Ley 175<\/a>, que se centra en mejorar la salud de los estudiantes y apoyar a los agricultores locales.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n\u201cIt benefits the community, the students and also the local businesses,\u201d Cruz said. \u201cFor me, being born and raised here on Kaua\u2018i, I support the businesses 100% and if we can use more businesses, that would be great.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hanalei Poi Company hopes poi becomes a lunch menu staple for its health benefits and as a way to support local farmers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe are grateful and excited to supply fresh Hanalei Poi to Hawai\u2018i students and hope that it can become a staple on the school lunch menu as it is a healthy and nutritious locally grown food,\u201d Michaela Fitzgerald of Hanalei Poi Company said. \u201cSupplying poi to Hawai\u2018i schools also helps to encourage farmers to continue to grow more taro into the future.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Last year the Department rolled out its first offering of fresh local poi in over a decade to O\u2018ahu schools, serving over 23,000 4-ounce servings from Pomai Kulolo LLC. Due to procurement limitations, participating O’ahu schools this year incorporated local u’ala (sweet potato) into their lunch menus in lieu of poi.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Department has synergistic goals to increase the amount of nutritious local food items to students, appropriately expend more funds in support of local suppliers and produce, educate students about local food resources, and educate farmers and vendors about state procurement compliance,\u201d Lindsay Rodrigues, Hawai\u2018i State Department of Education school food services program administrator, said. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
To help facilitate student education leading up to this poi event, the Department held a series of meetings with leaders of the Farm to School Network and Garden to School Network, aiming to educate teachers on how to use taro as a tool to positively influence nutritious eating patterns and to enhance connectivity with neighboring farmers who grow taro, sweet potato and breadfruit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Department is the state\u2019s largest institutional consumer of food products, serving over 100,000 student meals a day and continues to work closely with local vendors statewide to see how fresh local produce can be scaled across all schools in the future on a regular basis. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
A Request for Information (RFI) for potential vendors was posted by the Department this past October, and a subsequent Request of Proposals (RFP) to provide HIDOE school cafeterias with local produce, proteins and packaged foods, will be released next.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Across the participating schools, over 11,800 individual 4-ounce poi cups from Hanalei Poi Company and their Hanalei farmer suppliers \u2014 equating to nearly 3,000 pounds of poi \u2014 will be served. To help increase local menu offerings in school lunches, three dozen public schools on Hawai\u2018i Island, Maui, Kaua\u2018i, and Moloka\u2018i will be offering fresh […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","_sitemap_exclude":false,"_sitemap_priority":"","_sitemap_frequency":"","_kad_blocks_custom_css":"","_kad_blocks_head_custom_js":"","_kad_blocks_body_custom_js":"","_kad_blocks_footer_custom_js":"","wp_popup_display_lightbox":0,"wp_popup_suppress":"","wp_popup_trigger":"","wp_popup_trigger_amount":0,"wp_popup_disable_on_mobile":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9731","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","taxonomy_info":{"category":[{"value":21,"label":"News"}]},"featured_image_src_large":false,"author_info":{"display_name":"Chanel Honda","author_link":"https:\/\/hawaiipublicschools.org\/es\/author\/chanel-hondak12-hi-us\/"},"comment_info":0,"category_info":[{"term_id":21,"name":"News","slug":"news","term_group":0,"term_taxonomy_id":21,"taxonomy":"category","description":"","parent":0,"count":306,"filter":"raw","cat_ID":21,"category_count":306,"category_description":"","cat_name":"News","category_nicename":"news","category_parent":0}],"tag_info":false,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-14 15:52:09","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"post_status","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hawaiipublicschools.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9731","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hawaiipublicschools.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hawaiipublicschools.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hawaiipublicschools.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hawaiipublicschools.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9731"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hawaiipublicschools.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9731\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hawaiipublicschools.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9731"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hawaiipublicschools.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9731"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hawaiipublicschools.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9731"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}