space. Supervisors, however, voted 6-2-1 to toss the phasing plan after the completion of the first 450 homes. Supervisors Matthew F. Letourneau (R-Dulles) and Janet S. Clarke (R-Blue Ridge) voted against the move. Supervisor Geary M. Higgins (R-Catoctin) was absent from the meeting. The new rules allow the building of the remaining 590 homes after two criteria are met: • construction of the Rt. 7/Ashburn Village Boulevard interchange has begun; and • 300,000 square feet of commercial space is filled.
That shouldn’t take long. One Loudoun, which is required to build the Rt. 7 interchange, says that work could begin next spring. And more than 267,000 square feet of commercial space is either occupied or in the process of being filled at the development. Reasons for requiring phasing in mixed-use projects include not deluging county agencies by adding a lot of homes, which require government services, at one time, and encouraging the development of businesses, which generate more tax revenue than they cost in services. But County Chairman Scott K. York (R-At Large) said during last week’s meeting that making the One Loudoun changes was prudent. York said
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that allowing more people to move there quicker— or, as he said, “putting heads in beds”—translates to more customers for the development’s businesses. “It helps this project move along,” he said. Supervisor Suzanne M. Volpe (R-Algonkian) agreed, saying that the board has to be flexible if it wants mixed-use developments to succeed. She said that One Loudoun is off and running while similar projects are still just “groves of trees,” and that she’s jealous that the development isn’t in her district. It is in the district board Vice Chairman Shawn M. Williams (R-Broad Run) represents and he ardently supported the developer’s proposed
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Supervisors Lift Housing Restrictions At One Loudoun
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