Mayor Eric Adams has made plenty of unpopular budget cuts, but it was a mistake to mess with the French toast sticks.
The breakfast sticks with a side of syrup were one of the popular menu items at New York City public schools that suddenly disappeared earlier this year, along with chicken dumplings and bean burritos.
But nobody thought to ask the children, who quickly made their feelings known. On Wednesday, school officials reversed course, promising to quickly bring back those items and acknowledging that they had “heard from the kids loud and clear.”
The reversal was a major victory for students over meddling adults. It remains to be seen if they might next flex their political muscle by lobbying to bring back other items that vanished, like cookies and chicken drumsticks.
On Thursday outside Joseph Pulitzer middle school in Jackson Heights, Queens, a group of sixth graders jumped up and down and cheered upon hearing that some menu items would be returning.
“Let’s go,” said Dariel Genao, 12. “We’re about to have the best lunch.”
The menu changes had been disappointing, said Nameer Ahmed, 12.
“There’s been a lot of sadness,” he said. “I think some people even cried.”
Jeremy Roman, 12, held up a photo of the sloppy beef patty he had for lunch that day, shaking his head. “It’s gross,” he said.
Amy Tocachi, 13, said that it was important to have a good lunch because they eat it at 10:21 a.m.
“We have it really early, and then we don’t have anything else to eat the whole day,” she said.
The school lunch cuts were first reported by Chalkbeat, an education news site, and almost immediately prompted outrage among students, parents and some elected officials. Then on Monday, the mayor’s budget director, Jacques Jiha, made a curious argument to the City Council: He said that the city decided to remove the items because students were enjoying them too much.
Mr. Jiha said the city had made major investments in school cafeterias and had become, in a way, the victim of its own success.
“So what you end up with — you have a lot of kids hanging out in the cafeterias now and eating more and more and more and more,” he said.
It was a notable departure from cafeteria food’s longstanding poor reputation. John Liu, a state senator from Queens who chairs the education committee, was incredulous.
“Now it’s a bad thing that kids are hanging out in the cafeteria eating more?” he posted on social media. “School lunch doesn’t need to be gross, and this response doesn’t cut the mustard.”
The debate over school lunch menus comes as Mr. Adams presses in Albany to extend mayoral control of schools. Mr. Adams, a Democrat in his third year in office, has quarreled with state lawmakers over school funding and class sizes. He has repeatedly cut the budgets of city agencies, including the Education Department, blaming the rising costs of caring for tens of thousands of homeless migrants arriving in the city.
The reversal, which was first reported by NY1, was an effort to listen to students, said Jenna Lyle, an education department spokeswoman.
“Over the past few weeks, we’ve heard directly from our young people, and we are overjoyed that in partnership with the administration, we are able to restore a range of menu items, including French toast sticks, bean and cheese burritos, and chicken dumplings, that our children know and love,” she said.
Ms. Lyle said that some items were not returning, including bagel sticks, guacamole and cookies. “We do have full bagels available!” she added.
Last spring, the Education Department had promoted the French toast sticks on social media, saying that “this whole grain, lower in sodium, and lower in sugar breakfast item” had been taste-tested and approved by students.
Mr. Adams said at an event last year to honor food service workers that he wanted his legacy to be about health, noting that his mother was a food service worker. Kate Mackenzie, executive director of the mayor’s office of food policy, told the crowd at the time that her daughter had praised the dumplings in particular.
“My daughter came to me and she’s like, ‘Mom, please don’t ever make this again because there are no better dumplings than the dumplings I get at school,’” she said.
Troy Closson contributed reporting.