A brand new report from Nova Scotia’s auditor normal is discovering a majority of faculties aren’t following the province’s meals and vitamin coverage, which she stated wants an replace.

Kim Adair’s staff surveyed colleges throughout the province, and visited 26 of them in particular person in 4 regional centres for schooling, together with in Halifax. They discovered solely 40 per cent of them have been following the coverage.

“Faculties must do a greater job in terms of lunch,” she advised media Tuesday. “We discovered inconsistencies within the dietary worth of the meals provided to college students, and the vast majority of the faculties examined aren’t complying with the provincial coverage.”

“The Division [of Education] would not know if wholesome meals are being served in colleges due to the shortage of monitoring.”

In line with the report, nearly 60 per cent of province’s colleges use a third-party meals service supplier to run their cafeterias, and solely 9 per cent of these examined have been following the coverage.

“Based mostly on our discussions with directors we concluded that the principle motive this can be occurring is as a result of third-party suppliers are sometimes revenue pushed,” the report said. “They due to this fact can be prone to give attention to what meals gadgets will promote, not

essentially offering the healthiest meals choices.”

Nova Scotia’s Meals and Vitamin Coverage was created in 2006 to make sure college students have been being served wholesome choices, however Adair stated it is now outdated.

“It is primarily based on the 1992 Canada Meals Information, although newer variations have been launched in 2007 and 2019,” she stated.

The report did discover success in terms of breakfast packages.

“On a typical day, about 43,000 college students entry the free program, which is obtainable in about 98 per cent of the faculties,” the auditor normal defined. “The colleges we visited typically provided wholesome breakfast meals.”

There are 125,000 public faculty college students within the province, and in line with Adair, for a few of them, the one wholesome meals they’ve entry to is in school.

“The province actually has a vital function to play in shaping their future,” she defined.

“Wholesome meals decisions can have a major impact on studying readiness and tutorial success, and so they may set the stage for a lifetime of wholesome consuming.”

She stated if adjustments aren’t made, that would add as much as billions of {dollars} in well being care prices down the highway.

The auditor normal has provided up 10 suggestions, all of which have been agreed to by the Division of Schooling and Early Childhood Growth.