Conference Session

Alexandra (Alex) Emmott has served as the Farm to School Supervisor at Oakland Unified since 2012, where she oversees the district's nationally recognized farm to school programs. Before coming to Oakland, Alex worked for Boston Public Schools in a similar capacity. Alex has over a decade of experience in Food Service and once upon a time, owned a successful retail bakery in Boston. A graduate of McGill University, Alex is SNS certified by the American School Nutrition Association.

Christyna Serrano is a PhD student in the Graduate School of Education's Policy, Organizations, Measurement, and Evaluation (POME) program, at UC Berkeley. She is interested in social inequality and how schools are used as sites of intervention for the amelioration of structural inequality and the promotion of social justice. Christyna is currently working on her dissertation, which is a participant action ethnographic research study being conducted in the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD). Through this study she wants to examine the intersections between policy and practice within the processes and work of policy implementation. More specifically, she is examining federal policies and programs like the National School Lunch Program (NSLP), the Farm Bill, and the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 (HHKFA), and their implementation and impacts within OUSD, for the purposes of understanding the role that Nutrition Services plays in the social justice mission of education, and informing the construction of federal policies that can better support these efforts.

Jennifer LeBarre is the Executive Director for Oakland Unified School District Department of Nutrition Services. Jennifer has been with Oakland Unified for the past 16 years and holds a BA in Psychology from The University of California Santa Cruz and is SNS Certified by the American School Nutrition Association. Jennifer chaired the Public Policy and Legislation Committee for the California School Nutrition Association from 2014 to 2015 and has been the recipient of numerous awards and accolades, most recently as a School Food Innovator by the Center for Ecoliteracy.