"My family lives on a loess slope, and the wind blows in front of the door..." The song "Loess Slope", which was popular in the 1980s, is all too familiar to Zhao Mengsuo, who grew up in the countryside of Fenxi. When he was young, in order to go out to study, he and his companions carried a kettle and dry food on their backs, wrapped between loess and wind and sand, just to fulfill the dream of "getting ahead" in the hearts of their ancestors... In 2013, Zhao Mengsuo came to Xunxiang Town Nine-Year Consistent School as the principal. At that time, the Student Nutrition Improvement Program had been launched, but it was limited to "milk + egg" and "bread + ham sausage" type of recess meals.
In September 2016, the school built a new cafeteria, and the recess meals became a hot, fragrant and nutritious lunch. Each meal is paired with two dishes and one soup, meat and vegetarian dishes, and it is not repeated within a week. After the bell rings at the end of the last class every morning, the children enter the cafeteria in an orderly manner, read thanksgiving words, and eat happily, which becomes a moving landscape of the school. At 12:15 p.m., the children were sitting in the spacious and bright dining room, enjoying a fragrant and nutritious lunch: oiled meat, eggs, potato chips, accompanied by staple steamed buns, and a bowl of yellow rice soup was placed in front of each person.
There are more than 930 students from 18 natural villages in the town. Before 2012, nearly a third of the students living in rural areas, and most of them were left-behind children, and their meals were steamed buns and pickles, and there was no nutrition at all. The implementation of the student nutrition improvement plan not only completely solves the difficulty of these students to eat at school, so that their nutritional status has been improved, but also reduces the burden on parents and enables parents to devote themselves to work. Since the introduction of nutritious meals in schools, the enrolment rate of students has increased significantly.
Zhao Mengsuo told reporters that the current student nutrition improvement plan implements the "4 + 1" operation model, and the meal subsidy standard is 5 yuan per student per day, that is, on the basis of the national financial subsidy of 4 yuan, the county financial subsidy is 1 yuan per student per day, which basically solves the cost of canteen meals and operating costs. When their school had a slight surplus, they bought eggs with the surplus and distributed them to the students every morning. "Wow, today's dish is potato chips stir-fried meat, stir-fried cabbage, all of which I love to eat." Li Lingling, a fourth-grade student, said happily to her companions. After the teacher served her a meal, she sat down in the designated seat and ate it with relish.
Li Lingling's mother, Li Zhen, is a parent who accompanies meals and is responsible for supervising the quality of nutritious meals in the school, while also providing meal sharing services for students. She said happily: "The school's nutritious meals are reasonably matched with meat and vegetables, and the nutritional value is also high, and the children always say that they are better than me." A mother next to her said: "But no, in the past, children were always picky eaters, but now they are not picky, and they have grown stronger!" "Students have gradually changed from being able to eat and eat well to eating nutritiously and eating healthily, and their height and weight have changed significantly, and their learning momentum has become more sufficient."