West Marin children are feeling the nourishing effects of a farm-to-table state grant received earlier this year by Shoreline Unified School District, which is celebrating its first annual harvest festival next weekend. The grant has brought more local ingredients into school lunches, reinvigorated school gardens and expanded training for kitchen staff. The menu improvements have also helped students at Nicasio School, where fresh breakfasts and lunches are delivered daily from Shoreline after a year of shelf-stable meals. 

The Shoreline Harvest Festival will celebrate local food, sustainable crafts and natural history on Oct. 14 at West Marin School, organized by the school’s volunteer wellness advisory committee. Marianne Recher, who was instrumental in securing funds from the California Farm to School Incubator Grant Program last fall, said the festival is a way to connect Shoreline families and the greater community with local food vendors, nonprofits and educators. 

“The idea is to celebrate with our students and families, but it’s very important that we’re doing it with the whole community,” said Ms. Recher, an Inverness attorney and mother of two in the district. “It’s a way to engage with the larger community in which we live and have all the amazingness of the nonprofits and the scientists and the farmers come together in one place to have a conversation with our school district on how we can work together going forward.”

The event will feature over 25 local vendors, live music and a hay bale maze. Community members will be invited to churn butter, brew barley tea, press apples for fresh cider, use natural dyes, and make salt and tortillas. 

Birding experts will share local information and park rangers will host a touch table of pelts and vertebrate skeletons. Coast Miwok advocate Theresa Harlan will teach tule cord-making, Dewey Livingston will answer local history questions and the Inverness Garden Club will lead seedball making. Music by the Coastal Scrubbers, Press on Randy, the Baybillies and more will play throughout the day. 

Adam Jennings, Shoreline’s superintendent, said the festival is the culmination of months of hard work by the wellness committee and is part of the grant’s mission to integrate healthy ingredients into a school district surrounded by organic agriculture.

“The hope of the harvest festival is to share some of our local food culture as well as educating folks as to what’s available to us and how local ingredients can make their way back into our school lunches,” he said. 

Through its new farm-to-school grant program, the California Department of Food and Agriculture awarded over $25.5 million to 130 school districts statewide. Shoreline received a $150,000 grant in April but has been planning ways to use it since Ms. Recher applied for it last summer. 

Mr. Jennings said the district has made significant progress toward the goal of replacing ingredients purchased from large distributors like Sysco, which historically supplied the district with more than half its food, with healthier and more sustainable ingredients. 

Kitchen staff hours have been expanded, and a new Petaluma vendor is contributing produce for school lunches. Some of the gardens at the district’s five schools are providing ingredients for school meals on an ad hoc basis, Ms. Recher said, thanks to local volunteers and West Marin School custodian Gilo Rodriguez. Mr. Jennings said the district is still assessing the state of each garden and will hire a consultant this year to create a long-term plan for each site.  

This summer, Shoreline began working with a nonprofit called Conscious Kitchen to coordinate training sessions for the district’s kitchen staff with professional chefs from the Alice Waters Institute for Edible Education. The trainings are taking place across the district and centering on healthy ingredient sourcing and cooking tips.

The bolstering of Shoreline’s menus has brought positive change to another pocket of West Marin students. 

At Nicasio School District, state-mandated free breakfasts and lunches have been provided by Shoreline since this fall. Last school year, California implemented a statewide universal meals program that required schools to provide breakfast and lunch for all students each school day. 

In the past, Rancho Nicasio provided meals for the roughly 15 students who qualified for the school lunch program, said Barbara Snekkevik, the school’s principal. But supplying almost double that was not feasible for the restaurant, and last year Nicasio students ate shelf-stable foods from Optimum Foods. 

“It was not ideal for anyone, but it was our only option,” Ms. Snekkevik said. “I spent months figuring out how to make this happen with other districts. [Shoreline] was a godsend for us to basically become an additional site for their program. We serve breakfast and lunch, driving over there and picking up same-day lunch and next day’s breakfast.”

The Shoreline Harvest Festival takes place on Saturday, Oct. 14 from 10 to 4 p.m. at West Marin School, in Point Reyes Station. To learn more, go to https://www.instagram.com/shorelineharvestfestival/