Interviewee: Josephine Martin
Interviewer: Charlotte Oakley
Date: July 2008
Description: Dr. Josephine Martin is President of The Josephine Martin Group and an Adjunct Professor of Nutrition at Georgia State University, Atlanta. Dr. Martin earned her Ph.D. at Georgia State University; Master’s Degree at Teachers College, Columbia University, New York; and completed a dietetic internship at Duke University. She served as the first Executive Director of the National Food Service Management Institute, The University of Mississippi.
Although her goal when completing a dietetic internship was to be a pediatric dietitian, she actually began her professional career as an administrative hospital dietitian. However after a brief period, she joined the school nutrition program in its toddler years as an area consultant with the Georgia Department of Education.
She has extensive experience in child nutrition programs having been an area school nutrition consultant, a USDA regional nutritionist in the Southeast, and Georgia’s state child nutrition director. Prior to her retirement from the Georgia Department of Education in 1991, she was an Associate State Superintendent of Schools.
Since retirement from the National Food Service Management Institute in 1996 she has taught courses in Food Service Management at Georgia State University and in Child Nutrition Management at the University of Georgia. She is actively involved as a consultant in child nutrition, as a trainer, and in developing training materials for child nutrition personnel.
Her commitment to healthy children through being an advocate for professional growth, public policy, and education has been recognized through leadership in the School Nutrition Association, where she served as President, and in the Association of School Business Officials, the American Dietetic Association, the Georgia School Nutrition Association, and the Society of Nutrition Education. Dr. Martin has published a number of articles and monographs related to child nutrition. She is widely recognized as a strategic planner, visionary, legislative specialist, instructional specialist, and historian in child nutrition programs. She has made numerous professional presentations in national and state associations and organizations
Her contribution to the development of child nutrition program legislation and public policy is reflected in the legislation that expanded child nutrition programs from the School Lunch Program to its present scope of School Breakfast, Child and Adult Care Food Programs, and Summer Food Service Programs ensuring that funding and programs were available to reach all children. The legislation involved establishing school meals as a right for all children including full funding for those from low-income homes. These authorizations and funding provisions form the framework for child nutrition programs.
Dr. Martin has received an ADA Medallion Award; IFMA’s Silver Plate in School Food Service, the Tom O’Hearn Legislative Award, and the John Stalker Award for Distinguished Service in Child Nutrition. In 2006 she received the Gene White Lifetime Achievement Award for Child Nutrition given by the Child Nutrition Foundation. One former Congressional staff leader with whom she worked in the 1970s to achieve legislation that provided for the program expansion wrote a letter upon her selection of this Lifetime Achievement Award. The letter stated, “No unelected person played a larger, more intelligent and more constructive role in the principled expansion of our food and nutrition program than she did…never taking her eye off the prize of healthier, wiser, happier American children.”
-Chapter One: Birth of School Nutrition Programs-
Charlotte Oakley: Thank you for being with us today, Dr. Martin. We really appreciate your taking the time to tell us your child nutrition story. Can we begin by your sharing with us the purpose of those programs? And then, we want to talk about your role in being in child nutrition.
Josephine Martin: It is always great to have an opportunity to talk about the child nutrition programs and their purpose because it’s so simple – the purpose is to safeguard the health and well being of the nation’s children…but the real purpose is, according to the legislation, as a matter of national security. The program started way back early in the 20th century, but they really did not get established as a national program until the mid 1940’s when the National School Lunch Act was passed and Congress, in its wisdom coming out of World War II, began the preamble to the National School Lunch Act with the words “as a matter of national security” and “to safeguard the health and well being of the nation’s children” and “to expand the market for nutritious agricultural commodities, the School Lunch Program is established.” So, it is a matter of national security. It is exciting to have that purpose. The program is now sixty years old, but the purpose of the program has not changed. The programs have changed in many ways. They have been modified. They have been expanded. They have gone from one meal a day to all day, all year, all around, all age groups…but the purpose remains the same…as a matter of national security to safeguard the health and well being of the nation’s children.
CO: Thank you for sharing that with us, Dr. Martin. Let’s start with some of the history of child nutrition programs from 1946 or backward, if you would like, and then when you became involved in them.
JM: The program really got its philosophy and its vision from the pioneers who began the first programs in the U.S. back in the early part of the 20th century. The vision was established, and that vision that was established back in the early 1900s formed the foundation for the National School Lunch Act. And many of the words that were established by Emma Smedley in the early 1900s identified the components that are in the School Lunch Act. As indicated earlier, the purpose of the Act is to provide healthy school meals for children. Now that was not the original purpose. The original purpose was to provide a school lunch. But since 1946 the program has expanded in every direction. We now have programs that run all year long for all aged children all day long. So the program has expanded from that basic purpose of safeguarding the health and well being of the nation’s children to children of all ages throughout the school year. My involvement with the program began shortly after the passage of the National School Lunch Act. I wasn’t here when it was passed and I really didn’t even go to school where there was a school lunch program. I became involved in 1950 when the program was only four years old. It was almost my first job right out of a dietetic internship. It’s kind of a coincidence that I came for my interview with the Georgia Department of Education on the same day that the Georgia School Food Service Association was formed. So I have grown up believing in a close relationship between what goes on in the state education agencies, the local school system, and the professional organization of the American School Food Service Association, which is now the School Nutrition Association. I started out as an area consultant. My job was to work with about 400 schools up in North Georgia, providing training and to do what they called administrative reviews. But personally, I didn’t like doing administrative reviews and I much preferred doing training. The superintendants and principals really liked for me to do training. And so I did go on and I did the food demonstration and I had another funny incident in that same situation. I was getting ready for the commodity demonstration on the afternoon before, and the principal and his little daughter and I were the only people left on the campus that day. I was getting ready and the little girl said to me, “Tell me what you do.” And, I said, “Oh, I go around to 400 schools up here in North Georgia and I teach people how to cook.” And, she said, “My, how old you must be.” So, you know, I have had some really funny, humorous experiences, but the real success has been working with school leaders, like the principals, and letting them know that I was able to do some of the things and help school nutrition people back in the kitchen to improve the quality of foods that they were serving to children. And that’s really what my goal has been all along – to do whatever I could to make food taste good, look good, and have children accept it, but also to recognize that the school nutrition people who are out there serving the meals every day want the same goals that I want for children. They want their food to taste good and look good. So, from being an area consultant that was located in the state agency located here in Atlanta, I had the privilege of being mentored by a state director, because I was the only state consultant located in the Atlanta office and the state director was frequently out of the office, and I had the privilege of sitting at her desk or answering her phone when she was away, answering questions for the other area consultants who were located out in the state. I learned a lot about state administration sitting at Ms. Eleanor Pryor’s knee, and she was teaching me. She was such a wonderful teacher. So I learned. Along came in Georgia, this was the early fifties, and remember the social conditions of the fifties were really tumultuous. Schools were undergoing segregation. There were a lot of things going on in the school system. The Georgia legislature passed a huge building program. They required equal facilities in the schools in Georgia. One of those equal facilities was that every school in the State of Georgia would have a cafeteria. This was in the state law. A building cannot be built without a school cafeteria. Because I was this new kid on the block and I had dietetics training the State Director gave me the job of working with School Plant Services. My office was located down in Building Services. I worked with architects and engineers. I reviewed plans after plans as we built more than a thousand schools in a two or three year period. I had to look at architectural drawings, engineering drawings. I had to work with some of the more famous architects that are now in Atlanta who have built some of our fabulous buildings, because they had to do a site-based experience. I remember one of the things that I would do. Back in the early fifties most schools were still using a lot of galvanized equipment. I would write in my recommendation to the architects, “Recommend that you provide 18/8 gauge stainless steel equipment.” The chief architect said to me, “Jo, no more of that. No more of that. I want you to say ‘provide 18/8 gauge stainless steel equipment.’ ” But I said, “Larry, I don’t have the authority to do that.” He said, “I am giving you the authority. Now, these architects don’t pay any attention to recommendations. But, if you say provide, they will do it. If we get backed into a corner, I will be in the corner with you.” We converted so that all of our schools were getting stainless steel basic equipment in the schools. It was a wonderful experience. From that we grew into having to teach the people how to use the equipment. The site-based people didn’t have steamers. They didn’t have fancy ovens. They didn’t have the VCRs and a lot of the equipment. So we worked with the commercial foodservice equipment industry. They brought equipment into three sites in Georgia, and we would have equipment workshops, teaching people how to use the equipment. That went on in the fifties until people in the schools learned how to use the equipment. It was a wonderful experience, but about that time I decided that I was in the education business. My training had been in Management and Dietetics and Foodservice Management. If I were going to stay in education I needed to know more about education, and I would go back to school and get a master’s degree, which is what I did. At that point I did go back for a master’s degree. Now that’s a little bit about what I did during those early years. I also learned a lot of other things. I was only in my early twenties when I joined the State Department of Education and the youngest kid on the block. The people that I worked with in the department were wonderful mentors. They were much older than I was. They were even 15 years older than I was. They were in their thirties and they seemed to be so old. I looked up to them and I learned so much from the people that I had a chance to work with. One of the things that was happening, they were not only influential in getting the legislature to write for that school building law, that we would have a kitchen in every school, but they were also looking into other provisions in the legislation for school lunch people to be covered by Social Security, to have school lunch people covered by state requirements. They would go over to the State Capitol, and they would say, “Come on, Jo. Go over to the Capitol with us.” I learned from those professionals who really knew how to work with policy makers. The intricacies of listening to politicians, trying to see their side of the legislation and why they made the decisions they did, and I learned a lot about public policy in that first ten years that I worked in the State Department.
CO: Education is certainly very important and the preparation for being qualified as a child nutrition professional, and sometime before we get through with our conversation, we want to talk about that, Dr. Martin, but I want you to pick up from your continuing your education in education. Also, talk more about public policy and how the child nutrition programs truly are public policy. Maybe, some people are not aware of that.
JM: Well, for my master’s degree, I went to Teacher’s College at Columbia because they had a wonderful program of training school nutrition professionals. They also had wonderful leaders there who had done research and training in Nutrition Education. I felt that was absolutely the best place for me to go to really get grounded because I knew that if we were going to be successful in teaching children healthy food habits that we had to be able to tie the classroom and the cafeteria together. That would require nutrition education, so I really majored in Nutrition Ed in my master’s degree. But, a funny thing happened while I was there. I had to go, as part of a field experience, to a USDA regional conference in New York. While I was there I met the Regional Administrator of the Food Nutrition Service out of Washington. His name was Martin Garber from Oklahoma. Mr. Garber suddenly started talking to me about joining the United States Department of Agriculture. Well, I was only from the State Department of Education. I didn’t really have a whole lot of interest in going with USDA. But Mr. Garber finally convinced me that I should go with USDA. I decided to join the Regional Office in the Southeast as a, they called a home economist at that point. I was there for about 18 or 19 months. That was a marvelous experience because it gave me the opportunity to go to the nine Southeastern states to observe the best practices that all of the schools were doing, all of the states were doing. One of the things that happened to me at that point, which I did not mention earlier that had happened in my early days, was that I renewed my experience and my acquaintance with Thelma Flanagan, who was State Director in Florida. She ended up being one of my longest term mentors ever. Mrs. Flanagan made so many opportunities, opened so many doors for me in my early life, and throughout her full career. I did have the opportunity to visit the nine southern states and find out what they were doing, their best practices. Then, in 1961, the State Director in Georgia passed away, and Georgia asked me to come back as a State Director in Georgia, which I did. I had just come from this wonderful experience of seeing what was going on in all of the states. I immediately requested that Mrs. Flanagan come to Georgia and help us in centralizing some of our school nutrition practices, because we were totally de-centralized. I had just come from North Carolina, where the state director had a concept of organizing a state-wide training program through the vocational education program. I had worked with North Carolina on that project. I came back and immediately said to our state vocational ed director in Georgia, “Look what North Carolina is doing in their vocational schools. Could we start a training program for all of the school nutrition people in Georgia?” He was very receptive to that and later he became our State Superintendant. But he was very receptive. In 1963 we started what was called a Training in Depth Program. This was an organized program for training school nutrition site-based people. There was a sequence of eleven courses. They had to complete their first four courses. Those were the basic courses. Then they would gradually, every two or three years, add courses. So, we started the Training In Depth Program using vocational funds, using vocational people to teach our training program. That was very successful. Like the child nutrition programs, it has been modified many times to this day. The Training In Depth Program is still going on. About the time that I did come back to the State Department of Education there was a real controversy. When the National School Lunch Act was passed in 1946 the funding was based on the state’s enrollment. Well, you had a state like California that had mega millions. The State of Georgia had only a million, maybe two million kids. California was getting a lot more money than Georgia. Georgia and the Southeast Region had really focused on serving meals to all children. Suddenly our participation was skyrocketing. Some other states that were not focused on participation did not have the skyrocketing participation. They were able to pay a much higher rate of reimbursement per meal than those of us in the southern states that were rural states that had high participation. There was a need to ask Congress to change the formula for sending money to the states. Well, as I said, it was like my first year, three months, of being State Director and ASFSA called and said, “We want you to go and talk to Senator Richard B. Russell”, who was the author of the National School Lunch Act, Georgia’s Senior Senator at the time. He is now known as the Father of the Child Nutrition Program. “We want you to go and talk with him.” Well, I was a novice. I had never met a U.S. Congressman, much less talked with one. I knew that I needed some help. I asked my superintendant, I went to my state superintendant, and said, “You know, we really need to talk to Senator Russell about getting this funding formula changed.” And he said, “Josephine, he’ll be home for Christmas. We’ll just go over to Winder, and we will talk with him.” And sure enough, the Senator was very happy to see us. I had the privilege of meeting with Senator Russell and our state superintendant and explain to him what was happening in Georgia. We were down to a reimbursement rate of like two cents a meal because we were serving so many kids. This was happening in most of the rural states where participation had skyrocketed. The Senator was so gracious, and he said, “I will go back and see that this is changed.” And so immediately in 1962 the legislation was changed and the formula was changed to providing states the money on the basis of participation and not on the basis of enrollment. That was my first experience in politics. The sixties as you know were lively and active and at that point, I was still a fairly young person and I was caught up in the mood of the sixties. I was not a hippie, but, I loved what was going on. I loved the action that was going on. We had a new kind of a war, this War on Poverty. Orville Freeman was Secretary of Agriculture and Orville Freeman said, “Never let it be said of us in the decade of the sixties that we put a man on the moon and failed to put food in the mouths of hungry children.” I took that as a personal challenge. Working with Mrs. Flanagan at the Southern States Work Conference, we began to look at legislation that Congress was passing so we could see where we could leverage existing legislation to provide funding for the school meal program. Well, about that time in 1964, Congress passed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. We just happened to be down in Daytona Beach at a Southern States Work Conference working on a project on policies and standards which had been so influential in getting our southeastern states teaching children healthy food habits and serving healthy meals. Mrs. Flanagan said, “Let’s just ditch our project and let’s look at this new education legislation and see how we can leverage it to provide meals to kids.” So we went through that piece of legislation word by word. We said, “Well, we can go to Title I and we can get breakfast and we can get equipment and we can get money for needy children. And we can go to Title V and we can get state agency staff support. We can get a nutrition educator and we can get an equipment specialist.” Before our people left the Southern States Work Conference at Daytona Beach that summer we had a written plan that was mimeographed for the people to go back home and take to their state superintendant and say, “This is how we can use some of your easy ac money.” They were so pleased because the general ed people hadn’t caught up with us. The money had come in and they didn’t know what to do with it, even though it was supposed to be for poor kids, reading, writing…the basic skills. But by the end of the first year, we had used the money so wisely. But, the education people kind of caught up and they said to the Department of Ed in Washington, “That money shouldn’t be spent for feeding kids. That money should be spent for reading and math and whatever.” And so, the Department of Ed said we could no longer use the money. But, by that time school principals and school teachers and parents had realized – the community had realized the value of providing meals, breakfast and lunch, to needy kids and what it was doing in the classroom and how it was helping to get children to school and how it was helping to keep kids in school. It helped children who had never been productive in the classroom be productive in the classroom. The Department said we could no longer use the easy ac money and they went to Congress and said, “We need legislation that will provide these things or these meals for kids.” So, in 1966, we were influential in getting the Child Nutrition Act passed, and that provided for a pilot breakfast program. It provided additional money, a little bit of money, for special assistance for needy lunches. And it provided money for equipment assistance. At that time there were many schools across the nation that did not have foodservice facilities. If Congress was going to close the gap between hungry children having food and not they had to provide money for equipment. So they provided a large amount of money for needy schools to buy equipment. In 1966 that program started. In 1968 that very program was amended to add the Child Care and the Summer Food Service Programs into one program. It was called the Special Foodservice Program for Children. So, there in the sixties with President Kennedy and what happened to him and President Johnson coming in, the program took a huge jump in growth, but we still had so far to go. There were still the conservatives who said, “Feeding kids is a family responsibility. The next thing you know, we will be needing to sleep the kids.” But, that didn’t happen.
CO: Dr. Martin, tell us more about the Southern States Work Conference.
JM: The Southern States Work Conference was a conference that was organized by higher education personnel and local and state administration of state departments of education. It was organized sometime in the thirties or early forties. The purpose of this organization was to develop educational materials for teachers to use in improving the academics that were going on in the classroom. At that time we did not have the proliferation of materials from the publishers or the federal agencies. So, it was up to the state agencies to develop their own materials. This conglomerate, the Southern States Work Conference, was led by Dr. R.L. Johns from the University of Florida, who was a finance expert in the area of education. Once a project was approved you made a commitment to the Executive Committee that you would be there for three years and that you would produce a product. Well, the first school nutrition project started, I believe, in 1943. That was the year that state agencies received the first federal cash for school meals. Out of that work conference came a publication, Policies and Standards of Southern States. Each of the fourteen southern states that participated in the conference would come back and develop their own little booklet of policies and standards. Of course in Georgia that was what I cut my teeth on, the Georgia publication. That Georgia publication outlined the philosophy of the child nutrition programs – to be an integral part of the educational enterprise, to teach children healthy food habits, and to foster learning in the classroom. Those were the three basic essentials that were established. This was going on in all of the fourteen southern states, and the fourteen southern states went from West Virginia all the way to Texas. Those people would get together. Then, in the early fifties, a second project was started. Mrs. Flanagan was chairman of the very first project in 1943 because she was State Director in Florida. She had migrated from being a WPA Supervisor to being State Director in Florida. Her background was Extension, but she was a registered dietician. She was very active. She was a very conceptual person, always. She was a visionary person. She anticipated the changes. She could see the big picture. She was chairman of the School Nutrition Project. The second project was in the early fifties. I was not a part of that because I was just getting involved. Another project was renewed in the late fifties and I was a part of that project. There we developed new policies and standards for child nutrition programs. Again, the number of states had dwindled to nine states at that point, rather than the fourteen. I know Texas had dropped out and I believe Oklahoma had dropped out. But we went all the way up to West Virginia with the Southern States Work Conference. We worked very hard to develop policies and standards and basic beliefs. Those were promulgated among the nine southern states. To this day people will say, “Why do you all have such high participation in the school nutrition program?” And, we’ll say, “Because we worked together as a collaborative effort.” It was local people, it was higher ed, it was state departments of ed, it was state school boards coming together and working on a project. Our school nutrition project also included people from higher ed and state boards of ed and local superintendants and principals as well as some local foodservice directors that were there. We worked really hard to establish those standards. Then, in 1964 at the time that the Elementary and Secondary Education Act passed, we were at their door again for another project. We had a very specific project. That’s when we decided we would ditch the project that we were working on, at Mrs. Flanagan’s suggestion, and look at the Elementary and Secondary Education Act to see how we could leverage every provision in that act for child nutrition programs. But that was not my first experience with working with Mrs. Flanagan. I was co-chairman with her on that last project. My first experience with Mrs. Flanagan really began my first year as the State Department of Education Area Consultant. I began work in March 1950, and the annual convention was coming up in the fall. My state director said to me, “I want you to go with me to see the State Superintendant, because I want to ask him to allow you to go to the national convention in Kansas City this year.” And we did and we went to see Dr. Collins and she said to him that she wanted permission for me to go to Kansas City to the national convention. As a new consultant, she felt that this would be helpful for me. And Dr. Collins said, “Yeah, I think she is a keeper. We need to send her to Kansas City.” Well there I really met Thelma Flanagan, because she was President of the American School Food Service Association. It was the year that Harry Truman was President. She used to laugh and tell this story that she was the only President who was evicted from the President’s Suite at the hotel because Harry Truman came to town and got the President’s Suite, so she had to move. From that moment Thelma Flanagan, who was a wonderful, outstanding State Director, but she was also one of the people who helped develop the American School Food Service Association, and believed very strongly that the key to strong programs at the local level was having qualified people. She and Dr. Mary deGarmo Bryan were very active in training personnel and also writing the legislation for the 1946 Act; two of the people who worked on a joint committee to establish standards and qualifications for people at all levels, and those were established in 1949. Then Mrs. Flanagan kept working in the Association. Whenever she had the opportunity for someone to do something like being secretary or local arrangements chairman, or moving chairs or whatever. Between my State Director and Mrs. Flanagan I was the designated grunge worker. I could do more things, but I learned so much at the feet of people like Mrs. Flanagan, and Dr. deGarmo Bryan allowed me to do those things and watch the real pros developing the program, so I was involved in the first regional conference of the American School Food Service Association. It was held in Atlanta. Again Mrs. Flanagan said, “You know, just one conference a year is not enough to train people for professional growth. We need to have regional meetings.” It was her idea that the Association start having regional conferences which went on for many, many years. The first one was here, and I worked with that. I don’t know if you would be interested in this little story or not, not being in education, but being in school foodservice management and dietetics and also more clinical nutrition, I wasn’t aware of some of the group process things that educators were aware of. Well, at that particular conference, we had heard that some of our education friends were using what they called a Phillips 66 process to get people involved in training and professional groups. The person who formed that idea of group work was from Hillsdale College in Michigan, and he was invited to come to that first regional conference. We were going to introduce this new concept of working. It put people together in groups of six, and in six minutes they would come up with six ideas – the Phillips 66. Of course, now group processes are so well known we don’t even think about it any more. The Phillips 66 got dropped a long time ago. But I had the privilege of working with that guru in group process. Mrs. Flanagan made so many opportunities available to me working with the Association. So, that was how the Southern States Work Conference and Mrs. Flanagan became such an influential mentor in my life. The Southern States Work Conference was so influential in developing the quality of programs that we had in the south because the state directors came together. Then, long after the Southern States Work Conference was eliminated, because as technology became available there was no need any longer for states to get together to develop materials, because we were becoming much more sophisticated in the publishing business in getting materials printed and prepared. So, the Southern States Work Conference went away, but the state directors in the Southeast became a tight-knit group of people who met regularly to say, “Where are we going in the Southeast?” It was not unusual for those of us who were state directors in the Southeast to meet on our own away from the Department of Agriculture representatives, to just brainstorm about where we were going. I remember back in the 1960s when we were really needing to have some legislation for state directors, South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia and Florida met here in Atlanta and we drafted a piece of legislation that would have provided for the Breakfast Program and nutrition ed and equipment and expanded school meals for needy kids. We gave it to the Department of Agriculture and they really didn’t take our draft exactly, but a lot of the provisions that we had in that draft were included in the Child Nutrition Act of 1966. It was not lost. I’m picking up now I need to say more about the Southern States Work Conference. It was such a valuable tool. Not only in what it did, but how it did it. It taught us the value of alliances and working together and collaboration – of moving together. It gave the state directors in the Southeast a lot of power that other regions didn’t have when they were working independently. When we would go to USDA meetings we spoke as a group and knew where we wanted to go with the programs in the Southeast. One of the outstanding things about the program as it was developed in the 1940s – there were three sponsors of the legislation that finally passed. One was Senator Alan Ellendar from Louisiana, who was a Democrat. One was Senator George Aiken from Vermont, who was a Republican, and Senator Richard Russell from Georgia, who was a Democrat. It was a bi-partisan leadership who sponsored the National School Lunch Act. This was very, very important because to this day there is a bi-partisan support. I really like to say it’s a non-partisan program, because children, regardless of political party, are hungry and they need to have healthy foods and they need to have nutrition ed. One of the significant contributions that Senator Allen Ellendar made to the whole National School Lunch Act and to the program as we know it today, he said, “If this program is to be strong, it cannot be a federal program. It has to be a cooperative program with federal, state, and local people participating, and each one having a role in carrying out the program, because the program is going to be operated by the local people. The state is a valuable link between the federal and the local people. This must be cooperative in depth.” And he insisted, so the legislation, itself, if you go back to Section Two of the School Lunch Act, after it says to “safeguard the health and well being of the nation’s children and to expand the market for nutritious agriculture commodities”, it says “to assist states.” So, the legislation itself intended from the very beginning that the states would have an important role in establishing, maintaining, expanding, and providing the school lunch program throughout their states. Senator Ellender made that valuable contribution, and to this day I like for people to think about it as being a state program. We get federal funding and we get federal guidelines for our program, but it is a state program. It is what the state people and the local school administrators and principals and teachers and site-based people put into it that makes the program. It’s not what happens in Washington; but we could not do it without that federal support from Congress and the full Executive Branch, the President, and the Congress and the USDA. They are so important.
