Schools stick with pizza but make it healthier

Few students were waiting for teriyaki chicken sandwiches at Long Beach Senior High School. Yet the pizza line spilled beyond the cafeteria's doors.Friday is pizza day in schools across Long Island. At Long Beach, and many other high schools, pizza day is every day.

Kevin Hannon Jr., Long Beach's director of nutrition services, has embarked on a mission to revamp school food there. He's starting with pizza."It's the No. 1 most acceptable food," Hannon explained.

It's also the most frequently offered hot entree in districts across the Island, served at nearly 40 percent of all meals, according to a Newsday survey of school menus.

Instead of heating frozen pies as the district used to in the past, Hannon decided to make pizza from scratch in the high school cafeteria kitchen -- with a new $11,000 oven, no different from the ones used in professional pizzerias.

When he began last year, one of the first things he did was hire a special cook. He interviewed six candidates from local pizzerias and hired Mike Causi from popular Gino's.

Pizza, Hannon said, is not as unhealthy as some might argue: "It's protein, grain and vegetable all in one food."

Sari Greaves, an American Dietetic Association spokeswoman, agreed but said pizza can be high in saturated fat because of cheese. Just one ounce of cheese, she said, has about 5 grams of saturated fat.

"I wouldn't count pizza as a cause of childhood obesity," she said. "But it can also pack on a lot of calories if you don't practice portion control."

Thomas Murphy, school lunch manager for the Longwood district, said he tried a few years ago to move away from "pizza Fridays." But pizza is a big part of Long Island culture, he noted, with pizzerias dotting main streets and strip malls across the region.

Angela Brams, a mother of two students in the Bethpage district, where pizza is offered every Friday, said its popularity is simply an excuse to not offer healthier options.

"Pizza is being glorified, so to speak, on the menu," she said. "If you're putting pizza as the main lunch of the day and you're putting the salad in the corner, you're not helping them make a good choice."

But kids rely on routine, Murphy said, explaining why he continued with the weekly tradition. "A child likes that stability of 'I'll have pizza every Friday,'" he said, while acknowledging that he knows many families tend to have pizza for dinner on Fridays.

So he decided to compensate by making his pizza healthier, using fresh-baked whole wheat crust and low-fat mozzarella cheese, a change many other districts have implemented.

At Long Beach, Hannon has kept the traditional high-gluten flour because "whole wheat crust isn't really accepted by the students."

At about 6:15 on the morning of his debut, Causi was kneading and tossing dough, grating cheese and making tomato sauce from scratch in the basement kitchen. During lunch, he couldn't get the pies out fast enough, putting them into pizzeria-style boxes and loading them into a dumbwaiter.

Upstairs, a long line of students waited for a slice. One boy asked if he could buy an entire pie, flustering the server. Hannon told the boy he could only buy a slice as a lunch -- and an extra slice as a snack.