CHARLESTON, W.Va. – The state Board of Education on Wednesday presented Cabell County Food Service Director Rhonda McCoy with the Robert J. Freiler Award in recognition of her efforts to improve and promote child nutrition programs in West Virginia.

The award is named for Robert J. Freiler, the former mid-Atlantic regional director of special nutrition programs for the U.S. Department of Education. Freiler, who died in 2009, spent six decades promoting child nutrition.

McCoy has led efforts in Cabell County to reduce the use of processed foods in school while increasing the consumption of school-made food. The county has invested in new equipment and conducted recipe tastings to increase student acceptance of more nutritious food offerings. Some of the school-made meals include baked chicken dishes and scratch-made soups such as chicken noodle, chicken and rice and vegetable beef. Salad bars continue to be installed in some schools. Many items have been taken off the district’s usual USDA commodity food orders because they are now considered too processed.

“Rhonda McCoy has set a great example for other county school systems to follow,” said state Superintendent of Schools Jorea Marple. “The bottom line is healthy students have a greater capacity to learn and are ultimately more successful in school and life so we have to do all we can to support healthy living.”

This summer McCoy and several Cabell County cooks have assisted the West Virginia Department of Education’s Office of Child Nutrition in trainings of cooks from other counties in how to reduce the reliance on processed foods and increase the amount of school-made offerings.

For more information, contact the Office of Communications at (304) 558-2699 begin_of_the_skype_highlightingend_of_the_skype_highlighting.

--The West Virginia Board of Education and the West Virginia Department of Education (WVDE) are committed to ensuring all students in the state are college and career ready when they graduate from a public school. What West Virginia students are learning in school exceeds national and international standards. Through the WVDE’s 21^st century learning plan called “Global21: Students deserve it. The world demands it.,” West Virginia is seeing better student performance on the West Virginia Educational Standards Test 2 (WESTEST2); the SAT and the ACT college entrance exams; the job skills assessment called Work Keys given to career and technical education students; and in a high school graduation rate that exceeds the national average.

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