Credit: Samantha Finnegan
Seventeen years ago, three days a week, this song marked the high point of Samantha Finnegan’s morning:
Open, shut them, Open, shut them,
Give a little clap clap clap!
Open shut them, Open shut them,
Now it’s time for snack! Enjoy!
"I remember snack time,” Finnegan recalled recently. “Snack time was very important.”
Finnegan was a 4-year-old pupil at the Nutritional Sciences Preschool, the first preschool in the United States – and possibly, the only one – organized specifically around teaching young children to eat healthy foods. The school celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, and Finnegan, community nutrition major in her senior year at Rutgers’ School of Environmental and Biological Sciences, is back at her old stand, working in the school as part of her independent study, urging her pupils to enjoy their healthy snacks. Her two sisters and several cousins have attended the school, and one of her cousins is a pupil there now.
For two decades, the preschool has banned the usual snack-fare of cookies, chips, and other foods with lots of sugar, salt, and processing additives, in favor of fruits, vegetables, and other nutritious foods. “We were very hands on in the snacks,” Finnegan remembered. “I remember being involved in choices, the college students helping us. We were never forced to eat anything.”
The choice for each of us, the staff tells pupils, is between “any time foods” and “sometime foods.” Apples are any time foods. Chili dogs are sometime foods. Cupcakes will make an appearance for Halloween.
Samantha Finnegan, an alumna of the Nutritional Sciences Preschool and now a senior at Rutgers, working in the school, with her cousin, Darleen Wournell, now a pupil at the school.
Harriet Worobey, the school’s director from the beginning, estimates that between 350 and 400 families, mostly from communities near the campus, have sent their children to her school since 1991. The staff is made up of Worobey, teacher Brigitte Gliese, sundry work-study students of all majors, and students from the class she has taught for more than 20 years, “Nutrition for the Developing Child.”
Worobey believes that educators today have better idea of what’s developmentally appropriate for young children to be learning than when she started the school. “We learned what works and doesn’t, how to implement nutrition in all the aspects of the curriculum,” she said.
The school is now part of the Institute for Food, Nutrition and Health, a priority of Our Rutgers, Our Future: A Campaign for Excellence,” the university’s seven-year, $1 billion initiative that focuses on meeting the university’s most pressing academic and financial needs.
Three-year-olds come to the school on Tuesday and Thursday mornings; 4-year-olds on Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings. The tuition for 3-year-olds is $175 per month and for 4-year-olds $255 per month. Worobey, who has managed on a relative shoestring for 20 years, has plans to expand the school’s sessions to full-day sessions and to establish a scholarship fund, so that families whose parents can’t afford even the present modest tuition can send their children.
Finnegan is on her way to a career in nutrition, centering on children. She considers her start at the Nutritional Sciences Preschool a key influence in her subsequent path, along with a supportive family.
“I learned not only healthy food choices, but a family dynamic, how to get kids involved, and it was a lifestyle we adopted in my family,” she said. “Nutrition is resonating in people’s lives more than it did 20 years ago.”
