Students drink up lunch offering

EAST COUNTY — Gene Witt Elementary School students Ashreeti Sharma and Yohki Paschalidis, both 11, took a lesson from American history and made it their own.

The 11-year-old girls collected 256 signatures of students and staff members at their school and then petitioned the Manatee County Public School District to re-instate deliveries of strawberry milk.

Witt got its first monthly shipment of reduced-sugar strawberry milk in March and has gotten one delivery at the start of each month since. The milk, which will be delivered through the end of the school year, typically sells out within two or three days.

“It’s a little treat for us,” Yohki said, smiling. “I think of it as dessert.”

Ashreeti said she came up with the idea to petition for strawberry milk, which the school took off its menu a few years ago, while learning about how the American colonies protested taxes from Britain during a social studies unit. Her teacher, Debra Barnard, was talking about how petitions worked, and as an example of items that could be petitioned, she mentioned Witt no longer served strawberry milk — Ashreeti’s mind began to reel.

“At my house, my mom wants me to stay healthy,” Ashreeti said. “She doesn’t keep much junk food, which I think is good. But when I had strawberry milk (at school) I enjoyed it. I just wanted it back. It was my favorite thing to drink. I didn’t know why they stopped carrying it.”

Ashreeti almost immediately sought out the help of her friend, Yohki Paschalidis, to get strawberry milk delivered to the school once again.

As the class headed outside for recess that day, Yohki grabbed a clipboard and paper and immediately began soliciting support for the cause.

“It was a little harder than I thought it would be,” she said, noting sometimes she or Ashreeti would leave the petition at home on accident. “It was fun, and it was cool.”

Once enough signatures were collected, the girls, in January, sent their petition with a letter to the district with the help of Barnard. When they learned their petition would be granted, they had the choice of offering milk just to their fellow fifth-grade students or to the entire student body.

“We picked for the whole school,” Ashreeti said, adding it seemed more fair because children of all ages signed the petition. “The first time we had it in our class, everybody cheered.”

“I feel proud of myself,” Ashreeti said. “For some reason, I feel famous.”

Contact Pam Eubanks at [email protected].

KICKER
Gene Witt Elementary Cafeteria Manager Dawn Kitchner said the school now gets between 400 and 500 cartons of milk delivered once a month.

“We’re the only school that (gets) it,” she said.

Manatee County Public Schools had stopped offering strawberry milk to students several years ago because of its high sugar content. The flavored milk being delivered to Witt has 22 grams of sugar — half what it used to, Kitchner said.

As offered at the school, chocolate milk contains 21 grams of sugar and white milk contains 12 grams of sugar.