Is there a cooking school close to Bangor, Maine?

PORTLAND, Maine — One in six Americans — about 48 million people — get sick from food-borne diseases every year. Worse, 128,000 are hospitalized and 3,000 die. The most vulnerable population: children.

Those statistics, the latest available from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control’s 2011 report on food-borne illness, underscore the importance of food safety in schools. In southern Maine, public school kitchens largely pass state health inspections. Only a handful have failed an inspection in the last five years.

In fact, of the more than 200 Maine Department of Environmental Health kitchen inspection reports reviewed by The Forecaster, covering 64 public school cafeterias from Scarborough to Brunswick, state and city health inspectors have only failed six school kitchens since 2007. “The schools are great,” said Rebecca Walsh, senior health program manager for the department. And unlike restaurants, in the last two years, school kitchens have received no complaints about illness, according to Health Inspection Program Manager Lisa Roy.

Despite the high rate of passing schools, more than a dozen schools were on the brink of failure, coming within one violation of failing. Most had at least one violation that could spread food-borne illnesses. To fail an inspection, a kitchen must receive more than three critical violations and more than 10 noncritical violations, according to state inspection guidelines.